Please notice also the apparent fact that "...police clearly knew of Dotcom’s residency status when they compiled a planning document known as the 'Blue Folder' in which help from the anti-terrorist Special Tactics Group was requested." (emphasis mine)
If that's true, they apparently didn't just break the law intentionally, but also got the "Anti-terrorist Special Tactics Group" involved. Because we all know that running a business which might enable people to commit copyright infringement is terrorism.
That onion routing is not yet prohibited might be due to the fact that systems like TOR have been sufficiently subverted already (e.g. most fixed nodes could be run by cooperating intelligende agencies). The more users who use them, the harder it will become to break the system. Thus, in future onion routing will be prohibited if it gains widespread support.
Not that I believe any of this, just wanted to lay out a slightly more logical conspiracy theory.:P
There is probably not even a need to limit or ban encryption, because in a sense the Internet is already heavily regulated and not what it used to be. Thanks to all kinds of NATs, packet filters, and "intelligent" routers, the times when you could just connect one computer to another one to transmit information are long gone. Nowadays, if you want to be sure that your message reaches the destination without using a central server (which can be surveilled, subpoenaed, put under draconian laws, etc.) you need to dig through miriads of obscure heuristic NAT traversal techniques and use all kinds of hacks like ICMP tunneling or whatever. That in combination with government trojans, traffic analysis, and anti hacking (anti security) laws should suffice to suppress the citizens of Europe.
On the contrary, I'd like to see more stories like that. 'Cos the constant flow of recent iPhone and web-monkey stories on/. is definitely not news for nerds...
Yes, that seems to be the trend and I wonder why. It would be easy to put a killer battery in a phone by changing the form factor back to something like this instead of making phones smaller and smaller. Surely there must be other people like me who don't mind a larger phone if it means significantly longer battery life?
As a logician I am interested in this distinction. My distinction is based on the negation. Take p as "God exists" (quantifier is not needed here). Then according to me:
Very simple. No need to talk about conclusions or certainty. In a correct 'logic for belief', (1) is compatible with not(believe(not(p))) and some would perhaps add this as a clause to (1), with which I would agree. Now you seem to suggest that famous atheists call (1) atheism. Perhaps some atheists like Dawkins have spinned it that way, but I still don't agree with this terminology. I do agree that my definition (1) probably doesn't capture how some agnostics would characterize their position, because the reference to gnosis indicates an epistemic notion. However, I still would like to know how you -- or Dawkin, or Huxly, for what it's worth -- call case (2) if atheism in your opinion covers case (1)?
The number of PCs sold has been constantly growing from 1996 to 2011. No end of the PC era is in sight, just some slowing down of the total growth due to tablets and, probably more of an effect, the current economy.
What you describe is agnosticism, lack of belief in God. Atheism is the explicit belief that God doesn't exist.
To me, this difference is important, because I used to be an agnostic until I've realised that this position was just a result of my liberal upbringing. Atheism is a much more reasonable position, because there are many good arguments why God cannot and does not exist in addition to the arguments against the positive arguments for the existence of God.
Bertrand Russell's "Is there a God?" was an eye-opener to me. Some of the arguments in it support only agnosticism, but some also support atheism.
You're right, though, that even an atheist might not have a motivation for arguing or fighting against theists. For that you need independent additional motivation, like e.g. believing in rational enlightenment or, from a more practical perspective, being against the countless wrongdoings of the religious institutions. I personally would fight against religion, because it's stupid and I dislike stupidity.
Jesus Christ, I cannot believe this. This is really horrible news. Not only is X-Plane the best flight sim out there and I'm flying it for more than 8 years now, it also always used to be the best example for me that a smart guy can make a living nowadays simply by selling software. (They started as a one man company and I think by now are about 4 or something; it's hard to tell because there are so many dedicated hobbyists helping out for free. Not even Microsoft could harm Austin, and now that.
I hope the people at this "Uniloc" will rot in hell!
Here is how Mr. "smartass" aaaaaaargh! tells the industry for free how to win the war against piracy for computer games (but similar things work in other sectors):
1.) Make a good, innovative game with procedurally generated levels and content (= extremely high replay value)
2.) If you're totally afraidthat people might actually like your game too much because of the first step, still do it, but charge for the next version of the game engine (e.g. people have to pay for better graphics and optimizations)
3.) Include useful and/or creative items in the box like a complete booklet, collectors items, etc. Heck, even including a whole set of high-quality game controllers is not unheard of...
4.) Do not rip off consumers, make the pricing fair and reasonable. Don't let them pay extra for point 3 (no collectors box, no deluxe edition! One edition for all.)
5.) Good customer service and realease modding/hacking tools for your games.
6.) Ignore the pirates.
Revenue and sustainable business development are ensured, until you're bought by EA games who will fuck up your studio.
let's see him come up with a markup language standard that appeases every vendor while supporting every aspect of media delivery for users.
That's not an easy task.
Perhaps not easy for Zuckerberg but it's definitely not a hard task in general, provided that you are allowed to invent it from scratch and only one person is in charge. The problem was just that neither of the two additional conditions were fullfilled in case of HTML5.
a reverse Streisand effect. Surely a person everybody calls bad can't be that bad?
What annoys me most about this debate is that there are so many people who apparently think that having worked as a prostitute/sex worker is so very bad and would somehow disqualify a woman from being the first lady. People and the boulevard press in Germany even went so far as to take the first lady's mature attitude towards better sexual education at schools as a clear sign of having been a prostitute, as if any of that constituted any real problem (rather than, say, hypocrisy or the moronic politics of her husband).
I totally agree, I'm using the Linux desktop for around 5 years now without any problems.
To be honest, the naysayers are mostly people who have never really used GNU/Linux. You can find this phenomenon everywhere. When I used a Mac, there were also always plenty of people who emphatically argued against Macs and after scrutinizing them admitted that they never used one. Not to speak of people arguing against programming language X...
Regarding developers. There is no shortage of development tools, but I'm pretty sure that an easy to use graphical drag & drop cross-distribution package creator that really complies with the requirements of the largest distros would boost the amount of applications tremendously.
People don't give a fuck about whether they run a background service or not. What they care about is whether it can be started with one click or not. If not, they don't use it. You're right about the everyone else part, though.
Here, let me help you. Most people aren't paranoid. They see that no actual harm comes to them if "zomg teh facebooks knows i exist!!11one!!".
What you say might hold for yourself, but in my experience is not at all typical. People care a lot about privacy. In fact, I have never met a single person who didn't care about what companies like FB or Google do with their data. However, most people also tend to prefer ease of use and simplicity over privacy and security.
Make the p2p part transparent to the user, make the application cross-platform (incl. phones) and zero configuration, and offer something additional (like e.g. encrypted anonymous file transfer) and people will use it. None of this is easy, though, even just NAT traversal is a pain in the ass...
Keyboard and mouse haven't changed significantly over the years because they work well. Until we have mind control , I doubt anybody will come up with something better than keyboard and mouse anytime soon.
As for built quality, well, that's another thing. Arguably, the quality of keyboards has constantly declined since Model M except for remakes like Unicomp and keyboards with Cherry switches. It would be great if Valves console had a great keyboard but somehow I doubt it...
I'm using Ubuntu as a desktop environment for daily work for years now and switched to XFCE recently. The reasons are quite simple, people know them already, but allow me to reiterate them infinitely:
10 PRINT "I want a traditional, unobtrousive desktop environment ('desktop metaphor') with hidable and freely configurable panels and some way to define command shortcuts." 20 PRINT "I also strongly prefer normal windows with minimal, user-definable decoration, ordinary menus (on the top of windows), and a fast file browser." 30 GOTO 10
All of this has existed for a long time and there was no reason to change it. I use whatever session/window manager gives the above features to me. There are plenty of choices besides Unity and Gnome 3, e.g. XFCE works fine for me. Sorry if that offends Gnome 3 or Unity developers for some odd reason.
He may host it himself, but he can't make money from it using automated object recognition, because Google has just been awarded a patent for it. (Or to be more precise, at least he couldn't make money without paying exorbitant royalties to Google.)
Also, you don't have to read the whole file to make use of checksums, CRCs, hashes and the like. Just check a few pieces likely to be different if the files are different, such as the first and last 2000 bytes.
Coincidentally I've just experimented with this method and found a number of files with just 0s both at the beginning and at the end. I believe it's better to take the bytes from the middle of the file, e.g. sha1 8096 bytes around the middle.
It doesn't matter, what matters is that Apple is hurting all customers including their own, in the long run, by instigating spurious patent battles based on a rotten patent system. Whether it is an iphone, a Samsung phone or whatever else, you pay a hefty fee to lawyers anytime you buy a new phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Please notice also the apparent fact that "...police clearly knew of Dotcom’s residency status when they compiled a planning document known as the 'Blue Folder' in which help from the anti-terrorist Special Tactics Group was requested." (emphasis mine)
If that's true, they apparently didn't just break the law intentionally, but also got the "Anti-terrorist Special Tactics Group" involved. Because we all know that running a business which might enable people to commit copyright infringement is terrorism.
Amazing, I didn't know what M^H does until today, and I'm using Emacs for 4 years now...
Don't you think cybernetic systems should be secure?
And by the way, so should be cyborgs!
I think you've got it the wrong way 'round.
That onion routing is not yet prohibited might be due to the fact that systems like TOR have been sufficiently subverted already (e.g. most fixed nodes could be run by cooperating intelligende agencies). The more users who use them, the harder it will become to break the system. Thus, in future onion routing will be prohibited if it gains widespread support.
Not that I believe any of this, just wanted to lay out a slightly more logical conspiracy theory. :P
There is probably not even a need to limit or ban encryption, because in a sense the Internet is already heavily regulated and not what it used to be. Thanks to all kinds of NATs, packet filters, and "intelligent" routers, the times when you could just connect one computer to another one to transmit information are long gone. Nowadays, if you want to be sure that your message reaches the destination without using a central server (which can be surveilled, subpoenaed, put under draconian laws, etc.) you need to dig through miriads of obscure heuristic NAT traversal techniques and use all kinds of hacks like ICMP tunneling or whatever. That in combination with government trojans, traffic analysis, and anti hacking (anti security) laws should suffice to suppress the citizens of Europe.
On the contrary, I'd like to see more stories like that. 'Cos the constant flow of recent iPhone and web-monkey stories on /. is definitely not news for nerds...
Yes, that seems to be the trend and I wonder why. It would be easy to put a killer battery in a phone by changing the form factor back to something like this instead of making phones smaller and smaller. Surely there must be other people like me who don't mind a larger phone if it means significantly longer battery life?
As a logician I am interested in this distinction. My distinction is based on the negation. Take p as "God exists" (quantifier is not needed here). Then according to me:
(1) agnosticism: not(believe(p))
(2) atheism: believe(not(p))
Very simple. No need to talk about conclusions or certainty. In a correct 'logic for belief', (1) is compatible with not(believe(not(p))) and some would perhaps add this as a clause to (1), with which I would agree. Now you seem to suggest that famous atheists call (1) atheism. Perhaps some atheists like Dawkins have spinned it that way, but I still don't agree with this terminology. I do agree that my definition (1) probably doesn't capture how some agnostics would characterize their position, because the reference to gnosis indicates an epistemic notion. However, I still would like to know how you -- or Dawkin, or Huxly, for what it's worth -- call case (2) if atheism in your opinion covers case (1)?
No pun intended, just being curious.
Please mod parent up.
The number of PCs sold has been constantly growing from 1996 to 2011. No end of the PC era is in sight, just some slowing down of the total growth due to tablets and, probably more of an effect, the current economy.
What you describe is agnosticism, lack of belief in God. Atheism is the explicit belief that God doesn't exist.
To me, this difference is important, because I used to be an agnostic until I've realised that this position was just a result of my liberal upbringing. Atheism is a much more reasonable position, because there are many good arguments why God cannot and does not exist in addition to the arguments against the positive arguments for the existence of God.
Bertrand Russell's "Is there a God?" was an eye-opener to me. Some of the arguments in it support only agnosticism, but some also support atheism.
You're right, though, that even an atheist might not have a motivation for arguing or fighting against theists. For that you need independent additional motivation, like e.g. believing in rational enlightenment or, from a more practical perspective, being against the countless wrongdoings of the religious institutions. I personally would fight against religion, because it's stupid and I dislike stupidity.
Jesus Christ, I cannot believe this. This is really horrible news. Not only is X-Plane the best flight sim out there and I'm flying it for more than 8 years now, it also always used to be the best example for me that a smart guy can make a living nowadays simply by selling software. (They started as a one man company and I think by now are about 4 or something; it's hard to tell because there are so many dedicated hobbyists helping out for free. Not even Microsoft could harm Austin, and now that.
I hope the people at this "Uniloc" will rot in hell!
Here is how Mr. "smartass" aaaaaaargh! tells the industry for free how to win the war against piracy for computer games (but similar things work in other sectors):
1.) Make a good, innovative game with procedurally generated levels and content (= extremely high replay value)
2.) If you're totally afraidthat people might actually like your game too much because of the first step, still do it, but charge for the next version of the game engine (e.g. people have to pay for better graphics and optimizations)
3.) Include useful and/or creative items in the box like a complete booklet, collectors items, etc. Heck, even including a whole set of high-quality game controllers is not unheard of...
4.) Do not rip off consumers, make the pricing fair and reasonable. Don't let them pay extra for point 3 (no collectors box, no deluxe edition! One edition for all.)
5.) Good customer service and realease modding/hacking tools for your games.
6.) Ignore the pirates.
Revenue and sustainable business development are ensured, until you're bought by EA games who will fuck up your studio.
My girlfriend seems to like Unity. But to be honest, her only interest in a Desktop is "Where is the browser?" and "How do I listen to my mp3s?"
...and people like me who actually use Linux for daily work have replied that there is no problem.
let's see him come up with a markup language standard that appeases every vendor while supporting every aspect of media delivery for users.
That's not an easy task.
Perhaps not easy for Zuckerberg but it's definitely not a hard task in general, provided that you are allowed to invent it from scratch and only one person is in charge. The problem was just that neither of the two additional conditions were fullfilled in case of HTML5.
a reverse Streisand effect. Surely a person everybody calls bad can't be that bad?
What annoys me most about this debate is that there are so many people who apparently think that having worked as a prostitute/sex worker is so very bad and would somehow disqualify a woman from being the first lady. People and the boulevard press in Germany even went so far as to take the first lady's mature attitude towards better sexual education at schools as a clear sign of having been a prostitute, as if any of that constituted any real problem (rather than, say, hypocrisy or the moronic politics of her husband).
It has users and such tools, so your question doesn't make sense.
I totally agree, I'm using the Linux desktop for around 5 years now without any problems.
To be honest, the naysayers are mostly people who have never really used GNU/Linux. You can find this phenomenon everywhere. When I used a Mac, there were also always plenty of people who emphatically argued against Macs and after scrutinizing them admitted that they never used one. Not to speak of people arguing against programming language X...
Regarding developers. There is no shortage of development tools, but I'm pretty sure that an easy to use graphical drag & drop cross-distribution package creator that really complies with the requirements of the largest distros would boost the amount of applications tremendously.
People don't give a fuck about whether they run a background service or not. What they care about is whether it can be started with one click or not. If not, they don't use it. You're right about the everyone else part, though.
Here, let me help you. Most people aren't paranoid. They see that no actual harm comes to them if "zomg teh facebooks knows i exist!!11one!!".
What you say might hold for yourself, but in my experience is not at all typical. People care a lot about privacy. In fact, I have never met a single person who didn't care about what companies like FB or Google do with their data. However, most people also tend to prefer ease of use and simplicity over privacy and security.
Make the p2p part transparent to the user, make the application cross-platform (incl. phones) and zero configuration, and offer something additional (like e.g. encrypted anonymous file transfer) and people will use it. None of this is easy, though, even just NAT traversal is a pain in the ass...
Keyboard and mouse haven't changed significantly over the years because they work well. Until we have mind control , I doubt anybody will come up with something better than keyboard and mouse anytime soon.
As for built quality, well, that's another thing. Arguably, the quality of keyboards has constantly declined since Model M except for remakes like Unicomp and keyboards with Cherry switches. It would be great if Valves console had a great keyboard but somehow I doubt it...
I'm using Ubuntu as a desktop environment for daily work for years now and switched to XFCE recently. The reasons are quite simple, people know them already, but allow me to reiterate them infinitely:
10 PRINT "I want a traditional, unobtrousive desktop environment ('desktop metaphor') with hidable and freely configurable panels and some way to define command shortcuts."
20 PRINT "I also strongly prefer normal windows with minimal, user-definable decoration, ordinary menus (on the top of windows), and a fast file browser."
30 GOTO 10
All of this has existed for a long time and there was no reason to change it. I use whatever session/window manager gives the above features to me. There are plenty of choices besides Unity and Gnome 3, e.g. XFCE works fine for me. Sorry if that offends Gnome 3 or Unity developers for some odd reason.
He may host it himself, but he can't make money from it using automated object recognition, because Google has just been awarded a patent for it. (Or to be more precise, at least he couldn't make money without paying exorbitant royalties to Google.)
Also, you don't have to read the whole file to make use of checksums, CRCs, hashes and the like. Just check a few pieces likely to be different if the files are different, such as the first and last 2000 bytes.
Coincidentally I've just experimented with this method and found a number of files with just 0s both at the beginning and at the end. I believe it's better to take the bytes from the middle of the file, e.g. sha1 8096 bytes around the middle.
It doesn't matter, what matters is that Apple is hurting all customers including their own, in the long run, by instigating spurious patent battles based on a rotten patent system. Whether it is an iphone, a Samsung phone or whatever else, you pay a hefty fee to lawyers anytime you buy a new phone.