Seriously. We can call it GNUism. We'll meet to discuss Dogma in the Slashdot Temple, we'll have prophets and martyrs, and we'll have Holy Texts. We'll have the Gospels according to Phil Zimmermann, Jon Johansen, Linus Torvalds...
I'd LOVE to see the MPAA et al, not only try to ban a book, but a Holy Book to boot. It's not just about freedom of speach, but also about freedom of religion.
Then we can all take one character of the DeCSS printout, and stand in a long line while our "Pastor of Muppets" types it into a computer. This way we include the freedom of assembly.
Fsck the MPAA in accordance with the Law Of The Land, not in-spite of it. Play by the rules of the lawmakers to point out the absurdity of big business.
The T-shirt doesn't bear a non-permitted copyright. The DeCSS is open source. And the DeCSS code doesn't violate or reproduce copyrighted material, it circumvents a 'trade secret'. Difference being, once the cat is out of the bag, there's no legal 'animal control' officer you can call to stuff it back in. Hence the whole litigation.
As for decency laws, that's complete bunk: Anyone can proudly wear a Van Halen T-Shirt from the: For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge album without a worry of "the law", as long as they paid a royalty. This isn't about law and ethics, it's about MONEY.
As an exhibit in the court case, the source code for DeCSS is part of the court documents, isn't it? And these are open to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, aren't they?
So will the records be sealed, just because the MPAA says so? Or will the MPAA buy a Constitutional Ammendment against Free Speach?
Here's an idea. Someone dictate the DeCSS source code into an MP3, and start distributing it via Napster, with permission of course. Let's see how many law suits we can converge into one court-room. Maybe the MPAA and the RIAA can be made to target each-other and finally end this nonsense!
Freedom.net seems like a good idea, and it's sure to curb the most blatant of abuses by the 'other end' servers and such.. But in effect, all it really is, is another level of indirection. Right?
They do not gather a great deal of information on you, but you do pay them - so your identity, billing information and where to send your packets, is somewhere in their systems. They buffer you from a lot of the 1:1 mappings like cookies and such, but THEY still know who you are. They say you define your own 'nyms' which they then present as a front to the net. What's to keep them from relating these 'nyms' back to your actual identity? Or cross-referencing them to eachother and then back to you?
What assurance, besides their word, is there to guarantee that they will not compromise your traffic patterns. Or disclose them in a merger or buy-out? Or thet they will not be broken into?
If there is a path from A to B, regardless of the obfuscation in between, there is necessarily a mapping, and so you can make a connection. As I said, Freedom.net is a good idea for the 80/20 rule, but that still leaves the 20%, the truly paranoid (like myself) wondering how such a system can be bypassed.
Before you get too smug about living in a free country
Oh please, are you trying to equate pirate MP3s to human rights? My smugness is directed at those who would use anonymity for ethically questionable convenience.
What much of the/. population doesn't seem to accept is that a person's opinion is a continuum and not an absolute stance. Murder is wrong, but not in self-defense, or in the defense of another, or in the case of willful euthenesia... That's a hairy issue as well, and if I'd said: "Murder is wrong" you'd jump down my throat about self-defense. Right?
Anonymity is important to having a free society, which is why voting booths are private. Yeah, whatever. You sign in, go in and pull a little electronic lever. Are you so naive as to think that there's no way to correlate the order of signatures to the order of votes, and retrofit a vote to a name?? Please - I'm much more anonymous stuffing a sealed envelope into a ballot box in plain view of everyone. That's the way the Communist countries did/do it.
And I'll save you the trouble of commie-bashing. The Party was in control of who the candidates were, and there was no 'write in ballot'; this is an entirely different issue to the privacy of the vote being cast.
What the FreeNet people are doing is pretty damn important Absolutely true; but anonymity is going to come from uncontrolled (no login) public-access to a ubiquitous computer system - not from logging in from home. The signal to your home is going to your home, and the router knows where you are, even if the FreeNet people promise not to tell anyone. They have the reference tables, and these can be subpoenad, confiscated or outright stolen.
The solution is an ATM-style, always-online terminal on every corner; without a camera pointed at it. But how long do you think those would last at your local hang-out? Vandalism would take that freedom away by making terminal replacement unafordable long before the legislators pass laws to deny you freedom.
How do all those packets know how to get to your computer?? Really. In technical terms, you are NOT anonymous. The only way that you could be, is if you walked up to a public kiosk in a major city, that was already logged in to a 'guest' account.
Anything else has your name all over it.
take responsibility for your actions. If you like to copy someone's music against their wishes, at least sign your name.
'Script kiddies' is intended to create a negative image. It's supposed to denote an immature person who relies on scripts (other people's work) to cause trouble. It's meant to be a derogatory term that hackers use to refer to wanna-be poseurs. The motor-head community has a parallel term, 'rice boy'.
Your argument holds completely true for the term 'hacker', but defending 'script kiddie' or aspiring to wear that label with some sort of pride, is selling yourself short.
While 'script kiddie' implies an adolescent, it doesn't work the other way. A computer-savvy adolescent is not necessarily a 'script kiddie', though (s)he is most certainly a geek, and may be a capable hacker.
Are your teachers really so insecure about their lack of computer knowledge that they would right away label you as a miscreant, simply because you know more about computers than they do?
you'd only be able to get a one way connection to the Net
Yep. We're dealing with the broadcast media. Their mindset is completely fixated on serving out the entertainment. (If I may, I'll glob the RIAA in with the MPAA and TV as well for this argument, it fits).
They have always done demographic studies, Nielsen ratings, focus groups.. They have clamored for control, merged and acquired, conglomerated and associated, statistically analysed and strategized every bit of entertainment that they have ever released.
They do not understand. The concept of individual choice is completely, absolutely alien to the people in charge of this thing. They believe in market research, so when some like rap, and some like rock, and others like country while still others like opera... Well, the statistical average of album sales demonstrates a strong corellation that the average consumer buys 1.2 Backstreet Boys and 2.1 Britney Spears albums each week.
[aside] Why do people buy the albums that reinforce these figures? Because they have no choice. It's all they know to be available. It's all they hear on the radio. It's all they hear in the stores. It's all they see on the shelves. Once in a while, some mainstream artist lights a spark in one song, and we buy the album for that ONE song. And over time, we develop a taste for the other tracks on the disc - for the homogenized, cookbook mediocrity. Because we no longer know any better. This is why most people buy WinOS. Lack of awareness that there are alternatives. Yeah, we hear about them, but we don't even know where to look, most of the time. Where's the nearest Strawberries or Sam Goody to where you live? The bright lights point the way. Where's a decent independent music shop? What? Out of business? I wonder why... [/aside]
From their perspective, individual tastes are a statistical anomaly, something that throws off good data and causes special-order album overhead. It's cheaper to send a gross of crap than it is to send 144 individually burned albums. Consumers WILL buy two good tracks on a disc of 15 for $20. They have before. The economies of scale will prevail and money will be made. Here's a PowerPoint slide to show the market research...
Scream, yell, jump up and down flapping your arms. Get in touch with the EFF, and add your name to any relevant class-action-suit against the RIAA that you can possibly find.
Talk to an attorney at the EFF. The RIAA is depriving you of income. The RIAA is illegally leveraging it's monopoly power to prevent you from taking part in fair competition.
Thanks to Microsoft, you now have a legal precedent to point to. IANAL of course.
Napster is said to be extremely protective of it's programs internal workings, the protocols used, and it's MP3 databases.
Now, unless those can be grouped together with the "little devil" logo that Offspring has been peddling - you've got no argument.
As long as Napster claims IP-ownership rights over database content accessed by it's program and the protocols used to do so, they will be branded as hypocrites. Now, if there were to open-source their stuff, they might win the law-suit. But, things being as they are, only the government can give with one hand and take with the other.
/. says "Check out [link]this[/link] site" and the little web server in a match-box goes down for a few hours. Then comes back, and no one cares.
/. says "Of course there's an obligatory 'Slashdot is censoring the story' post on [link]Kuro5hin.org[/link]" and a wanna-be 733t3 haX0r goes on a crusade - effectively censoring K5 - and/. posts a front page article about the event.
IIRC, during the Apollo missions, a ground tech sneezed into a camera enclosure. The camera was then taken to the Moon, and left there for a number of months. After the camera was retireved, the microbes in the enclosure came back to life in the lab, and THEN it was discuvered that someone had sneezed into the thing pre-launch. For a while there, they must have thought they brought something BACK.:O
The Cube article makes a lot of sense, but I think it assumes a more complex plan than is actually in the works.
Jobs is a brilliant man, no arguing that. He has a sense of how people think about technology.
First, he appealed to the geeks and hackers. He tweaked their need to be Free by giving them a personal computer - the Apple.
Then he appealed to 'the rest' of people, who saw computers as very complicated, crypric things. He gave them a GUI and called it a Macintosh.
In between the two events, he realized that catering to the uninformed would be difficult in the future, so he donated Apple IIs to schools, to train the next generation of Apple customers.
Then a bunch of bad things happened to Mr. Jobs, but Apple eventually realized it's mistakes. Steve gave us some real computers (ahem!) that appealed to people's aesthetic as well as their adrenal glands.
Jobs sold iMacs to your neighbors college kids, and that made your kids want one too, didn't it? Same with the G3.
Now, Steve is aiming at your early adopter neighbor. You know the one, he has the 2000 Eclipse and the new SUV in his driveway. He has the cool flat-screen or Bang&Olafsen stereo or the newest whatchamacallit-thingymahooey. He know's your kids will drool and chew your ear come Christmas time. He knows your wife will ooh and aah, and it's going to make you question your manhood.
Steve knows that 90% of American males are competitive beyond reason, and will likely buy one (especialy at the very reasonable price) just to keep up with the neighbor.
"Physics is the Math as Sex is to Masturbation" -- Richard Feynmann
Math, for it's own sake, is pretty useless. Sure, we get to see some pretty symmetries and learn some interesting relationships, but without applying what we learn, math is gratuitous self-appeasement. Physics, and then Engineering, is mathematics with a purpose. It relates to the real world in the former, and serves others in the latter.
"Science is like sex; sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that's not why we do it" -- Richard Feynmenn
But on the other hand, doing things for pure enjoyment is where the passion for the pursuit lies. The word 'amateur' is today seen as an insult as compared to 'professional', but the root of the word implies that something is done for the love of doing.
The satisfaction derived from pure math is very internal to the individual doing the math. The satisfaction of seeing math done is greatly diminished for the observer. There is significantly more satisfaction to be had by an observer of physics - such as all of us reading the tether article than by the observer of the underlying math. An article on the 'same principles' would not be anywhere as accessible as one on the application of the math. The true benefit of the math and the physics comes from the beneficiaties of the engineering - those who actually get power from the tether as it cuts through the Earth's magnetic field. Those people, living on the station in the future, will have a tangible appreciation of the math and physics in the form of lights and air.
So, if by "glorified" you mean "more useful" and "better", I whole-heartedly agree. If instead you mean that in some derogatory sense, re-evaluate.
A computer is, after all, nothing more than a "glorified" Turing Machine, yet I would not trade my little beige box for a pencil and a bunch of paper.
That's whay people voluntarily submit loads of personal information into computers. They're just video games, right? I mean, you can balance your checkbook, and store your novel on the disk, but that's on your desk, right? And when you shut it off, all the information goes away, right?
People tend to suspend sanity when they sit in front of a computer. This is why so many marriages have been dented, if not broken, by chat-rooms. It's just not real, until suddenly it's TOO REAL.
Same with personal info, it's a mindless, or rather thoughtless, exchange of trivial info (hey, I can tell a computer my phone-number. Computers are honest, and can't talk anyway) for some automated reminder of a sale at Fry's...
Computers, to most people, are like... Well, internal combustion engines, electricity, Radon gas... People do not understand the fundamental tennets of how they work and what they do.
People 'freak out' whenever their computer crashes, and assume that it's their fault, not bad programming. They are afraid of touching anything in the computer for fear of braking it. And when a computer tells them to 'press any key' or enter some information in order to continue, they take the computer's word for it.
How many times have we seen people blindly click through an installation procedure? How many times are people who install software completely unaware of the directory (excuse me, FOLDER) into which their data goes? The computer is a magic box - and the 'installation stupor' spills over to those times people are surfing the web. They will click and click and enter anything a web-site asks for.
Also, many people need the "do not use while showering" warning on a hair-dryer.. They probably own computers. Of course they'll tell the computer who their friends are and where they live.
I wasn't suggesting blueprints, but rather pics of local buildings. The sort a tourist would take.
The whole thing presumes that the communicating parties are able to establish a convention securely, and that the States-side one isn't getting mail at director@covert.cia.gov...:)
For being a little sneaky, this is fine. For military-grade communication, you would probably just write the message on a piece of paper and hold it up to the sky as a sattelite passes overhead, subsequently eating the message.
The hacker solution is relatively low-tech here.:)
Given the specific need, the people involve can standardize on a meta-encoding. If it's a nature scene that's being sent, it's good news (decode for details), if it's an architectural one, it's bad news, if it's a GIF is about business and if it's a PNG it's about freedom. If a sound file of bird-calls is sent then it means something else entirely.
This way, depending on the attachment, the message is relayed to the appropriate department, for decoding. Or the media format suggests the crypto method used in the payload. If it's a pictore of a blow-fish, that's how the message is coded (Blowfish-II).
I'm very surprised to see this question even being asked, the combinations are endless. The hard part of course is standardizing on a meta-code. If it can be done securely, great! Otherwise... Well... It's all very cloak and dagger.
BillEGoat, take a look at some steganography tools out on the net.
For those unaware, steganography is the embedding of useful information in other data, for example encoding text in the least-significant-bit(s) of an image.
As a hypothetical: Your friend wants to send email with sensitive information. He encrypts it (just to be extra safe) and then burries the ciphertext in a large TIFF file of the Chinese Wall. He compresses the image with ZIP and attaches it to an innocuous e-mail "Having a great time, wish you were here"...
The government spooks intercept, decode and conclude ' another happy tourist spending dollars '.
You receive the message, reverse the process and learn that the attack is being launched at dawn.
What most Americans are is apathetic, deluded, convenience seeking lemmings.
There is the very vocal, extremely right-wing clique of "Bible-Thumpers". There is the very vocal, militant, bleeding-heart equal-rightists. There is the very blase bunch of, unfortunatelly all too silent, head-shaking free-thinkers who hope that 'common-sense' will prevail.
And the rest are sheep, who just change the channel when the news makes them feel the uncomfortable twinge of a budding opinion.
Whacking a Brit across the ears isn't going to change things. S/He has a point. When our elected officials ooh and aah over the President's spunk on some privileged sluts dress one day, and legislate 'right' and 'wrong' the next, it's time to stop and think.
This whole issue isn't about what is or isn't ethically or morally correct and proper. This is about what is aesthetically pleasing. People bitch and moan about things that they find offensive. This should not be confused with what is immoral or unethical - simply unappealing.
Clinton dogging a naive 21 year old nymphette was fucking exciting shit! The Starr Report was the closest that most of Congress got to a real pussy in decades! They, vicariously, ate that shit up! You GO Bill! -- But what we say is "Isn't that shameful? Isn't that deplorable? Well? Isn't it? Don't YOU agree?"
The OJ trial was hot-dog fucking cool too! What middle-manager wouldn't want to be a Football player? What middle-manager wouldn't want to dispose of his ex-wife and get away with it? OJ's a freaking hero, he beat the system! -- But what we say is "How Awful. Of course he's guilty. He was guilty before he was ever accused, nevermind proven so."
But having little Timmy look at porn is just down-right unwholesome! My GOD! What would the neighbors think?!... I'll say that one again... WHAT WOULD THE NEIGHBORS THINK?
Cross-platform is hard to do. Java is a 'sporting try' at it, but it's still not quite there.
You said: Java isn't cross platform. Java is a platform.
Exactly right. Java's way of making the language cross-platform is to abstract the underlying platform. Hence the mention of VMs and hardware abstraction.
I can write a C/C++ that will run native, unchanged, optermised, on more platforms than I can think of.
Sure, "Hello World!" will port fine. But what use will it be?
Any actually usable (from the end-users perspective) program REQUIRES that it be interactive, hooked into the OS and hardware, and implemented within the reasonable real-world constraints of budget and schedule. Witness the problems between Gnome and KDE... Now add Windows and MacOS and BeOS and VMS and Solaris. If you can write a real-world app to span those, they'll give you a Turing for it.
Imagine what's involved in making something like Netscape 'source portable'. Or Office. Or even grep or vi... The underlying filesystems of UNIX and NT (for example) alone are so different that the size and complexity of the program become unreasonable, and you're better off developing parallel, platform specific versions.
The complexity required for a widely portable C/C++ application program calls for considering a HUGE number of #defs, testing it all, making it modular in the extreme and prevents timely development.
Cross-platform is hard to do. Java is a 'sporting try' at it, but it's still not quite there. With c-p, you necessarily take a penalty hit with a VM, or platform-specific abstraction hardware. It's the nature of the beast, as long as there are different platforms, there will necessarily be platform specificity. I'm all for some sort of meta-assembly language that everyone would agree to implement; but how do you propose to do that?
Portability has it's own issues. Different platforms exists beacuse there are some problems that are better solved one way, and others that are better solved another way. Some chips are good for real math, others for integers, others for parallel matrix work, others for graphics processing and still others exists solely to support LISP. True application portability would require a standard set of libraries (native of course) for the 'portable' language to hook into. (Umm, Java again, some C/C++, FORTRAN have already tried this). And you still have to recomplie (though not necessarily edit much code) to run on the new system - and there's keeping the libs up to date to worry about.
We just push the problem to another layer.
Asking for the problem to go away isn't going to do it. There will always be cross-platform issues - for as long as there are different platforms; and for just as long, there will be portability issues.
Many people have been trying to solve the problem of multiple platforms, and all of them have developed pretty good solutions. Sun, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Linus, IBM...:)
From CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED, by Daniel Dennett, p. 177
"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)"
Which is strikingly similar to 3Com's approach to the new Palm. By making it all curvy, like an iMac, and colorful (like an iMac), and giving the user the ability to change the color to match their mood (like a Nokia cell-phone), 3Com is letting the rest of the competition know that they have simply run out of technological ideas, and are ready to be replaced as the leader in the PDA market.
Time to ask Handspring for a Palm Vx-like form-factor. Now, I know, they come in fruity flavors too, but they've done some new technological innovation to already show more promise than the Palms. The Springboard is a great idea; though the non-upgradable ROM has got to go.
Frankly, I was convinced that some version of the WinCE PDA'a would have been the first to go candy-colored. I guess M$ is going to have to try real hard to top 3Com now... Maybe a talking paper-clip for the Jornada? Nah, paper-clips are too bulky for a device with such limited storage and processing resources.. How about a talking staple??
Re:I posted the /. "bashing" comment(s) on K5
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Jamie and Slashdot crew,
First off, let me apologize if I went too far. All I did was, in the context of an apparently major story, question the reasons behind it's absence from slashdot. I got a bit hot-headed/paranoid about it, and I see how this could have ruffled feathers at 'the compound'.
You're right, every time slashdot isn't perfect, someone complains. The "Cube" story is a perfect example. And yes, the issue with the book has been resolved in the most honorable way possible, at a financial disadvantage to you guys. Isn't it always the case that we only provide feedback when there's a reason to be whinny? If we were to be fair, and applaud every thing slashdot does right, your mailbox would be jam-packed with "atta'boy!" messages, and I'm sure you'd just be resentful at having to delete them all.;)
Slashdot is run in a very democratic and equitable fashion, with moderation and meta-moderation allowing the community to police itself to a great extent. The model isn't perfect, but there is no glaring, obvious improvement to the scheme. It works well.
Slashdot is run very much as a benevolent dictatorship as well. The product is near and dear to us, but the people in charge stay cloistered. This is where the speculation about motives comes from. You guys obviously work hard at making slashdot a self-governing entity. But you are in control of it's future, not the readers. You choose the content around which the community here governs itself, you accept or reject the stories.
Maybe it's just me, but when people in charge don't let me know what they're up to, I tend to get a little antsy about their motives. The last time we (the readers) heard anything personal from 'the management' it was about the wedding, before that about the Microsoft 'request' at censorship. Prior to that, it was over the Andover/VA buyout. Before that, when moderation and M2 came into play, there was a great deal of discussion in which Taco, Hemos and the others took an active role. Your motivation, inspiration and expectations were presented, questioned, challenged, understood and for the most part accepted by the readers.
The history of your stance on behalf of slashdot and her readers is admirable, but the silence and lack of discussion is a bit unnerving. Since slashdot has been bought, this sort of interaction has been missing. We've become more of an audience than participants, and while I understand that it's hard to talk to 220,000 whinny slashdotters, an occasional personal visit would be appreciated. Don't you guys ever feel the need to bounce ideas about future directions for slashdot off of the readers? Aren't you curious about our opinion of the site itself? (Critiques of the site and content tend to get nailed as Off-Topic right quick, as there is no convenient place to be heard.) If not, then how much respect do you have for us?
I posted the /. "bashing" comment(s) on K5
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Once the site (K5) recovers, please, everyone go and read it, and decide how "bashing" it really was. It was never my intention to bash/., I like the site a lot. I didn't intend to start a flame-war. All I did was ask some questions that inadvertently questioned the integrity of our gracious hosts, Taco, Hemos, et al. A simple answer of "You're on crack!" would probably have sufficed.
Here's the jist of what I had to say:
A pretty long time ago at this point,/. was a reliable source of breaking-news in the technology sector, a source of obscure scientific research and a valuable resource of technical information.
As/. has grown in readership, the stories chosen by the editors for posting on the front page have changed. They are not nearly as edgy anymore, and tend to 'cater to a mass-mentality' instead of trying to inform individuals.
The topics covered are more political and opinion-feeding rather than factual, and they are a lot less timely. News breaks elsewhere now, and/. picks up the pieces a bit later.
Now, my "bash" consisted of asking "WHY?"
Is it that the editors are that much more busy, now that they get paid to do what they did brilliantly for free? Is it that Andover wants some assurance that a story isn't being fabricated, just so someone out there can take pride in being slashdotted? Are the stories chosen specifically for the amount of opinionated discussion they will create, possibly for book-content-fodder - since there is less fact and more opinion with each passing month?
Or (and here's the "bash") are the editors getting some benefit from bringing in more and more eyeballs, and so they choose the more dilute stories to post, so they will be accessible to more and more eyeballs?
My subversion simply asks, 'are Rob and Jeff catering/reacting to the interests of/. readers; or are they running the biggest troll of them all in exchange for payment for most ad-banners served?'
If I'm making unfair accusations, I've already offered on K5 to print my post and eat it before a live audience. But it has been a really long time since we've had a "State of the Slashdot" article from Taco; perhaps it's time for a Slashdot Interview with the Slashdot Staff; just to get this kind of thing off of my (and our, perhaps) chest?
If we're willing to consider Windows as a clone, then Excel, Word and Access are also clones, of Lotus 1-2-3 (which cloned VisiCalc), WordPerfect and DBase respectively. These were the original applications to fill those niches, and there have been other options in these areas. Quatro Pro, Ami Pro and Paradox come to mind readily.
However there is one thing I am willing to give Microsoft full credit for: They know how to manipulate the computer industry. They figured out a new and original way of making money, licensing to the end-user, and only recently did the others really catch up. The backlash they're suffering comes mainly, IMO from the fact that people do not like being manipulated, even if they do make billions as a result.
Microsoft is a successful business because they understand their priorities. They are in business to make money, and the product is secondary. They're not idealists in the EFF/OSS sense, but they are good at what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. We can call it GNUism. We'll meet to discuss Dogma in the Slashdot Temple, we'll have prophets and martyrs, and we'll have Holy Texts. We'll have the Gospels according to Phil Zimmermann, Jon Johansen, Linus Torvalds...
I'd LOVE to see the MPAA et al, not only try to ban a book, but a Holy Book to boot. It's not just about freedom of speach, but also about freedom of religion.
Then we can all take one character of the DeCSS printout, and stand in a long line while our "Pastor of Muppets" types it into a computer. This way we include the freedom of assembly.
Fsck the MPAA in accordance with the Law Of The Land, not in-spite of it. Play by the rules of the lawmakers to point out the absurdity of big business.
The T-shirt doesn't bear a non-permitted copyright. The DeCSS is open source. And the DeCSS code doesn't violate or reproduce copyrighted material, it circumvents a 'trade secret'. Difference being, once the cat is out of the bag, there's no legal 'animal control' officer you can call to stuff it back in. Hence the whole litigation.
As for decency laws, that's complete bunk:
Anyone can proudly wear a Van Halen T-Shirt from the:
For
Unlawful
Carnal
Knowledge
album without a worry of "the law", as long as they paid a royalty. This isn't about law and ethics, it's about MONEY.
As an exhibit in the court case, the source code for DeCSS is part of the court documents, isn't it? And these are open to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, aren't they?
So will the records be sealed, just because the MPAA says so? Or will the MPAA buy a Constitutional Ammendment against Free Speach?
Here's an idea. Someone dictate the DeCSS source code into an MP3, and start distributing it via Napster, with permission of course. Let's see how many law suits we can converge into one court-room. Maybe the MPAA and the RIAA can be made to target each-other and finally end this nonsense!
Freedom.net seems like a good idea, and it's sure to curb the most blatant of abuses by the 'other end' servers and such.. But in effect, all it really is, is another level of indirection. Right?
They do not gather a great deal of information on you, but you do pay them - so your identity, billing information and where to send your packets, is somewhere in their systems. They buffer you from a lot of the 1:1 mappings like cookies and such, but THEY still know who you are. They say you define your own 'nyms' which they then present as a front to the net. What's to keep them from relating these 'nyms' back to your actual identity? Or cross-referencing them to eachother and then back to you?
What assurance, besides their word, is there to guarantee that they will not compromise your traffic patterns. Or disclose them in a merger or buy-out? Or thet they will not be broken into?
If there is a path from A to B, regardless of the obfuscation in between, there is necessarily a mapping, and so you can make a connection. As I said, Freedom.net is a good idea for the 80/20 rule, but that still leaves the 20%, the truly paranoid (like myself) wondering how such a system can be bypassed.
Before you get too smug about living in a free country
/. population doesn't seem to accept is that a person's opinion is a continuum and not an absolute stance. Murder is wrong, but not in self-defense, or in the defense of another, or in the case of willful euthenesia... That's a hairy issue as well, and if I'd said: "Murder is wrong" you'd jump down my throat about self-defense. Right?
Oh please, are you trying to equate pirate MP3s to human rights? My smugness is directed at those who would use anonymity for ethically questionable convenience.
What much of the
Anonymity is important to having a free society, which is why voting booths are private.
Yeah, whatever. You sign in, go in and pull a little electronic lever. Are you so naive as to think that there's no way to correlate the order of signatures to the order of votes, and retrofit a vote to a name?? Please - I'm much more anonymous stuffing a sealed envelope into a ballot box in plain view of everyone. That's the way the Communist countries did/do it.
And I'll save you the trouble of commie-bashing. The Party was in control of who the candidates were, and there was no 'write in ballot'; this is an entirely different issue to the privacy of the vote being cast.
What the FreeNet people are doing is pretty damn important
Absolutely true; but anonymity is going to come from uncontrolled (no login) public-access to a ubiquitous computer system - not from logging in from home. The signal to your home is going to your home, and the router knows where you are, even if the FreeNet people promise not to tell anyone. They have the reference tables, and these can be subpoenad, confiscated or outright stolen.
The solution is an ATM-style, always-online terminal on every corner; without a camera pointed at it. But how long do you think those would last at your local hang-out? Vandalism would take that freedom away by making terminal replacement unafordable long before the legislators pass laws to deny you freedom.
There are NO easy answers.
Come on. You all know this.
How do all those packets know how to get to your computer?? Really. In technical terms, you are NOT anonymous. The only way that you could be, is if you walked up to a public kiosk in a major city, that was already logged in to a 'guest' account.
Anything else has your name all over it.
take responsibility for your actions. If you like to copy someone's music against their wishes, at least sign your name.
'Script kiddies' is intended to create a negative image. It's supposed to denote an immature person who relies on scripts (other people's work) to cause trouble. It's meant to be a derogatory term that hackers use to refer to wanna-be poseurs. The motor-head community has a parallel term, 'rice boy'.
Your argument holds completely true for the term 'hacker', but defending 'script kiddie' or aspiring to wear that label with some sort of pride, is selling yourself short.
While 'script kiddie' implies an adolescent, it doesn't work the other way. A computer-savvy adolescent is not necessarily a 'script kiddie', though (s)he is most certainly a geek, and may be a capable hacker.
Are your teachers really so insecure about their lack of computer knowledge that they would right away label you as a miscreant, simply because you know more about computers than they do?
you'd only be able to get a one way connection to the Net
Yep. We're dealing with the broadcast media. Their mindset is completely fixated on serving out the entertainment. (If I may, I'll glob the RIAA in with the MPAA and TV as well for this argument, it fits).
They have always done demographic studies, Nielsen ratings, focus groups.. They have clamored for control, merged and acquired, conglomerated and associated, statistically analysed and strategized every bit of entertainment that they have ever released.
They do not understand. The concept of individual choice is completely, absolutely alien to the people in charge of this thing. They believe in market research, so when some like rap, and some like rock, and others like country while still others like opera... Well, the statistical average of album sales demonstrates a strong corellation that the average consumer buys 1.2 Backstreet Boys and 2.1 Britney Spears albums each week.
[aside] Why do people buy the albums that reinforce these figures? Because they have no choice. It's all they know to be available. It's all they hear on the radio. It's all they hear in the stores. It's all they see on the shelves. Once in a while, some mainstream artist lights a spark in one song, and we buy the album for that ONE song. And over time, we develop a taste for the other tracks on the disc - for the homogenized, cookbook mediocrity. Because we no longer know any better. This is why most people buy WinOS. Lack of awareness that there are alternatives. Yeah, we hear about them, but we don't even know where to look, most of the time. Where's the nearest Strawberries or Sam Goody to where you live? The bright lights point the way. Where's a decent independent music shop? What? Out of business? I wonder why... [/aside]
From their perspective, individual tastes are a statistical anomaly, something that throws off good data and causes special-order album overhead. It's cheaper to send a gross of crap than it is to send 144 individually burned albums. Consumers WILL buy two good tracks on a disc of 15 for $20. They have before. The economies of scale will prevail and money will be made. Here's a PowerPoint slide to show the market research...
At least that's how THEY see it.
Scream, yell, jump up and down flapping your arms.
Get in touch with the EFF, and add your name to any relevant class-action-suit against the RIAA that you can possibly find.
Talk to an attorney at the EFF. The RIAA is depriving you of income. The RIAA is illegally leveraging it's monopoly power to prevent you from taking part in fair competition.
Thanks to Microsoft, you now have a legal precedent to point to. IANAL of course.
Napster is said to be extremely protective of it's programs internal workings, the protocols used, and it's MP3 databases.
Now, unless those can be grouped together with the "little devil" logo that Offspring has been peddling - you've got no argument.
As long as Napster claims IP-ownership rights over database content accessed by it's program and the protocols used to do so, they will be branded as hypocrites. Now, if there were to open-source their stuff, they might win the law-suit. But, things being as they are, only the government can give with one hand and take with the other.
/. says "Check out [link]this[/link] site" and the little web server in a match-box goes down for a few hours. Then comes back, and no one cares.
/. posts a front page article about the event.
/. says "Of course there's an obligatory 'Slashdot is censoring the story' post on [link]Kuro5hin.org[/link]" and a wanna-be 733t3 haX0r goes on a crusade - effectively censoring K5 - and
Nevermind the slashdot effect - beware it's wake.
IIRC, during the Apollo missions, a ground tech sneezed into a camera enclosure. The camera was then taken to the Moon, and left there for a number of months. After the camera was retireved, the microbes in the enclosure came back to life in the lab, and THEN it was discuvered that someone had sneezed into the thing pre-launch. For a while there, they must have thought they brought something BACK. :O
The Cube article makes a lot of sense, but I think it assumes a more complex plan than is actually in the works.
Jobs is a brilliant man, no arguing that. He has a sense of how people think about technology.
First, he appealed to the geeks and hackers. He tweaked their need to be Free by giving them a personal computer - the Apple.
Then he appealed to 'the rest' of people, who saw computers as very complicated, crypric things. He gave them a GUI and called it a Macintosh.
In between the two events, he realized that catering to the uninformed would be difficult in the future, so he donated Apple IIs to schools, to train the next generation of Apple customers.
Then a bunch of bad things happened to Mr. Jobs, but Apple eventually realized it's mistakes. Steve gave us some real computers (ahem!) that appealed to people's aesthetic as well as their adrenal glands.
Jobs sold iMacs to your neighbors college kids, and that made your kids want one too, didn't it? Same with the G3.
Now, Steve is aiming at your early adopter neighbor. You know the one, he has the 2000 Eclipse and the new SUV in his driveway. He has the cool flat-screen or Bang&Olafsen stereo or the newest whatchamacallit-thingymahooey. He know's your kids will drool and chew your ear come Christmas time. He knows your wife will ooh and aah, and it's going to make you question your manhood.
Steve knows that 90% of American males are competitive beyond reason, and will likely buy one (especialy at the very reasonable price) just to keep up with the neighbor.
"Physics is the Math as Sex is to Masturbation"
-- Richard Feynmann
Math, for it's own sake, is pretty useless. Sure, we get to see some pretty symmetries and learn some interesting relationships, but without applying what we learn, math is gratuitous self-appeasement. Physics, and then Engineering, is mathematics with a purpose. It relates to the real world in the former, and serves others in the latter.
"Science is like sex; sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that's not why we do it"
-- Richard Feynmenn
But on the other hand, doing things for pure enjoyment is where the passion for the pursuit lies. The word 'amateur' is today seen as an insult as compared to 'professional', but the root of the word implies that something is done for the love of doing.
The satisfaction derived from pure math is very internal to the individual doing the math. The satisfaction of seeing math done is greatly diminished for the observer. There is significantly more satisfaction to be had by an observer of physics - such as all of us reading the tether article than by the observer of the underlying math. An article on the 'same principles' would not be anywhere as accessible as one on the application of the math. The true benefit of the math and the physics comes from the beneficiaties of the engineering - those who actually get power from the tether as it cuts through the Earth's magnetic field. Those people, living on the station in the future, will have a tangible appreciation of the math and physics in the form of lights and air.
So, if by "glorified" you mean "more useful" and "better", I whole-heartedly agree. If instead you mean that in some derogatory sense, re-evaluate.
A computer is, after all, nothing more than a "glorified" Turing Machine, yet I would not trade my little beige box for a pencil and a bunch of paper.
That's whay people voluntarily submit loads of personal information into computers. They're just video games, right? I mean, you can balance your checkbook, and store your novel on the disk, but that's on your desk, right? And when you shut it off, all the information goes away, right?
People tend to suspend sanity when they sit in front of a computer. This is why so many marriages have been dented, if not broken, by chat-rooms. It's just not real, until suddenly it's TOO REAL.
Same with personal info, it's a mindless, or rather thoughtless, exchange of trivial info (hey, I can tell a computer my phone-number. Computers are honest, and can't talk anyway) for some automated reminder of a sale at Fry's...
Computers, to most people, are like... Well, internal combustion engines, electricity, Radon gas... People do not understand the fundamental tennets of how they work and what they do.
People 'freak out' whenever their computer crashes, and assume that it's their fault, not bad programming. They are afraid of touching anything in the computer for fear of braking it. And when a computer tells them to 'press any key' or enter some information in order to continue, they take the computer's word for it.
How many times have we seen people blindly click through an installation procedure? How many times are people who install software completely unaware of the directory (excuse me, FOLDER) into which their data goes? The computer is a magic box - and the 'installation stupor' spills over to those times people are surfing the web. They will click and click and enter anything a web-site asks for.
Also, many people need the "do not use while showering" warning on a hair-dryer.. They probably own computers. Of course they'll tell the computer who their friends are and where they live.
I wasn't suggesting blueprints, but rather pics of local buildings. The sort a tourist would take.
:)
:)
The whole thing presumes that the communicating parties are able to establish a convention securely, and that the States-side one isn't getting mail at director@covert.cia.gov...
For being a little sneaky, this is fine. For military-grade communication, you would probably just write the message on a piece of paper and hold it up to the sky as a sattelite passes overhead, subsequently eating the message.
The hacker solution is relatively low-tech here.
Funny, but also Insightful.
Given the specific need, the people involve can standardize on a meta-encoding. If it's a nature scene that's being sent, it's good news (decode for details), if it's an architectural one, it's bad news, if it's a GIF is about business and if it's a PNG it's about freedom. If a sound file of bird-calls is sent then it means something else entirely.
This way, depending on the attachment, the message is relayed to the appropriate department, for decoding. Or the media format suggests the crypto method used in the payload. If it's a pictore of a blow-fish, that's how the message is coded (Blowfish-II).
I'm very surprised to see this question even being asked, the combinations are endless. The hard part of course is standardizing on a meta-code. If it can be done securely, great! Otherwise... Well... It's all very cloak and dagger.
BillEGoat, take a look at some steganography tools out on the net.
For those unaware, steganography is the embedding of useful information in other data, for example encoding text in the least-significant-bit(s) of an image.
As a hypothetical: Your friend wants to send email with sensitive information. He encrypts it (just to be extra safe) and then burries the ciphertext in a large TIFF file of the Chinese Wall. He compresses the image with ZIP and attaches it to an innocuous e-mail "Having a great time, wish you were here"...
The government spooks intercept, decode and conclude ' another happy tourist spending dollars '.
You receive the message, reverse the process and learn that the attack is being launched at dawn.
What most Americans are is apathetic, deluded, convenience seeking lemmings.
... I'll say that one again... WHAT WOULD THE NEIGHBORS THINK?
There is the very vocal, extremely right-wing clique of "Bible-Thumpers". There is the very vocal, militant, bleeding-heart equal-rightists. There is the very blase bunch of, unfortunatelly all too silent, head-shaking free-thinkers who hope that 'common-sense' will prevail.
And the rest are sheep, who just change the channel when the news makes them feel the uncomfortable twinge of a budding opinion.
Whacking a Brit across the ears isn't going to change things. S/He has a point. When our elected officials ooh and aah over the President's spunk on some privileged sluts dress one day, and legislate 'right' and 'wrong' the next, it's time to stop and think.
This whole issue isn't about what is or isn't ethically or morally correct and proper. This is about what is aesthetically pleasing. People bitch and moan about things that they find offensive. This should not be confused with what is immoral or unethical - simply unappealing.
Clinton dogging a naive 21 year old nymphette was fucking exciting shit! The Starr Report was the closest that most of Congress got to a real pussy in decades! They, vicariously, ate that shit up! You GO Bill! -- But what we say is "Isn't that shameful? Isn't that deplorable? Well? Isn't it? Don't YOU agree?"
The OJ trial was hot-dog fucking cool too! What middle-manager wouldn't want to be a Football player? What middle-manager wouldn't want to dispose of his ex-wife and get away with it? OJ's a freaking hero, he beat the system! -- But what we say is "How Awful. Of course he's guilty. He was guilty before he was ever accused, nevermind proven so."
But having little Timmy look at porn is just down-right unwholesome! My GOD! What would the neighbors think?!
Cross-platform is hard to do. Java is a 'sporting try' at it, but it's still not quite there.
You said: Java isn't cross platform. Java is a platform.
Exactly right. Java's way of making the language cross-platform is to abstract the underlying platform. Hence the mention of VMs and hardware abstraction.
I can write a C/C++ that will run native, unchanged, optermised, on more platforms than I can think of.
Sure, "Hello World!" will port fine. But what use will it be?
Any actually usable (from the end-users perspective) program REQUIRES that it be interactive, hooked into the OS and hardware, and implemented within the reasonable real-world constraints of budget and schedule. Witness the problems between Gnome and KDE... Now add Windows and MacOS and BeOS and VMS and Solaris. If you can write a real-world app to span those, they'll give you a Turing for it.
Imagine what's involved in making something like Netscape 'source portable'. Or Office. Or even grep or vi... The underlying filesystems of UNIX and NT (for example) alone are so different that the size and complexity of the program become unreasonable, and you're better off developing parallel, platform specific versions.
The complexity required for a widely portable C/C++ application program calls for considering a HUGE number of #defs, testing it all, making it modular in the extreme and prevents timely development.
We're back to the VM, aren't we?
Cross-platform is hard to do. Java is a 'sporting try' at it, but it's still not quite there. With c-p, you necessarily take a penalty hit with a VM, or platform-specific abstraction hardware. It's the nature of the beast, as long as there are different platforms, there will necessarily be platform specificity. I'm all for some sort of meta-assembly language that everyone would agree to implement; but how do you propose to do that?
:)
Portability has it's own issues. Different platforms exists beacuse there are some problems that are better solved one way, and others that are better solved another way. Some chips are good for real math, others for integers, others for parallel matrix work, others for graphics processing and still others exists solely to support LISP. True application portability would require a standard set of libraries (native of course) for the 'portable' language to hook into. (Umm, Java again, some C/C++, FORTRAN have already tried this). And you still have to recomplie (though not necessarily edit much code) to run on the new system - and there's keeping the libs up to date to worry about.
We just push the problem to another layer.
Asking for the problem to go away isn't going to do it. There will always be cross-platform issues - for as long as there are different platforms; and for just as long, there will be portability issues.
Many people have been trying to solve the problem of multiple platforms, and all of them have developed pretty good solutions. Sun, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Linus, IBM...
From CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED, by Daniel Dennett, p. 177
"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)"
Which is strikingly similar to 3Com's approach to the new Palm. By making it all curvy, like an iMac, and colorful (like an iMac), and giving the user the ability to change the color to match their mood (like a Nokia cell-phone), 3Com is letting the rest of the competition know that they have simply run out of technological ideas, and are ready to be replaced as the leader in the PDA market.
Time to ask Handspring for a Palm Vx-like form-factor. Now, I know, they come in fruity flavors too, but they've done some new technological innovation to already show more promise than the Palms. The Springboard is a great idea; though the non-upgradable ROM has got to go.
Frankly, I was convinced that some version of the WinCE PDA'a would have been the first to go candy-colored. I guess M$ is going to have to try real hard to top 3Com now... Maybe a talking paper-clip for the Jornada? Nah, paper-clips are too bulky for a device with such limited storage and processing resources.. How about a talking staple??
Jamie and Slashdot crew,
;)
First off, let me apologize if I went too far. All I did was, in the context of an apparently major story, question the reasons behind it's absence from slashdot. I got a bit hot-headed/paranoid about it, and I see how this could have ruffled feathers at 'the compound'.
You're right, every time slashdot isn't perfect, someone complains. The "Cube" story is a perfect example. And yes, the issue with the book has been resolved in the most honorable way possible, at a financial disadvantage to you guys. Isn't it always the case that we only provide feedback when there's a reason to be whinny? If we were to be fair, and applaud every thing slashdot does right, your mailbox would be jam-packed with "atta'boy!" messages, and I'm sure you'd just be resentful at having to delete them all.
Slashdot is run in a very democratic and equitable fashion, with moderation and meta-moderation allowing the community to police itself to a great extent. The model isn't perfect, but there is no glaring, obvious improvement to the scheme. It works well.
Slashdot is run very much as a benevolent dictatorship as well. The product is near and dear to us, but the people in charge stay cloistered. This is where the speculation about motives comes from. You guys obviously work hard at making slashdot a self-governing entity. But you are in control of it's future, not the readers. You choose the content around which the community here governs itself, you accept or reject the stories.
Maybe it's just me, but when people in charge don't let me know what they're up to, I tend to get a little antsy about their motives. The last time we (the readers) heard anything personal from 'the management' it was about the wedding, before that about the Microsoft 'request' at censorship. Prior to that, it was over the Andover/VA buyout. Before that, when moderation and M2 came into play, there was a great deal of discussion in which Taco, Hemos and the others took an active role. Your motivation, inspiration and expectations were presented, questioned, challenged, understood and for the most part accepted by the readers.
The history of your stance on behalf of slashdot and her readers is admirable, but the silence and lack of discussion is a bit unnerving. Since slashdot has been bought, this sort of interaction has been missing. We've become more of an audience than participants, and while I understand that it's hard to talk to 220,000 whinny slashdotters, an occasional personal visit would be appreciated. Don't you guys ever feel the need to bounce ideas about future directions for slashdot off of the readers? Aren't you curious about our opinion of the site itself? (Critiques of the site and content tend to get nailed as Off-Topic right quick, as there is no convenient place to be heard.) If not, then how much respect do you have for us?
Once the site (K5) recovers, please, everyone go and read it, and decide how "bashing" it really was. It was never my intention to bash /., I like the site a lot. I didn't intend to start a flame-war. All I did was ask some questions that inadvertently questioned the integrity of our gracious hosts, Taco, Hemos, et al. A simple answer of "You're on crack!" would probably have sufficed.
/. was a reliable source of breaking-news in the technology sector, a source of obscure scientific research and a valuable resource of technical information.
/. has grown in readership, the stories chosen by the editors for posting on the front page have changed. They are not nearly as edgy anymore, and tend to 'cater to a mass-mentality' instead of trying to inform individuals.
/. picks up the pieces a bit later.
/. readers; or are they running the biggest troll of them all in exchange for payment for most ad-banners served?'
Here's the jist of what I had to say:
A pretty long time ago at this point,
As
The topics covered are more political and opinion-feeding rather than factual, and they are a lot less timely. News breaks elsewhere now, and
Now, my "bash" consisted of asking "WHY?"
Is it that the editors are that much more busy, now that they get paid to do what they did brilliantly for free? Is it that Andover wants some assurance that a story isn't being fabricated, just so someone out there can take pride in being slashdotted? Are the stories chosen specifically for the amount of opinionated discussion they will create, possibly for book-content-fodder - since there is less fact and more opinion with each passing month?
Or (and here's the "bash") are the editors getting some benefit from bringing in more and more eyeballs, and so they choose the more dilute stories to post, so they will be accessible to more and more eyeballs?
My subversion simply asks, 'are Rob and Jeff catering/reacting to the interests of
If I'm making unfair accusations, I've already offered on K5 to print my post and eat it before a live audience. But it has been a really long time since we've had a "State of the Slashdot" article from Taco; perhaps it's time for a Slashdot Interview with the Slashdot Staff; just to get this kind of thing off of my (and our, perhaps) chest?
If we're willing to consider Windows as a clone, then Excel, Word and Access are also clones, of Lotus 1-2-3 (which cloned VisiCalc), WordPerfect and DBase respectively. These were the original applications to fill those niches, and there have been other options in these areas. Quatro Pro, Ami Pro and Paradox come to mind readily.
However there is one thing I am willing to give Microsoft full credit for: They know how to manipulate the computer industry. They figured out a new and original way of making money, licensing to the end-user, and only recently did the others really catch up. The backlash they're suffering comes mainly, IMO from the fact that people do not like being manipulated, even if they do make billions as a result.
Microsoft is a successful business because they understand their priorities. They are in business to make money, and the product is secondary. They're not idealists in the EFF/OSS sense, but they are good at what they do.