Umm, dude, believe it or not some guys DO get hit on. A LOT. Ninenine has it right here. The secret to having "game" is to not have ANY game because you don't really care. Check out "The Tao of Steve" to see what I mean.
The big deal is that this is in a *Pocket* operating system.
Number one it's much more difficult because of limited resources. I don't know of many who've actually accomplished useable voice recognition on a pocket platform.
Number two, think about the uses of this. The two major bottlenecks of handheld systems are input and output. If the speech recognition gets good enough (which I doubt at this point but which will probably happen sooner rather than later) you might not have to use the little pin-pusher thumb keyboard or handwriting recognition. Also, think of this being used on a combination pda/cell phone. You can use your hands free set for the phone to control the pda and also get information from it. You could use it driving much easier then.
I'm not getting all lathered up over this, but it is kind of cool.
Okay, first there's the human factor, which is everpresent in any situation involving humans. Perviously casinos would have to suspect someone before they tried voice activated tracking software on them. Now they will be tracked by default. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, although it could be annoying to counters.
The thing is, especially if the system works (which they often don't), once it gets a reputation people will begin to rely on it more and more instead of gut instinct. What could easily evolve from this is an over-reliance on the computer. A pit boss might suspect that something's fishy but the higher-ups will think he's full of it because "the computer says no".
This system won't really work against one of the most popular methods of counting (as has been mentioned in a couple previous posts and I think the article) called "back counting". This is where the counter doesn't even enter the game until the deck is favorable. Of course, some casinos are banning mid-shoe entry as a result.
Either way the thing to remember is that there will always be a way to fake out the casino personnel. The other thing to think of is that it could prove advantageous to "advantage" players who primarily rely on counting as a means to a free or paid vacation. The idea is that the little that they would normally lose while earning comps is offset by the counting advantage. These players routinely get shafted on comps because most casinos limit the "hands per hour" figure to 100. Many counters and just regular players routinely average 150. This means that they are supposed to be losing 50% more money; not insignificant.
There are other well known methods that would beat tracking this way. Beating machines is almost always easier than beating people.
Yes, but the linux version uses loopback crypto, which is a lot slower and doesn't use volatile (I think that's the term) keys. It's basically done by making the swap partition on a loopback encrypted drive.
The OpenBSD version is done at the pager level, with each key being used only as long as it is needed. This has much less overhead (which is necessary for something that is done thousands of times per minute), and is inherently more secure.
This project doesn't use lava lamps! It is made by some of the people who worked on a project that did. That technique is patented, and used by the company that made it to form the basis of a pay service for random numbers.
The "new" thing about the project is that it uses a normal webcam on your own system (with the lens cap on;-)). This makes it so anyone can get random numbers of a similar quality to the ones being sold for buku money. This is Pretty Damned Cool.
Maybe I'm biting at a troll, but I'll do it anyway...
There are a few basic areas where OpenBSD is "unique" to my knowledge. It is certainly unique among the BSDs in these respects. The first is proactive security. They audit all code going into the OS and all code that was legacied (is that a word?) into the OS. I can't count the number of times I've heard something like "This problem was fixed in OpenBSD 6 months ago in a routine audit" as the page linked above states. Hell, people in the OpenBSD community were actually complaining about the routine security fixes not being released as actual security patches with alerts. The fact of the matter was that they had no idea if the old code could lead to an exploit or not; it was flawed so they fixed it. This leads into a second part of this aspect, which is full disclosure. Anytime there is any kind of exploit or potential exploit, you hear about it along wiith a bugfix immediately. None of this waiting 3 months for it to be recognized by the vendor and then another two for the patch to be publicly available.
The second part is integrated cryptography. This doesn't mean just including IPsec. This means using 128-bit AES on the *swap* partitions to prevent them from being used against the system administrator in cases where the regular filesystem is also encrypted. I have never seen encrypted *swap* in an OS before. The design is ingenious; I've been looking at it very closely with an eye for porting it to another OS, and it's way cool.
The third aspect, and perhaps the most important in my mind, is the ridiculously detailed and useful man pages. They are the best I've seen in any Unix, period. The FAQ on the website will answer almost any question you can think of for getting started. And if the man pages don't answer your question, you are probably looking in the wrong place or asking the wrong question. Well, that's what it's been any time I couldn't find stuff there.
Oh and then there's the "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 7 years!" thing. Anyone can screw up a system, but OpenBSD sets you up for success where with the others it is truly a challenge to get the system as secure.
Section 10. No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
There was, in fact, great debate in the constitutional convention about allowing even the federal government the right to mint fiat money.
From Madison's notes from the constitutional convention:
MR. GORHAM [Mass.] had doubts on the subject. Congress, he thought, would not have the power unless it was expressed. Though he had a mortal hatred to paper money, yet, as he could not foresee all emergencies, he was unwilling to tie the hands of the legislature. He observed the late war could not have been carried on had such a prohibition existed. (1)
The general consensus was that while it was distasteful, paper money might prove necessary in the event of another war (as it had in the war for independence). However, the founders wanted to stop individual states from printing money not backed in specie to stop what had happened during the war with hugely different values of state currencies.
(1) From Edward Flaherty's paper "Debunking the Federal Reserve Conspiracy Theories (and other financial myths)"
I think you're missing the fundamental "hack" the article implies.
If I own part of a corporation, and that corporation owns a recording, do I not have rights to that recording? Provided there is nothing in the corporate charter prohibiting this, I see no reason it wouldn't work. The difference between this and my.mp3.com is that the users own the service they are using.
The only hole I can really see is in the distribution method. If it's provided by a corporation as a service to its shareholders that's one thing, but if it's provided by a separate company? I'm not sure. Of course, I'm NAL.
I'll reply even though you're anonymous and probably won't hear me.
I don't care if Microsoft releases the loader. Scratch that, I think it's actually be pretty cool, but I sincerely doubt they'd do it. I was simply defending the platform as a useful one on which to install linux and use as a jukebox, server, etc.
Reasons for running Linux on an XBox rather than another platform? How about:
1. Built in TV out. 2. Built in *5.1* digital sound. Most digital soundcards do not offer this, the only stream sent over the optical cable is in stereo. The one exception I know of is the sound built in to NVidia's NForce. 3. Built in ethernet. 4. Built in DVD/CD-ROM (although it is kind of picky about some of the DVD-R's used) 5. USB after a slight modification (not much harder than modchipping in the first place). 6. Relatively low power consumption. 7. It costs $199 brand new and is available just about anywhere that sells electronics.
Add to those cool factor and a love of modifying things just for the hell of it and I see some pretty comeplling reasons, particularly for those of us interested in having a media jukebox, firewall, mail server, or just hack-around box.
Granted, their methods of introducing new reverse engineering techniques and discoveries leaves a little to be desired.
If the army mandated a free operating system, they could modify the operating system to only provide the services that the army NEEDs.
Yes, they can also afford to license Windows code to do the same thing. However, the thing is that the Army doesn't want to have to modify things to fit its needs, nor should they waste resources toward that aim. They want something that works now that they can train their men to use with a minimum effort and cost.
If the system is setup correctly, the end user would not have the ability to make changes that would require downtime to fix.
Things break. They break in Windows, they break in Unix, they break in Linux. What happens when there is a power outage caused by a lightening strike which causes key system files to be corrupted? Should there have been a surge protector and/or UPS? Probably. Was there? No. Okay, now half my systems don't work and since no one at my unit level has any knowledge how to fix them I have to send the whole systems up to the next level and hope they can fix them. This happened to us a few weeks ago and the systems were able to be fixed by the guys at our unit, because they had a familiarty with the software and knew how to fix it. (Yes, I know a Journalling Filesystem would have fixed this problem before it started, too, but the point was an example of how things break despite a good design, not discussing the merits of ReiserFS or ext3.)
You have been trained by the Windows crowd to just accept downtime and failures as part of normal operation.
I would guess even someone in B. CO 1/509th Abn could figure out. No offence intended.
Some "offence" taken. I've got plenty of experience supporting systems running Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, and OpenBSD among others; I still maintain that 1. Stuff Breaks, and 2. You need someone *here* and *now* who knows how to fix it. Not someone who gets sent down by the Dept. of the Army twice a month to check on things, but someone organic to the unit.
Before you get on the Army for not buying Linux or doing something Free, consider this.
In my unit (B Co. 1/509th Abn.) we have I think 7 systems. They all run Windows 2000 and are connected to a network, through which we can access printers, other systems, and the Internet. You would be *amazed* at how many people come in a day with problems printing, getting the Internet to work, or just getting a certain program to run. You want infantrymen who at least have some familiarty with office and windows to try learning bash or mutt? It's all we can do to get all the systems functioning properly, with everyone remembering their passwords and able to get there damned email and print. If the Army mandated Linux, there would be a 4 week training program, after which chaos would ensue because 90% of the people still didn't understand it.
Your talking about people who have trouble checking email. Asking infantrymen to run linux as part of their work would be ludicrous at this point.
The only time I ever seem to use the MSN search is when I enter a URL into IE that it doesn't recognize (i.e. just about anything that doesn't either end in.com or start www).
Then it invariably brings up an MSN search page with, surprise!, my url right at the top. Hell, using that method they could become the leaders in much the same way that the MSN homepage is one of the most visited one on the internet (because so many users don't bother to change the default one loaded every time you open a new browser window).
Does Phoenix/Firebird support tabbed homepages?
on
Mozilla 1.4RC2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If they are going to drop the "suite" version I sure hope it does. This is the one feature stopping me from using Camino or even Safari. I love how all the newer browsers are supporting tabs now, but there is one feature from the "suite" Mozilla that I use every day but that none of the other browsers has added.
I just love tabbed homepages. The way you can save a tab group as a bookmark and then set that as your homepage. I use this every day; I load up my four most visited sites and just go. For some strange reason it makes a big difference.
Check out DJ Shadow (his groundbreaking Endtroducing or the new Private Press), Moby, or RJD2, just to name a few, if you'd like to hear some amazing use of sampling that goes far beyond Paul's Boutique.
I would argue that sampling has yet to hit its peak as an artform. Just because some amazing stuff has been produced in a genre doesn't mean that everything that comes afterward is crap.
I'm from New Hampshire. We don't have sales tax. Delaware also doesn't have it. I'm not sure how many other states there are like us, but I presume there are at least a couple.
So does this mean that the only time I won't be paying tax on my online purchases will be when I'm shopping at stores in my home state? This strikes me as at least a little bit absurd. If I mail order something from a company in a state that charges sales tak I don't have to pay it; why should this be any different?
Hey, sometimes you have to point out to your executioners their flaws before they kill you.
It was mostly a statement of disgust with people who moderate based on whether or not they agree with your position (particularly when the moderation is taking away points). Also, I don't try to impress Slashdot readers with my bravery ~(-:.
I'll probably get modded or flamed into oblivion for this, but here goes anyway...
Is this a worthy principled stand, or is it more like Kruschev banging his shoe in the UN?
No, it's more like a child on the playground at recess sitting down and crying in the middle of a touch football game because the other boys wanted to play with different rules. And then going off to play his own game on the other side of the playground by himself.
Maybe a bad analogy, but come on. From the statement on sourceforge, nothing in the situation has actually changed; it just seems like the project maintainers had been hoping that Apple would bow down and see the light, but it's been too long and they haven't. So we're taking our ball and going home.
If the APSL is not free software compliant, why not say that in the first place instead of finding issue with it now? If Apple's "support" of the DMCA was disgraceful, why bring it up now rather than before starting the project? I mean, I'm sure the burgeoning legions of x86 Darwin users will support you, but at the cost of alienanting all the PPC users. Priorities.
Donning nomex suit andd breathing mask; prepare for flaming in five, four, three, two.....
I'm amazed that no one has mentioned the link between this article and a book by popular-with-geeks author Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (information on Everything).
If you've never read it, I recommend it, very reality bending and a good read besides.
I translated this with a little help from Systran(Sherlock). I lay no claim to the words being mine though, as the article was written by someone else.
Court Suspends Internet Blockage Ruling
Mario A. Muñoz andresm@prensa.com
The Supreme Court of Justice ordered to suspend the effects of the Public Services Regulating Body (ESRP) order that blocked the ports for voice over IP, due to a finding that it was constitutionally protected.
The motion was presented by the firm Infante, Garrido & Garrdio for the company Net2net Corp, in opposition to the Oct. 25th, 2002 resolution JD-3576 by the board of directors of the Regulating Body.
In a letter from the Chief Magistrate, Winston Spadafora, the Court asked for a report on the facts of the case and ordered the immediate suspension of the effects of the aforementioned resolution.
The President of the Regulating Body, Alex Anel Arroyo, thinks international calls made through the Internet are illegal.
The ESRP order was given to 50 Internet Service Providers, ordering them to block 24 UDP access ports that were used for voice transmission, including some companies that offered that service to the public.
Those ISPs have presented several requests to the ERSP for reconsideration (of the order).
Among the ISPs that issued the request are Intered, Ayayai.com, BellSouth Internet, Cable & Wireless Internet, Cable Onda, Compu Service Communications, GBNet a CCI Network, Inter.net, PanNet, Net2Net, and Senacyt.
The national Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation (Senacyt) criticized the resolution through its director, Gonzalo Cordova, who affirmed that blocking the voice access ports "constitutes a different form of censorship".
The ISPs position is added to that of the many users would be affected by blocking the access ports known as UDP (User Datagram Protocols)
All rights are reserved by Prensa corporation. internet@prensa.com (hopefully those don't include translation rights)
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
·
· Score: 2
I wish I had some mod points to give this comment so more people would read it. Very compelling, thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, dude, believe it or not some guys DO get hit on. A LOT. Ninenine has it right here. The secret to having "game" is to not have ANY game because you don't really care. Check out "The Tao of Steve" to see what I mean.
The big deal is that this is in a *Pocket* operating system.
Number one it's much more difficult because of limited resources. I don't know of many who've actually accomplished useable voice recognition on a pocket platform.
Number two, think about the uses of this. The two major bottlenecks of handheld systems are input and output. If the speech recognition gets good enough (which I doubt at this point but which will probably happen sooner rather than later) you might not have to use the little pin-pusher thumb keyboard or handwriting recognition. Also, think of this being used on a combination pda/cell phone. You can use your hands free set for the phone to control the pda and also get information from it. You could use it driving much easier then.
I'm not getting all lathered up over this, but it is kind of cool.
Okay, I'm probably too late for anyone to see this but...
So anorexia isn't a disease, it's a survival mechanism?
Was that a joke?
Since when did Microsoft ever want you to evaluate the things you were paying them money to "improve"? Mandatory upgrades anyone?
Okay, first there's the human factor, which is everpresent in any situation involving humans. Perviously casinos would have to suspect someone before they tried voice activated tracking software on them. Now they will be tracked by default. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, although it could be annoying to counters.
The thing is, especially if the system works (which they often don't), once it gets a reputation people will begin to rely on it more and more instead of gut instinct. What could easily evolve from this is an over-reliance on the computer. A pit boss might suspect that something's fishy but the higher-ups will think he's full of it because "the computer says no".
This system won't really work against one of the most popular methods of counting (as has been mentioned in a couple previous posts and I think the article) called "back counting". This is where the counter doesn't even enter the game until the deck is favorable. Of course, some casinos are banning mid-shoe entry as a result.
Either way the thing to remember is that there will always be a way to fake out the casino personnel. The other thing to think of is that it could prove advantageous to "advantage" players who primarily rely on counting as a means to a free or paid vacation. The idea is that the little that they would normally lose while earning comps is offset by the counting advantage. These players routinely get shafted on comps because most casinos limit the "hands per hour" figure to 100. Many counters and just regular players routinely average 150. This means that they are supposed to be losing 50% more money; not insignificant.
There are other well known methods that would beat tracking this way. Beating machines is almost always easier than beating people.
Yes, but the linux version uses loopback crypto, which is a lot slower and doesn't use volatile (I think that's the term) keys. It's basically done by making the swap partition on a loopback encrypted drive.
The OpenBSD version is done at the pager level, with each key being used only as long as it is needed. This has much less overhead (which is necessary for something that is done thousands of times per minute), and is inherently more secure.
Hey guys, just to gripe:
;-)). This makes it so anyone can get random numbers of a similar quality to the ones being sold for buku money. This is Pretty Damned Cool.
This project doesn't use lava lamps! It is made by some of the people who worked on a project that did. That technique is patented, and used by the company that made it to form the basis of a pay service for random numbers.
The "new" thing about the project is that it uses a normal webcam on your own system (with the lens cap on
Maybe I'm biting at a troll, but I'll do it anyway...
There are a few basic areas where OpenBSD is "unique" to my knowledge. It is certainly unique among the BSDs in these respects. The first is proactive security. They audit all code going into the OS and all code that was legacied (is that a word?) into the OS. I can't count the number of times I've heard something like "This problem was fixed in OpenBSD 6 months ago in a routine audit" as the page linked above states. Hell, people in the OpenBSD community were actually complaining about the routine security fixes not being released as actual security patches with alerts. The fact of the matter was that they had no idea if the old code could lead to an exploit or not; it was flawed so they fixed it. This leads into a second part of this aspect, which is full disclosure. Anytime there is any kind of exploit or potential exploit, you hear about it along wiith a bugfix immediately. None of this waiting 3 months for it to be recognized by the vendor and then another two for the patch to be publicly available.
The second part is integrated cryptography. This doesn't mean just including IPsec. This means using 128-bit AES on the *swap* partitions to prevent them from being used against the system administrator in cases where the regular filesystem is also encrypted. I have never seen encrypted *swap* in an OS before. The design is ingenious; I've been looking at it very closely with an eye for porting it to another OS, and it's way cool.
The third aspect, and perhaps the most important in my mind, is the ridiculously detailed and useful man pages. They are the best I've seen in any Unix, period. The FAQ on the website will answer almost any question you can think of for getting started. And if the man pages don't answer your question, you are probably looking in the wrong place or asking the wrong question. Well, that's what it's been any time I couldn't find stuff there.
Oh and then there's the "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 7 years!" thing. Anyone can screw up a system, but OpenBSD sets you up for success where with the others it is truly a challenge to get the system as secure.
From the Constitution of the United States:
Section 10. No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
There was, in fact, great debate in the constitutional convention about allowing even the federal government the right to mint fiat money.
From Madison's notes from the constitutional convention:
MR. GORHAM [Mass.] had doubts on the subject. Congress, he thought, would not have the power unless it was expressed. Though he had a mortal hatred to paper money, yet, as he could not foresee all emergencies, he was unwilling to tie the hands of the legislature. He observed the late war could not have been carried on had such a prohibition existed. (1)
The general consensus was that while it was distasteful, paper money might prove necessary in the event of another war (as it had in the war for independence). However, the founders wanted to stop individual states from printing money not backed in specie to stop what had happened during the war with hugely different values of state currencies.
(1) From Edward Flaherty's paper "Debunking the Federal Reserve Conspiracy Theories (and other financial myths)"
I think you're missing the fundamental "hack" the article implies.
If I own part of a corporation, and that corporation owns a recording, do I not have rights to that recording? Provided there is nothing in the corporate charter prohibiting this, I see no reason it wouldn't work. The difference between this and my.mp3.com is that the users own the service they are using.
The only hole I can really see is in the distribution method. If it's provided by a corporation as a service to its shareholders that's one thing, but if it's provided by a separate company? I'm not sure. Of course, I'm NAL.
I'll reply even though you're anonymous and probably won't hear me.
I don't care if Microsoft releases the loader. Scratch that, I think it's actually be pretty cool, but I sincerely doubt they'd do it. I was simply defending the platform as a useful one on which to install linux and use as a jukebox, server, etc.
Reasons for running Linux on an XBox rather than another platform? How about:
1. Built in TV out.
2. Built in *5.1* digital sound. Most digital soundcards do not offer this, the only stream sent over the optical cable is in stereo. The one exception I know of is the sound built in to NVidia's NForce.
3. Built in ethernet.
4. Built in DVD/CD-ROM (although it is kind of picky about some of the DVD-R's used)
5. USB after a slight modification (not much harder than modchipping in the first place).
6. Relatively low power consumption.
7. It costs $199 brand new and is available just about anywhere that sells electronics.
Add to those cool factor and a love of modifying things just for the hell of it and I see some pretty comeplling reasons, particularly for those of us interested in having a media jukebox, firewall, mail server, or just hack-around box.
Granted, their methods of introducing new reverse engineering techniques and discoveries leaves a little to be desired.
If the army mandated a free operating system, they could modify the operating system to only provide the services that the army NEEDs.
Yes, they can also afford to license Windows code to do the same thing. However, the thing is that the Army doesn't want to have to modify things to fit its needs, nor should they waste resources toward that aim. They want something that works now that they can train their men to use with a minimum effort and cost.
If the system is setup correctly, the end user would not have the ability to make changes that would require downtime to fix.
Things break. They break in Windows, they break in Unix, they break in Linux. What happens when there is a power outage caused by a lightening strike which causes key system files to be corrupted? Should there have been a surge protector and/or UPS? Probably. Was there? No. Okay, now half my systems don't work and since no one at my unit level has any knowledge how to fix them I have to send the whole systems up to the next level and hope they can fix them. This happened to us a few weeks ago and the systems were able to be fixed by the guys at our unit, because they had a familiarty with the software and knew how to fix it. (Yes, I know a Journalling Filesystem would have fixed this problem before it started, too, but the point was an example of how things break despite a good design, not discussing the merits of ReiserFS or ext3.)
You have been trained by the Windows crowd to just accept downtime and failures as part of normal operation.
I would guess even someone in B. CO 1/509th Abn could figure out. No offence intended.
Some "offence" taken. I've got plenty of experience supporting systems running Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, and OpenBSD among others; I still maintain that 1. Stuff Breaks, and 2. You need someone *here* and *now* who knows how to fix it. Not someone who gets sent down by the Dept. of the Army twice a month to check on things, but someone organic to the unit.
Before you get on the Army for not buying Linux or doing something Free, consider this.
In my unit (B Co. 1/509th Abn.) we have I think 7 systems. They all run Windows 2000 and are connected to a network, through which we can access printers, other systems, and the Internet. You would be *amazed* at how many people come in a day with problems printing, getting the Internet to work, or just getting a certain program to run. You want infantrymen who at least have some familiarty with office and windows to try learning bash or mutt? It's all we can do to get all the systems functioning properly, with everyone remembering their passwords and able to get there damned email and print. If the Army mandated Linux, there would be a 4 week training program, after which chaos would ensue because 90% of the people still didn't understand it.
Your talking about people who have trouble checking email. Asking infantrymen to run linux as part of their work would be ludicrous at this point.
The only time I ever seem to use the MSN search is when I enter a URL into IE that it doesn't recognize (i.e. just about anything that doesn't either end in .com or start www).
Then it invariably brings up an MSN search page with, surprise!, my url right at the top. Hell, using that method they could become the leaders in much the same way that the MSN homepage is one of the most visited one on the internet (because so many users don't bother to change the default one loaded every time you open a new browser window).
If they are going to drop the "suite" version I sure hope it does. This is the one feature stopping me from using Camino or even Safari. I love how all the newer browsers are supporting tabs now, but there is one feature from the "suite" Mozilla that I use every day but that none of the other browsers has added.
I just love tabbed homepages. The way you can save a tab group as a bookmark and then set that as your homepage. I use this every day; I load up my four most visited sites and just go. For some strange reason it makes a big difference.
Check out DJ Shadow (his groundbreaking Endtroducing or the new Private Press), Moby, or RJD2, just to name a few, if you'd like to hear some amazing use of sampling that goes far beyond Paul's Boutique.
I would argue that sampling has yet to hit its peak as an artform. Just because some amazing stuff has been produced in a genre doesn't mean that everything that comes afterward is crap.
Sorry, had to say it :-).
I'm from New Hampshire. We don't have sales tax. Delaware also doesn't have it. I'm not sure how many other states there are like us, but I presume there are at least a couple.
So does this mean that the only time I won't be paying tax on my online purchases will be when I'm shopping at stores in my home state? This strikes me as at least a little bit absurd. If I mail order something from a company in a state that charges sales tak I don't have to pay it; why should this be any different?
Hey, sometimes you have to point out to your executioners their flaws before they kill you.
It was mostly a statement of disgust with people who moderate based on whether or not they agree with your position (particularly when the moderation is taking away points). Also, I don't try to impress Slashdot readers with my bravery ~(-:.
I'll probably get modded or flamed into oblivion for this, but here goes anyway...
Is this a worthy principled stand, or is it more like Kruschev banging his shoe in the UN?
No, it's more like a child on the playground at recess sitting down and crying in the middle of a touch football game because the other boys wanted to play with different rules. And then going off to play his own game on the other side of the playground by himself.
Maybe a bad analogy, but come on. From the statement on sourceforge, nothing in the situation has actually changed; it just seems like the project maintainers had been hoping that Apple would bow down and see the light, but it's been too long and they haven't. So we're taking our ball and going home.
If the APSL is not free software compliant, why not say that in the first place instead of finding issue with it now? If Apple's "support" of the DMCA was disgraceful, why bring it up now rather than before starting the project? I mean, I'm sure the burgeoning legions of x86 Darwin users will support you, but at the cost of alienanting all the PPC users. Priorities.
Donning nomex suit andd breathing mask; prepare for flaming in five, four, three, two.....
I'm amazed that no one has mentioned the link between this article and a book by popular-with-geeks author Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (information on Everything).
If you've never read it, I recommend it, very reality bending and a good read besides.
I translated this with a little help from Systran(Sherlock). I lay no claim to the words being mine though, as the article was written by someone else.
Court Suspends Internet Blockage Ruling
Mario A. Muñoz
andresm@prensa.com
The Supreme Court of Justice ordered to suspend the effects of the Public Services Regulating Body (ESRP) order that blocked the ports for voice over IP, due to a finding that it was constitutionally protected.
The motion was presented by the firm Infante, Garrido & Garrdio for the company Net2net Corp, in opposition to the Oct. 25th, 2002 resolution JD-3576 by the board of directors of the Regulating Body.
In a letter from the Chief Magistrate, Winston Spadafora, the Court asked for a report on the facts of the case and ordered the immediate suspension of the effects of the aforementioned resolution.
The President of the Regulating Body, Alex Anel Arroyo, thinks international calls made through the Internet are illegal.
The ESRP order was given to 50 Internet Service Providers, ordering them to block 24 UDP access ports that were used for voice transmission, including some companies that offered that service to the public.
Those ISPs have presented several requests to the ERSP for reconsideration (of the order).
Among the ISPs that issued the request are Intered, Ayayai.com, BellSouth Internet, Cable & Wireless Internet, Cable Onda, Compu Service Communications, GBNet a CCI Network, Inter.net, PanNet, Net2Net, and Senacyt.
The national Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation (Senacyt) criticized the resolution through its director, Gonzalo Cordova, who affirmed that blocking the voice access ports "constitutes a different form of censorship".
The ISPs position is added to that of the many users would be affected by blocking the access ports known as UDP (User Datagram Protocols)
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(hopefully those don't include translation rights)
I wish I had some mod points to give this comment so more people would read it. Very compelling, thank you.