Personally, I don't see a need for top level domains at all. Yes, the might be needed for technical purposes, but the domain name system needs to be overhauled anyway and TLDs are mostly meaningless except for allowing some educated guesses about the location of servers (which often turn out to be wrong).
I'm quite confident that a censor-free distributed DNS system is coming soon, and then TLDs will be obsolete.
Become an active member of Amnesty International. They do some awesome work and have saved hundreds of people from torture or "disappearing." Their reports are impartial and so well-researched that they serve as a standard that even governments cannot ignore them.
Check out Racket. It is fast, comes with "batteries included", and even has a fairly feature-complete cross-platform GUI toolkit. It even has its own built-in web server.
Some people claim it's no longer Scheme, though, because Racket lists are immutable.
If you read Slashdot, you know that copyright infringement is OK, because
Fixed that for you.
You've got modded funny, but your list list reflects pretty well why most reasonable and decent people think copyright infringement is okay or at least only petty crime rather than on a par with terrorism et al. The good news is that it's only harmless for personal use. Nobody really thinks it is okay to copy someone else's software and sell it.
1) It costs more than is reasonable 2) You disagree with their license or copy protection scheme 3) The MPAA/RIAA are a bunch of jerks 4) You promise you will support the artist directly by some kind of donation or going to their show or referring your friends 5) It's a try before you buy situation, and you'll pay later if you like the program 6) Stealing software doesn't deprive others of the product
Just a side note: If your reason is (2) then it is better to send back your proposed license changes to the company's legal department. Even better: If you have the money and the EULA is illegal (as >90% of them), you may also sue them right away to clarify the issues. Unfortunately, not many people are willing to do that.
In the US, anybody who is not constantly cheerful and consumerist has a mental disorder and needs to take some pills. That's just part of the new definitions.
We are willing to accept the fact that a human occasionally makes an error. We are, however, not willing to accept when a machine makes an error, not to speak of the occasional errors made by software engineers. That's the social or moral problem. Who's fault is it if there is a software or hardware glitch?
But there is also a technical issue. I personally would not drive in a car programmed by Google engineers, because I am not confident that these people have the experience to develop such high-integrity systems. I want to see the CVs of these engineers first. On how many high-integrity systems have they worked so far? I know plenty of people with an AI background, and trust me, I don't want these to program my car. I'd also need to know which programming languages and development tools they have used, see the source code, and would like to know which formal software and hardware verification methods were used to verify the code.
It would also be a good idea to publish the source code for software used in planes like those of Airbus, but unfortunately they haven't gotten so far yet. However, there are plenty of reasons to have more confidence in airplane safety than in the safety of autonomous vehicles developed by Google. BTW, one reason is that it's technically much easier to fly a plane (without landing, which is still mostly done manually) than to programmatically steer a car or make a robot walk.
Perhaps he's idealistic, but he might not be as naive as it seems. If millions of people would send Disney a revised TOS (or any other company whatsoever), they would have a serious problem.
Here is something to try out, just for the fun of it: Read the EULAs and TOS when you buy or lease a product, make changes to the contract, and then send the changes back to the company with the note that you do not agree with the original contract, and do all of this within a short period after purchase. Some people in their legal department will probably hate you, but the worst thing they can do is keeping you from using the product, in case of which they'll have to pay you back the full price.
Should work great with software and all kinds of content where you're not given a complete contract to sign before buying the product. (Obscure links and small print on the packaging doesn't count.) Now if only enough people would do that with Sony products...
I understand this challenge was invented by volunteers and not some official agency based on tax money, right? Hopefully it's just for fun, because I don't really understand the purpose of it.
AFAIK already in the 80ies spy satellites were good enough to read newspapers. Even if that's not accurate I'd imagine with the process that technology has made it should be possible to automatically spot someone in real-time out of millions of people, as long as the sky is clear enough and the person occasionally looks up. Moreover, accessing the Internet, using a credit card or any other similar card once or using a cell phone should also suffice to locate a person. Heck, even NOT using the Internet seems to suffice for tracking someone down and sending a death squadron after him nowadays. (Not that I had any sympathies with the person in question.)
You may be right about processed food in general, but wrong about airline food. The problem of airline food is the opposite, it tastes like nothing, is certainly not salty and is not spiced at all. At least that's the case with the European airlines I'm frequently flying with. And the bread is disgusting. Perhaps there is a difference between US and European airline food?
Or, wait... when you say 'spices' do you mean artificial flavors and preservatives? Then you might have a point. When I say spices of course I mean rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, parsley, savory, and so on...
I have a second internal drive that is automatically synced with the main hard drive that contains all the important data. (No RAID, just plain old backup.) Moreover, all important data is backed up from one machine to another and to an online server.
For both of it I'm using Crashplan with a long-term contract. It's quite affordable and the software works really fine both for online and local backups. I don't understand why the "cloud" is not a solution apart from the obvious fact that you should avoid companies that use the word "cloud" too often. I've been using Jungledisk and Crashplan without complaint so far. Then again, I've never been struck by disaster so I don't know how easy it is to get the data back.
If you're storing a lot of illegal content like pirated movies then you'd probably be better off with choosing a European backup provider, but in any case you need to have encrypted online backup if you really care about the integrity of your data. No local backup can safe you from a flood or a fire.
I guess I'm being voted flamebait or troll for this, but someone's got to say it.
The only problem with FLOSS is that you can't make money with with two exceptions: (1) You can earn money if your software is sufficiently complicated; in that case you get money mostly for support work and maintaining the software, not from selling the software itself. (2) You can earn money by making the software FLOSS, but using obscure languages, build systems, or distributing the source in a way that makes it almost impossible for anyone else to build it.
Both (1) and (2) works only with highly complex software involving a lot of know how. With anything else you cannot make money. That's a fact and it's kind of annoying that some FLOSS aficionados try to constantly deny it. A perfect example is AdaCore, who gave one of the most hypocritical talks I've ever heard on Fosdem 2012. Basically, AdaCore works because of (1)&(2), particularly (2), because their GPL edition forces you to put every program you compile under GPL, whereas the FSF GNAT edition with MGPL lacks essential tools (AdaCore doesn't provide them...), is about 2-3 years behind, and contains numerous bugs fixed in newer releases. Notice also that (1) is inherently bad, because it means that a FLOSS developer is more likely to make money with his software the less it is usable out of the box/without training.
I'm a big fan of FLOSS and also contribute to it myself, but someone has to say the truth. You cannot make money with ordinary end-consumer software under the free software model. That's why I think that the shareware model is still a viable route to go even if it means that the software remains proprietary. Perhaps releasing libraries under LGPL and keeping the end product proprietary is the right way for small companies. Of course, RMS, whom I respect very much, will disagree.
As I've just written in another thread, we should really start thinking about whether there is a need for company with shady business models such as FB. In any case they get far too media attention---not the least because of their viral marketing campaigns.
Perhaps/. should open a Facebook page for these stories? Most of them seem to be slashvertisements anyway.
Perhaps some teenagers use FB as their primary communication means and think the Internet is the same as Google, but that's really not news for nerds.
It is time to stop worrying about the 10-20 companies who make their money from violating privacy and selling data to advertisers. Just because Google and Facebook have become popular with this business model during the past decade doesn't mean that we should give up century old principles and that we have to protect this business model in all eternity.
The vast majority of all companies can or could do respectable business without violating privacy. Notwithstanding the software patent nightmare, it is possible to make products and sell them to customers to the satisfaction of both parties. It is ridiculous how very few companies, which only have become global players after stockholders have artificially inflated their values, can steer the public discussion about what should be possible for them and what not. We need laws not only to protect our privacy and stop parasitic, advertising-based business models, but also to put an end to frivolous EULAs and the copyright, trademark, and patent nonsense.
It's time to give the power back to real companies, who actually offer real products and who are interested in sustainable business based on making their customers happy. There are plenty of those, and it's pissing me off that a few black sheeps get all the media attention.
Absolutely. Basically US agencies have the cart blanche for spying on any non-US citizens in any way they like. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have built a giant database with all information about any non-US person they can gather just because they can.
Look it's obvious that this is the right strategy against terrorism. When the people who regularly visit extremist websites go to jail for it, they will contemplate about the thought crimes they've committed and get a new life as democratic and well-adapted citizens. What else could happen?
I thought the problem was that The Senate approved a bill that deals with teaching of evolution.
It doesn't sound like a smart idea to me to let politicians decide---by law!---what can and cannot be taught in school. How about letting remotely competent people decide the curriculum?
Hint: it's NOT market share. There are small software shops that LOVE writing apps for niche markets. But one of the biggest reasons they don't target Linux is that it's a moving target.
As someone who has recently developed proprietary software that also runs on Linux I'd say the real reasons (apart from market share, which is relevant) ar enot that Linux is a moving target---it moves much slower than OS X---but simple lack of distribution channels and lack of cross-distribution packaging solutions
Perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place, but the packaging/distribution tools I have found either didn't create.deb and.rpm files that were acceptable/installed without warnings on popular distros like Ubuntu or Arch or they were so cryptic that it was hard to even get the simplest example work. Then I checked out distro-specific guidelines for packaging---what a nightmare! Pages after pages of recommendations, hand-written commandline stuff and manifests, version differences, and most of it partly outdated/wiki style. I concluded that it is not possible to create a working cross-platform distribution format without investing about as much time as creating the software in the first place, and in the end just said: "Fuck it, nobody will pay for my app on Linux anyway, so I'll just use it for myself (because I'm a Linux user) and don't distribute it."
The bottomline is that if Linux ever wants to become popular among makers of proprietary software (which almost no distro makers wants anyway), then at least the large distributions would have to agree on a common distribution format for closed software and provide some good GUI package creator that automatically installs icons, system menu entries, etc. as well. Or, this software exists and I missed it...?
Piracy will always occur when it is possible, but I think there is a profound reason why many if not most people don't have much of a bad conscience when doing it: People generally have a good sense of distributional justice. (...even in the US!)
If you copy a song by some unknown artist and later hear he's really a "starving artist" who is struggling to make a living with his music, almost everyone would get a bad conscience. But who seriously gives a fuck about Madonna's reduction in income due to piracy? Surely not me.
I know this sounds like blasphemy to many Americans, who often rationally believe that people are entitled to get as much money as they can make, but deep in their heart most people know that the excessive accumulation of wealth is not just. Once you're in the media and have reached a certain wealth threshold, you can basically accumulate money by literally doing nothing. A team of experts (composers, marketing people, agents, etc.) will ensure that. You'll get 500,000 $ just for showing up somewhere and could literally sell your own shit casted into synthetic resin on ebay for lots of $$$. Of course, being filthy rich is not just limited to media celebrities and many people have the same feeling that there is something wrong, a feeling of injustice, with other filthy rich people. You know, this Robin Hood feeling, etc.
The funny thing is that nobody on earth needs more than one million dollar a year. If there was an income cap to the effect that any more money earned would have to be invested immediately or given back to society where it comes from, the effect on the well-being of rich people would be Zero. But of course that idea is heresy in the US...
Anyway, I don't really endorse piracy but just wanted to point out one reason why people have no problem with piracy. For it looks a lot like the people that benefit from record and movie sales the most are the bosses of companies and studios as well as a few selected starlets as opposed to the real artists who can sometimes make a living off it, another times barely survive (e.g. some screenwriters, jazz musicians, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I don't see a need for top level domains at all. Yes, the might be needed for technical purposes, but the domain name system needs to be overhauled anyway and TLDs are mostly meaningless except for allowing some educated guesses about the location of servers (which often turn out to be wrong).
I'm quite confident that a censor-free distributed DNS system is coming soon, and then TLDs will be obsolete.
This deal is insane. The next Internet bubble is going to burst soon.
Sigh, I swear I've read Baroness Howe of Idiocy at first glance. Need to brush up my reading skills.
Become an active member of Amnesty International. They do some awesome work and have saved hundreds of people from torture or "disappearing." Their reports are impartial and so well-researched that they serve as a standard that even governments cannot ignore them.
Check out Racket. It is fast, comes with "batteries included", and even has a fairly feature-complete cross-platform GUI toolkit. It even has its own built-in web server.
Some people claim it's no longer Scheme, though, because Racket lists are immutable.
If you read Slashdot, you know that copyright infringement is OK, because
Fixed that for you.
You've got modded funny, but your list list reflects pretty well why most reasonable and decent people think copyright infringement is okay or at least only petty crime rather than on a par with terrorism et al. The good news is that it's only harmless for personal use. Nobody really thinks it is okay to copy someone else's software and sell it.
1) It costs more than is reasonable
2) You disagree with their license or copy protection scheme
3) The MPAA/RIAA are a bunch of jerks
4) You promise you will support the artist directly by some kind of donation or going to their show or referring your friends
5) It's a try before you buy situation, and you'll pay later if you like the program
6) Stealing software doesn't deprive others of the product
Just a side note: If your reason is (2) then it is better to send back your proposed license changes to the company's legal department. Even better: If you have the money and the EULA is illegal (as >90% of them), you may also sue them right away to clarify the issues. Unfortunately, not many people are willing to do that.
In the US, anybody who is not constantly cheerful and consumerist has a mental disorder and needs to take some pills. That's just part of the new definitions.
The problem is technical and social/moral.
We are willing to accept the fact that a human occasionally makes an error. We are, however, not willing to accept when a machine makes an error, not to speak of the occasional errors made by software engineers. That's the social or moral problem. Who's fault is it if there is a software or hardware glitch?
But there is also a technical issue. I personally would not drive in a car programmed by Google engineers, because I am not confident that these people have the experience to develop such high-integrity systems. I want to see the CVs of these engineers first. On how many high-integrity systems have they worked so far? I know plenty of people with an AI background, and trust me, I don't want these to program my car. I'd also need to know which programming languages and development tools they have used, see the source code, and would like to know which formal software and hardware verification methods were used to verify the code.
It would also be a good idea to publish the source code for software used in planes like those of Airbus, but unfortunately they haven't gotten so far yet. However, there are plenty of reasons to have more confidence in airplane safety than in the safety of autonomous vehicles developed by Google. BTW, one reason is that it's technically much easier to fly a plane (without landing, which is still mostly done manually) than to programmatically steer a car or make a robot walk.
Keep on suing each other, boys! Sue, sue, sue! That'll teach you a lesson!
Perhaps he didn't sign an NDA? Nobody can force you to sign one.
they=Disney
Perhaps he's idealistic, but he might not be as naive as it seems. If millions of people would send Disney a revised TOS (or any other company whatsoever), they would have a serious problem.
Here is something to try out, just for the fun of it: Read the EULAs and TOS when you buy or lease a product, make changes to the contract, and then send the changes back to the company with the note that you do not agree with the original contract, and do all of this within a short period after purchase. Some people in their legal department will probably hate you, but the worst thing they can do is keeping you from using the product, in case of which they'll have to pay you back the full price.
Should work great with software and all kinds of content where you're not given a complete contract to sign before buying the product. (Obscure links and small print on the packaging doesn't count.) Now if only enough people would do that with Sony products...
I understand this challenge was invented by volunteers and not some official agency based on tax money, right? Hopefully it's just for fun, because I don't really understand the purpose of it.
AFAIK already in the 80ies spy satellites were good enough to read newspapers. Even if that's not accurate I'd imagine with the process that technology has made it should be possible to automatically spot someone in real-time out of millions of people, as long as the sky is clear enough and the person occasionally looks up. Moreover, accessing the Internet, using a credit card or any other similar card once or using a cell phone should also suffice to locate a person. Heck, even NOT using the Internet seems to suffice for tracking someone down and sending a death squadron after him nowadays. (Not that I had any sympathies with the person in question.)
You may be right about processed food in general, but wrong about airline food. The problem of airline food is the opposite, it tastes like nothing, is certainly not salty and is not spiced at all. At least that's the case with the European airlines I'm frequently flying with. And the bread is disgusting. Perhaps there is a difference between US and European airline food?
Or, wait... when you say 'spices' do you mean artificial flavors and preservatives? Then you might have a point. When I say spices of course I mean rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, parsley, savory, and so on...
I have a second internal drive that is automatically synced with the main hard drive that contains all the important data. (No RAID, just plain old backup.) Moreover, all important data is backed up from one machine to another and to an online server.
For both of it I'm using Crashplan with a long-term contract. It's quite affordable and the software works really fine both for online and local backups. I don't understand why the "cloud" is not a solution apart from the obvious fact that you should avoid companies that use the word "cloud" too often. I've been using Jungledisk and Crashplan without complaint so far. Then again, I've never been struck by disaster so I don't know how easy it is to get the data back.
If you're storing a lot of illegal content like pirated movies then you'd probably be better off with choosing a European backup provider, but in any case you need to have encrypted online backup if you really care about the integrity of your data. No local backup can safe you from a flood or a fire.
I guess I'm being voted flamebait or troll for this, but someone's got to say it.
The only problem with FLOSS is that you can't make money with with two exceptions: (1) You can earn money if your software is sufficiently complicated; in that case you get money mostly for support work and maintaining the software, not from selling the software itself. (2) You can earn money by making the software FLOSS, but using obscure languages, build systems, or distributing the source in a way that makes it almost impossible for anyone else to build it.
Both (1) and (2) works only with highly complex software involving a lot of know how. With anything else you cannot make money. That's a fact and it's kind of annoying that some FLOSS aficionados try to constantly deny it. A perfect example is AdaCore, who gave one of the most hypocritical talks I've ever heard on Fosdem 2012. Basically, AdaCore works because of (1)&(2), particularly (2), because their GPL edition forces you to put every program you compile under GPL, whereas the FSF GNAT edition with MGPL lacks essential tools (AdaCore doesn't provide them...), is about 2-3 years behind, and contains numerous bugs fixed in newer releases. Notice also that (1) is inherently bad, because it means that a FLOSS developer is more likely to make money with his software the less it is usable out of the box/without training.
I'm a big fan of FLOSS and also contribute to it myself, but someone has to say the truth. You cannot make money with ordinary end-consumer software under the free software model. That's why I think that the shareware model is still a viable route to go even if it means that the software remains proprietary. Perhaps releasing libraries under LGPL and keeping the end product proprietary is the right way for small companies. Of course, RMS, whom I respect very much, will disagree.
As I've just written in another thread, we should really start thinking about whether there is a need for company with shady business models such as FB. In any case they get far too media attention---not the least because of their viral marketing campaigns.
Perhaps /. should open a Facebook page for these stories? Most of them seem to be slashvertisements anyway.
Perhaps some teenagers use FB as their primary communication means and think the Internet is the same as Google, but that's really not news for nerds.
It is time to stop worrying about the 10-20 companies who make their money from violating privacy and selling data to advertisers. Just because Google and Facebook have become popular with this business model during the past decade doesn't mean that we should give up century old principles and that we have to protect this business model in all eternity.
The vast majority of all companies can or could do respectable business without violating privacy. Notwithstanding the software patent nightmare, it is possible to make products and sell them to customers to the satisfaction of both parties. It is ridiculous how very few companies, which only have become global players after stockholders have artificially inflated their values, can steer the public discussion about what should be possible for them and what not. We need laws not only to protect our privacy and stop parasitic, advertising-based business models, but also to put an end to frivolous EULAs and the copyright, trademark, and patent nonsense.
It's time to give the power back to real companies, who actually offer real products and who are interested in sustainable business based on making their customers happy. There are plenty of those, and it's pissing me off that a few black sheeps get all the media attention.
Yours sincerely,
aaaaaaargh!
Slashdot Ranter
Absolutely. Basically US agencies have the cart blanche for spying on any non-US citizens in any way they like. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have built a giant database with all information about any non-US person they can gather just because they can.
Look it's obvious that this is the right strategy against terrorism. When the people who regularly visit extremist websites go to jail for it, they will contemplate about the thought crimes they've committed and get a new life as democratic and well-adapted citizens. What else could happen?
Boy, you are retarded. How about getting a life?
In a sense it is, but a very recent one.
I thought the problem was that The Senate approved a bill that deals with teaching of evolution.
It doesn't sound like a smart idea to me to let politicians decide---by law!---what can and cannot be taught in school. How about letting remotely competent people decide the curriculum?
Hint: it's NOT market share. There are small software shops that LOVE writing apps for niche markets. But one of the biggest reasons they don't target Linux is that it's a moving target.
As someone who has recently developed proprietary software that also runs on Linux I'd say the real reasons (apart from market share, which is relevant) ar enot that Linux is a moving target---it moves much slower than OS X---but simple lack of distribution channels and lack of cross-distribution packaging solutions
Perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place, but the packaging/distribution tools I have found either didn't create .deb and .rpm files that were acceptable/installed without warnings on popular distros like Ubuntu or Arch or they were so cryptic that it was hard to even get the simplest example work. Then I checked out distro-specific guidelines for packaging---what a nightmare! Pages after pages of recommendations, hand-written commandline stuff and manifests, version differences, and most of it partly outdated/wiki style. I concluded that it is not possible to create a working cross-platform distribution format without investing about as much time as creating the software in the first place, and in the end just said: "Fuck it, nobody will pay for my app on Linux anyway, so I'll just use it for myself (because I'm a Linux user) and don't distribute it."
The bottomline is that if Linux ever wants to become popular among makers of proprietary software (which almost no distro makers wants anyway), then at least the large distributions would have to agree on a common distribution format for closed software and provide some good GUI package creator that automatically installs icons, system menu entries, etc. as well. Or, this software exists and I missed it...?
Blasphemy:
Piracy will always occur when it is possible, but I think there is a profound reason why many if not most people don't have much of a bad conscience when doing it: People generally have a good sense of distributional justice. (...even in the US!)
If you copy a song by some unknown artist and later hear he's really a "starving artist" who is struggling to make a living with his music, almost everyone would get a bad conscience. But who seriously gives a fuck about Madonna's reduction in income due to piracy? Surely not me.
I know this sounds like blasphemy to many Americans, who often rationally believe that people are entitled to get as much money as they can make, but deep in their heart most people know that the excessive accumulation of wealth is not just. Once you're in the media and have reached a certain wealth threshold, you can basically accumulate money by literally doing nothing. A team of experts (composers, marketing people, agents, etc.) will ensure that. You'll get 500,000 $ just for showing up somewhere and could literally sell your own shit casted into synthetic resin on ebay for lots of $$$. Of course, being filthy rich is not just limited to media celebrities and many people have the same feeling that there is something wrong, a feeling of injustice, with other filthy rich people. You know, this Robin Hood feeling, etc.
The funny thing is that nobody on earth needs more than one million dollar a year. If there was an income cap to the effect that any more money earned would have to be invested immediately or given back to society where it comes from, the effect on the well-being of rich people would be Zero. But of course that idea is heresy in the US...
Anyway, I don't really endorse piracy but just wanted to point out one reason why people have no problem with piracy. For it looks a lot like the people that benefit from record and movie sales the most are the bosses of companies and studios as well as a few selected starlets as opposed to the real artists who can sometimes make a living off it, another times barely survive (e.g. some screenwriters, jazz musicians, etc.).