Make up a whole bunch of files that sound like the names of copyrighted MP3s. Then encrypt them and post them on a website or FTP site. Tell people in a README that if they e-mail you privately, you'll send them the decryption key. What will really be in the files is a whole bunch of images and text that make fun of the music industry. If they sue you, make a huge stink about it, then hand over the key. Then they'll get to figure out what you really have after having spent tons of money and lawyer time.
My beef is that I think attempting to force people to artificially limit technology in order to further a profit motive is evil. One should only limit what you do with a tool, not what tools you can have.
Also, I wouldn't actually have bought any DVD movies until there was a player for Linux. I find the entertainment industry's attitude to be more and more disturbing as time goes on. I resent what they did to DAT. I resent their use of money to achieve their own political agenda at the expense of their customers. I resent their characterization of every consumer as a potential evil pirate who must be put into a technological prison.
My message to the entertainment industry is that they'd better start seeing their customers in a different light, or they will have horrible problems with copyright violations that they'll never be able to solve. Making a profit by angering your consumers generally doesn't work. What you are doing is waging a war on your consumers. They may be lots poorer than you, but they're a lot more numerous and harder to find. Take a lesson from Vietnam and quit while you're ahead.
BTW, I don't have a functioning Windows partition. I gave up on it after I realized I'd have to do a full re-install to get it to function after I last changed motherboards. Strangely enough, Linux handled it fine.
Neither you, nor Libertarians understand things all that well in some ways. Note though that I tend to call myself a libertarian.:-)
Microsoft's dominance comes from two sources, both government supported.
One source is their copyrights on their software. This is a government supported monopoly. It's a leaky monopoly, but a monopoly all the same, and corporations are making it less and less leaky all the time.
The other source is their status as a 'corporation'. A 'corporation' is a legal fiction, created by a body of law. For example, if corporations didn't exist, only individuals could hold copyrights or patents, and individuals would be responsible for actions. An organization couldn't have trade secrets, only individual people. The list goes on and on.
Both of these reasons exist because of government. They exist because a body of law exists to support them. Arguments based on Microsoft achieving it's position purely through market forces are ingoring too many things. Arguments on the other side based on the failure of the free market system are ignoring the fact that in many ways, we aren't.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that a body of law defining a market (not a particular market, but the marketplace as a whole) should always be engineered such that self interest will cause companies to do what is good for consumers with an absolute minimum of government intervention. I don't think the current body of law is engineered in such a way, and that is much of the source of the reason I call myself a libertarian.
There also remains the coercion question. I think it's a very questionable activity to restrict the kinds of contracts you will allow business partners to enter into, especially when you hold such a dominant position in a market that they almost _have_ to deal with you in order to make any money. Then you start becoming a government of sorts in your own right.
This feels like a bad idea, and I can't fully articulate why.
A big part of it is that X is all about 'mechanism, not policy'. Interpretation of HTML falls to hard on the 'policy' side.
Another thing is, this would sort of limit you to having just one browser, the one built into X.
Also, doing it that way doesn't buy you anything extra. You still have to do everything you'd have to do with a non-integrated browser.
Some X terminal vendors attempted to produce 'Net PCs' that were essentially their X terminal with Navigator running locally. But the browser was still a completely seperate application from the X server.
The idiots who say this kind of thing in a boardroom will quickly be selected out of the pool of successful companies because they'll start to ignore Linux.
I don't care if that is actually why they cracked the DVD encryption scheme. It's the reason I'm happy they did, and that's good enough for me.
*sigh* Sadly, you perpetuated the invisibility of AMD. The AMD performs faster than the Pentium III in almost all tasks. You could've made your point even better that way.
Also, in the rather silly arena of benchmarking based on SETI@Home results, the alpha is the clear winner. There are no CPUs that come even close to the two alpha scores of 1:23 per data set, and 0:59 per data set.
Of course, I would MUCH rather run Linux on an Alpha, despite the fact that Tru64 has some interesting features (like a journaling FS, and an amazing level of parameter tunability (how relevant when you have the source?)) that Linux doesn't.
Several people have said this, but a little less succinctly...
AMD chips are fine! I've run an AMD K6 of one kind or another for a long time now and have had no problems, except when I tried to use to 686 version of SETI@Home.
In fact, when the whole, stupid Slot 1 fiasco proved to me that Intel intended to crush their competition via marketing instead of compete in the technical arena, I stopped buying them. I think my choice has finally been amply justified now that the Athlon is clearly better than any Intel offering.
I don't find the idea of childlessness to be immature and selfish. I do find it to be stagnating and a concession to death I would rather not make. I wish the human race to grow, flourish and move off the planet. I wish to make the universe green with life. I want to see if Teilhard (sp? Omega Point guy) was right. Not reproducing is a recipe for stagnation, and eventual death.
I know I'm not going to change your mind, but I hope to make you more understanding of those of us who find your choice to be an anathema.
Why should I go out and do a whole big bunch of things I find horribly unpleasant? It seems to me that the fact that I'm obviously uncomfortable would be a huge turnoff.
Re:Sadly, no GPG support, but then again, who does
on
Mutt Hits 1.0
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· Score: 1
Hmmm... Well, I guess I spoke too soon. I read the blurb in the FAQ, and assumed that the difficultues I was having compiling mutt meant that it didn't support the newer version of gpg.
I hand edited my config.h file to remove any references to PGP (carefully avoiding removing references to GPG) because it wanted to use PGP5 if I had it, and after I did that, I got lots of compilation errors about struct pgpinfo not having a definition.
I just took the more drastic measure of removing pgp entirely by moving the executables, then running configure. It compiled fine, and my test worked.
Checking the config.h file shows that one thing I commented out, _PGPPATH, is defined. My mistake, but I really would expected them to key off one of the HAVE_ variables, and not _PGPPATH. Oh, well.
Sadly, no GPG support, but then again, who does?
on
Mutt Hits 1.0
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· Score: 1
I've been hunting mailers in an attempt to find one with gpg support since I wish to drop my use of PGP completely.
There is the beginnings of GPG support, but it seems to break to try to compile it. Maybe I'll have to fix it myself.:-)
:-( I'm rading that set of posts now, and am deeply saddened that my words were even a faint echo of some of the things posted on there by idiots.
W. Richard Stevens will be very missed. I recommend his books to everyone who wants to understand TCP/IP deeply. I don't think there are any other books you can point to and say "If you want to write your own TCP/IP protocol stack, read and understand this, and you'll be 90% of the way to knowing how.".
APIs are just a fancy way of documenting your source code. Bill Joy as much as stated that when he talked about only accepting compatibility breaking big fixes for bugs that were worse the the compatability problem would be.
The only way to have a truly open standard is to have completely open source code, because source code is the ultimate documentation of what something does.
I was really looking forward to reading more of his books to see where he fell in the whole BSD vs. Linux vs. everyone else debate. It was pretty clear from his other books that he really disliked System V, and really liked BSD.
I recognize that William Gibson has had a strong impact on our culture, but the question I always ask myself is "Why did it have to be him?".
He seems like an arthouse poseur. He doesn't do a fraction of the research for his books that Neal Stephenson so obviously does, and he makes statements that place him firmly in the category of artists who produce garbage and try to pretend that nobody understands it. His books reek of contrived symbolism.
In the SF convention circuit, they scramble to find earlier references to cyberspace concepts (Vernor Vinge's "True Names and Other Dangers" being a favorite) so nobody has to mention Gibson.
Sadly, he did invent the term cyberspace, and did provide a vision for ideas that had been in the backs of our heads that we didn't know how to express ourselves. It's depressing that all that comes in the same package with the statement "If we did our jobs right, nobody will understand what we've done for 20 years." made about an abysmal book, "The Difference Engine".
So, after making sure MTV really only wanted some sordid story about a massive criminal underground, this guy gave it to them, and now is pointing the journalistic integrity finger at MTV. I don't know who's worse.
I also doubt this will make everyone believe the media conspiracy of convenience this guy espouses. No doubt it exists, as he just proved, but I'm not sure if the form of the proof is all that helpful to the general public. I doubt anyone outside the cracker and hacker communities will ever hear about the tale this guy spun, and they'll end up believing what they see on MTV.
Then why not set up a test? One of us can purposely violate the GPL and be hauled into court for it, then we will see if it holds up or not.
I'd prefer not to test this by taking a nice company, like Corel, and hitting them with a lawsuit because they made a mistake that they quickly corrected.
IMHO, I don't really like the idea of Visa giving out loans for gambling. They should never have signed contracts with the offshore gambling houses. I don't really want my credit card company to be a loan shark.
I think this is a perfect argument for digital cash. She shouldn't have been able to spend anything but real money. If she borrowed the money from Visa, well, then she's defrauding Visa.
Slashdot Mirror
Go here and buy me a book. But, please don't buy it from Amazon since they want to own patents on ridiculous things like 'One-Click Shopping'.
Make up a whole bunch of files that sound like the names of copyrighted MP3s. Then encrypt them and post them on a website or FTP site. Tell people in a README that if they e-mail you privately, you'll send them the decryption key. What will really be in the files is a whole bunch of images and text that make fun of the music industry. If they sue you, make a huge stink about it, then hand over the key. Then they'll get to figure out what you really have after having spent tons of money and lawyer time.
My beef is that I think attempting to force people to artificially limit technology in order to further a profit motive is evil. One should only limit what you do with a tool, not what tools you can have.
Also, I wouldn't actually have bought any DVD movies until there was a player for Linux. I find the entertainment industry's attitude to be more and more disturbing as time goes on. I resent what they did to DAT. I resent their use of money to achieve their own political agenda at the expense of their customers. I resent their characterization of every consumer as a potential evil pirate who must be put into a technological prison.
My message to the entertainment industry is that they'd better start seeing their customers in a different light, or they will have horrible problems with copyright violations that they'll never be able to solve. Making a profit by angering your consumers generally doesn't work. What you are doing is waging a war on your consumers. They may be lots poorer than you, but they're a lot more numerous and harder to find. Take a lesson from Vietnam and quit while you're ahead.
BTW, I don't have a functioning Windows partition. I gave up on it after I realized I'd have to do a full re-install to get it to function after I last changed motherboards. Strangely enough, Linux handled it fine.
Neither you, nor Libertarians understand things all that well in some ways. Note though that I tend to call myself a libertarian. :-)
Microsoft's dominance comes from two sources, both government supported.
One source is their copyrights on their software. This is a government supported monopoly. It's a leaky monopoly, but a monopoly all the same, and corporations are making it less and less leaky all the time.
The other source is their status as a 'corporation'. A 'corporation' is a legal fiction, created by a body of law. For example, if corporations didn't exist, only individuals could hold copyrights or patents, and individuals would be responsible for actions. An organization couldn't have trade secrets, only individual people. The list goes on and on.
Both of these reasons exist because of government. They exist because a body of law exists to support them. Arguments based on Microsoft achieving it's position purely through market forces are ingoring too many things. Arguments on the other side based on the failure of the free market system are ignoring the fact that in many ways, we aren't.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that a body of law defining a market (not a particular market, but the marketplace as a whole) should always be engineered such that self interest will cause companies to do what is good for consumers with an absolute minimum of government intervention. I don't think the current body of law is engineered in such a way, and that is much of the source of the reason I call myself a libertarian.
There also remains the coercion question. I think it's a very questionable activity to restrict the kinds of contracts you will allow business partners to enter into, especially when you hold such a dominant position in a market that they almost _have_ to deal with you in order to make any money. Then you start becoming a government of sorts in your own right.
This feels like a bad idea, and I can't fully articulate why.
A big part of it is that X is all about 'mechanism, not policy'. Interpretation of HTML falls to hard on the 'policy' side.
Another thing is, this would sort of limit you to having just one browser, the one built into X.
Also, doing it that way doesn't buy you anything extra. You still have to do everything you'd have to do with a non-integrated browser.
Some X terminal vendors attempted to produce 'Net PCs' that were essentially their X terminal with Navigator running locally. But the browser was still a completely seperate application from the X server.
The idiots who say this kind of thing in a boardroom will quickly be selected out of the pool of successful companies because they'll start to ignore Linux.
I don't care if that is actually why they cracked the DVD encryption scheme. It's the reason I'm happy they did, and that's good enough for me.
*sigh* Sadly, you perpetuated the invisibility of AMD. The AMD performs faster than the Pentium III in almost all tasks. You could've made your point even better that way.
Also, in the rather silly arena of benchmarking based on SETI@Home results, the alpha is the clear winner. There are no CPUs that come even close to the two alpha scores of 1:23 per data set, and 0:59 per data set.
Of course, I would MUCH rather run Linux on an Alpha, despite the fact that Tru64 has some interesting features (like a journaling FS, and an amazing level of parameter tunability (how relevant when you have the source?)) that Linux doesn't.
Several people have said this, but a little less succinctly...
AMD chips are fine! I've run an AMD K6 of one kind or another for a long time now and have had no problems, except when I tried to use to 686 version of SETI@Home.
In fact, when the whole, stupid Slot 1 fiasco proved to me that Intel intended to crush their competition via marketing instead of compete in the technical arena, I stopped buying them. I think my choice has finally been amply justified now that the Athlon is clearly better than any Intel offering.
I don't find the idea of childlessness to be immature and selfish. I do find it to be stagnating and a concession to death I would rather not make. I wish the human race to grow, flourish and move off the planet. I wish to make the universe green with life. I want to see if Teilhard (sp? Omega Point guy) was right. Not reproducing is a recipe for stagnation, and eventual death.
I know I'm not going to change your mind, but I hope to make you more understanding of those of us who find your choice to be an anathema.
Why should I go out and do a whole big bunch of things I find horribly unpleasant? It seems to me that the fact that I'm obviously uncomfortable would be a huge turnoff.
Hmmm... Well, I guess I spoke too soon. I read the blurb in the FAQ, and assumed that the difficultues I was having compiling mutt meant that it didn't support the newer version of gpg.
I hand edited my config.h file to remove any references to PGP (carefully avoiding removing references to GPG) because it wanted to use PGP5 if I had it, and after I did that, I got lots of compilation errors about struct pgpinfo not having a definition.
I just took the more drastic measure of removing pgp entirely by moving the executables, then running configure. It compiled fine, and my test worked.
Checking the config.h file shows that one thing I commented out, _PGPPATH, is defined. My mistake, but I really would expected them to key off one of the HAVE_ variables, and not _PGPPATH. Oh, well.
I've been hunting mailers in an attempt to find one with gpg support since I wish to drop my use of PGP completely.
There is the beginnings of GPG support, but it seems to break to try to compile it. Maybe I'll have to fix it myself. :-)
:-( I'm rading that set of posts now, and am deeply saddened that my words were even a faint echo of some of the things posted on there by idiots.
W. Richard Stevens will be very missed. I recommend his books to everyone who wants to understand TCP/IP deeply. I don't think there are any other books you can point to and say "If you want to write your own TCP/IP protocol stack, read and understand this, and you'll be 90% of the way to knowing how.".
:-( :-( :-(
APIs are just a fancy way of documenting your source code. Bill Joy as much as stated that when he talked about only accepting compatibility breaking big fixes for bugs that were worse the the compatability problem would be.
The only way to have a truly open standard is to have completely open source code, because source code is the ultimate documentation of what something does.
I was really looking forward to reading more of his books to see where he fell in the whole BSD vs. Linux vs. everyone else debate. It was pretty clear from his other books that he really disliked System V, and really liked BSD.
And now I hear he died. :-( When did this happen?
I recognize that William Gibson has had a strong impact on our culture, but the question I always ask myself is "Why did it have to be him?".
He seems like an arthouse poseur. He doesn't do a fraction of the research for his books that Neal Stephenson so obviously does, and he makes statements that place him firmly in the category of artists who produce garbage and try to pretend that nobody understands it. His books reek of contrived symbolism.
In the SF convention circuit, they scramble to find earlier references to cyberspace concepts (Vernor Vinge's "True Names and Other Dangers" being a favorite) so nobody has to mention Gibson.
Sadly, he did invent the term cyberspace, and did provide a vision for ideas that had been in the backs of our heads that we didn't know how to express ourselves. It's depressing that all that comes in the same package with the statement "If we did our jobs right, nobody will understand what we've done for 20 years." made about an abysmal book, "The Difference Engine".
So, after making sure MTV really only wanted some sordid story about a massive criminal underground, this guy gave it to them, and now is pointing the journalistic integrity finger at MTV. I don't know who's worse.
I also doubt this will make everyone believe the media conspiracy of convenience this guy espouses. No doubt it exists, as he just proved, but I'm not sure if the form of the proof is all that helpful to the general public. I doubt anyone outside the cracker and hacker communities will ever hear about the tale this guy spun, and they'll end up believing what they see on MTV.
Oh, well.
Oh, but we do care about his sex life! *grin* Wouldn't you be curious to find out what (obviously not who) was willing to actually have sex with him?
Yes, I agree with this strongly. Yes, this post is redundant, I'm tired. :-)
And I bet I have a few guesses as to what you had sex with. Congratulations, not many can claim to be the proud father of a new hybrid species.
Ooh, ooh! I have a question! What do you suppose the moderator did if she was female?
Thank you, that tells me all I needed to know.
And what does that make you, praytell?
I'm quite curious as to your answer.
I think you're posts should be moderated up because they're funny.
Then why not set up a test? One of us can purposely violate the GPL and be hauled into court for it, then we will see if it holds up or not.
I'd prefer not to test this by taking a nice company, like Corel, and hitting them with a lawsuit because they made a mistake that they quickly corrected.
IMHO, I don't really like the idea of Visa giving out loans for gambling. They should never have signed contracts with the offshore gambling houses. I don't really want my credit card company to be a loan shark.
I think this is a perfect argument for digital cash. She shouldn't have been able to spend anything but real money. If she borrowed the money from Visa, well, then she's defrauding Visa.