Although release and courier groups engage in little direct commercial activity, a 1997 extension in federal copyright law made piracy a crime even if there is no monetary profit.
How were pirates prosecuted before then? I seem to recall that they busted hacker rings long before 1997.
Still able to download/upload stuff at the same rates you could 3 years ago?
Much, much faster today. You see, now I'm on DSL wheras I was on 56K. More bandwidth makes spam a smaller percentage of that bandwidth.
The technical solutions are better than the legal solutions.
Re:Minority Report was not very good (spoilers)
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
4. The surgeon who replaces Tom's eyes gives a big speech about getting screwed over, then does....nothing bad. Fixes the eyes, leaves a nice sandwich.
YES YES YES YES YES. Absolutely. This annoyed me to no end, and the only thing I can think of is that perhaps he tipped off precrime that Anderton was there.
Hmmm. I thought the surgeon was one of the more interesting characters in the movie. There are plenty of good explinations for his actions, but they're all, like real people, complex.
One possible motive: just because someone is immoral, doesn't mean they are immoral in every possible way. Maybe, despite the fact that he likes to set people on fire, he takes his committments seriously. So when he agrees to meet someone and do an eye transplant, he's committed even when he finds out it's Anderton. Doesn't keep him from messing with Anderton's head, giving him a funky set of eyes ("greetings, mr Yakamoto!"), or setting up a nasty trick for him in the fridge, it just means he lives up to his end of the bargain, which is, the eyeballs for the cash.
You want a problem? Why is it that the precrime agency gets notifications that Anderton has gotten on a Metro (due to the retina scanners that are EVERYWHERE) but when he uses his old eyes to get into precrime, they see nothing. They don't even go looking for him until they see Agatha in the prediction and realize that he will eventually come back to get her.
Security is always like this - strong at the gates, weak inside. Once you become root, the machine doesn't check every 10 minutes to see if you should be root. Passing one checkpoint gives you the keys to the kingdom. They assume that if he gets within spitting distance of precrime, he'll be caught, so cleaning his identity out of the computers is a pretty low priority. (As a new organization, they probably don't even have well-established employee termination protocols or much more security than a bunch of off-the-shelf systems.)
The "flaw so great that I started laughing" moment was with the pulse-shotgun early in the car plant scene. Knocking someone 5 feet back through the air is either harmless if the person knows how to land or fatal if they land wrong on thier spine, so the weapon is something between useless crap and really dangerous depending on the target and the terrain.
Even if you did design such a weapon, why would you make it so you needed to *cock* it?
I finally decided that the future is much like the present - lots of "non-lethal" gizmos get pitched to, and often bought by, police departments, but still nothing's managed to replace a simple firearm. Besides, the scene is really cool.
A CEO takes time out from his busy day, and the highest ranked comments accuse him of being a liar or against the 'cause'.
Moby says that just maybe P2P cost him a dime or two, and now he's a no-clue traitor to the cause who sucks now anyway.
You suck. You all suck. Nobody should agree to be interviewed by you. Other sites would be better off refusing HTTP referals from slashdot because too many people here are incapable of being civilized.
The embarassment to the OSS movement and the DRM debate caused by Slashdot posters has probably set both respective causes back 6 months.
Now I understand the trolls.
Now I agree with the trolls!
Please people, learn how to be decent human beings!
How is this relevant to fair use? Fair use is not about market share. It doesn't matter if a game has one player or 10 million players, it is still legal to reverse engineer it to achieve compatibility with your own creation.
You have a valid point, I think.
Still, there's plenty of examples of propritary interfaces in the non-software world. Every printer uses different ink cartriges. Every american cellphone provider sells you a phone, because they can, even though the phone is exchangable if it follows the same band. Selling things that only interact with what you want them to interact with is a common thing these days. I'd rather play WC3 than fight that battle.
Is it really a fair use issue? If I have a movie, and you take 90% of the movie and cut it into your own movie, you've infringed on my copyright. Most of us would agree that stealing 90% of a movie and reusing it would be wrong. If I write my own server, and use 100% of your client to render my server, how is that right?
I want you to shut up about open source. And the time at which I want you to shut up about it, is now, to paraphrase Douglas Adams. Not every thread on Slashdot has to be about open source! Can't you go advocate open source in a thread where someone is actually supporting closed source, or even discussing open source, instead of pretending it's on topic everywhere? Or are you still working towards the karma cap? Good principles of software design are relevant in both models!
I submit to you that the 2001 refrigerator is approaching perfection.
It is perfect. The 1950 fridge is less efficient than the 1970 fridge, which is less efficient than the 2000 fridge. Off the shelf, the 2000 fridge is cheaper to run and keeps things colder.
The 2000 fridge is also an improvement on the 1950 fridge in one very, very significant way - it breaks sooner. Lighter materials, and lots of stupid little unnecessary components add up to a fridge that will be on the scrap heap sooner.
What? That's not an improvement? It is if you sell refrigerators. Companies that make fridges sell them.
In contrast, Microsoft software seems just sloppy. For example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has 18 unpatched security bugs [jscript.dk] (when this was written).
Ah, but you miss the point of the discussion. It's not that Microsoft software is better than OSS software, or that OSS software is better than Microsoft software. We all have well established opinions on that matter; it all depends on what is really important to you as to which you like more.
What we're talking about is that while one paradigm or another may produce better software, surely there's a better way of doing it than either well-traveled road... Some way of doing design where anything designed to a spec will be bug free because the spec is well designed. There have been some articles here in the past that discussed the habits of software houses that build software that can not afford to fail. We need the tools to build all software like that.
We're not out of touch with reality. You're just grounded in a very specific part of reality - the OSS CSS war. Many closed source shops produce crap code - thus, open source provides an alternative. Open source, however, only guarantees correctness for large projects which hackers are willing to throw thier eyes at. Small projects don't magically fix thier problems just because they're open source. For the purposes of this discussion, however, we don't care either way - we want better principles of design, that can be used for open source and closed source projects.
Right. But what *is* a design for a computer program? Most designs I see are pseudocode, which is begging the question, or pretty diagrams with fuzzy clouds that look like a kid was drawing a stick man and started going crazy with the limbs.
How are people going to be designing computer programs in 30 years? I'm sure that they will be doing a lot of design before coding. What will those designs look like?
What is the difference between a unicorn and a picture of a unicorn? What's the difference between a cpu and the design of a cpu? How can these principles be brought to the software?
Software's so bad because it's still handcrafted, and the interchangable parts don't. Cars sucked too when when they were done the same way. OSS isn't the solution. The solution is for Computer Engineering to someday become as rigorous as other areas of Engineering.
Please consider the fact that Blizzard is suing people who write software to interoperate with theirs when deciding whether you want to purchase this game.
Somehow I don't think that a game publisher needs to be held to quite the same interoperatibility standards as an operating systems publisher... because it's a game. Odds are, no matter how much they sue or how inoperable they are, they're not going to push all other games out of the market.
Am I going to buy it? I'll wait for the reviews on the single player campaign. I never liked warcraft I or II multiplayer - it seemed to be the simple art of running exploding suicide troops at the enemy.
Which borders on unpatriotic these days, now that I think about it.
Why isn't XFree86 written to handle a kill -9 in a more friendly manner? As I recall, processes can catch a 'kill -9' and respond sanely to it.
So I guess it is an X bug after all... But personally, I feel it should be fixed on both sides. Mozilla shouldn't be able to overload X, and X shouldn't be able to crash the video hardware when it's killed.
Server-linking features allow the assembly of distributed MMORPGs.
That's the hope of the fans. They haven't promised to deliver it, and have in fact stated some design decisions that would make this very hard to do, if possible at all. The fans, you see, are hopeless optimists who are sure they can outdo the professionals.
If you had doors between quake servers, would that make quake a MMORPG? No?
Because of said deterministic requirements, you couldn't just release patches to air traffic controller code - but wouldn't it be cool to find a bug and send in a fix? A lazy Saturday afternoon spent reading code could make every air traveller in the sky safer.
Yet another 5 rating on a post from someone who did scanty research. They have a link to the chess engine they use - it has a long article on how it does decision making.
I wonder if they're pushing it through because the new software has some nice government supplied code to send the Air Force a fax in the case of a dangerously misdirected plane. If the system does that, then the use of the emergency powers act would be justified because the new system provides "critical homeland security" - not that they'll tell us about it or anything.
One bug later, and your plane is reported as speeding towards the Sears tower and you're shot down by a fighter craft.
Slashdot Mirror
So, no transplanetary quake. Thanks.
Although release and courier groups engage in little direct commercial activity, a 1997 extension in federal copyright law made piracy a crime even if there is no monetary profit.
How were pirates prosecuted before then? I seem to recall that they busted hacker rings long before 1997.
Title of parent post is:
Re:Kinda (Score:3)
Is this a bug? Since it's been moderated, shouldn't it be Interesting or Informative or Troll or something?
Anyone want to tell me what the minimum ping time to the moon is based on the speed of light?
Does anyone who has server space on Sealand sell unix shell access?
Still able to download/upload stuff at the same rates you could 3 years ago?
Much, much faster today. You see, now I'm on DSL wheras I was on 56K. More bandwidth makes spam a smaller percentage of that bandwidth.
The technical solutions are better than the legal solutions.
4. The surgeon who replaces Tom's eyes gives a big speech about getting screwed over, then does....nothing bad. Fixes the eyes, leaves a nice sandwich.
YES YES YES YES YES. Absolutely. This annoyed me to no end, and the only thing I can think of is that perhaps he tipped off precrime that Anderton was there.
Hmmm. I thought the surgeon was one of the more interesting characters in the movie. There are plenty of good explinations for his actions, but they're all, like real people, complex.
One possible motive: just because someone is immoral, doesn't mean they are immoral in every possible way. Maybe, despite the fact that he likes to set people on fire, he takes his committments seriously. So when he agrees to meet someone and do an eye transplant, he's committed even when he finds out it's Anderton. Doesn't keep him from messing with Anderton's head, giving him a funky set of eyes ("greetings, mr Yakamoto!"), or setting up a nasty trick for him in the fridge, it just means he lives up to his end of the bargain, which is, the eyeballs for the cash.
You want a problem? Why is it that the precrime agency gets notifications that Anderton has gotten on a Metro (due to the retina scanners that are EVERYWHERE) but when he uses his old eyes to get into precrime, they see nothing. They don't even go looking for him until they see Agatha in the prediction and realize that he will eventually come back to get her.
Security is always like this - strong at the gates, weak inside. Once you become root, the machine doesn't check every 10 minutes to see if you should be root. Passing one checkpoint gives you the keys to the kingdom. They assume that if he gets within spitting distance of precrime, he'll be caught, so cleaning his identity out of the computers is a pretty low priority. (As a new organization, they probably don't even have well-established employee termination protocols or much more security than a bunch of off-the-shelf systems.)
The "flaw so great that I started laughing" moment was with the pulse-shotgun early in the car plant scene. Knocking someone 5 feet back through the air is either harmless if the person knows how to land or fatal if they land wrong on thier spine, so the weapon is something between useless crap and really dangerous depending on the target and the terrain.
Even if you did design such a weapon, why would you make it so you needed to *cock* it?
I finally decided that the future is much like the present - lots of "non-lethal" gizmos get pitched to, and often bought by, police departments, but still nothing's managed to replace a simple firearm. Besides, the scene is really cool.
Here goes my karma.
A CEO takes time out from his busy day, and the highest ranked comments accuse him of being a liar or against the 'cause'.
Moby says that just maybe P2P cost him a dime or two, and now he's a no-clue traitor to the cause who sucks now anyway.
You suck. You all suck. Nobody should agree to be interviewed by you. Other sites would be better off refusing HTTP referals from slashdot because too many people here are incapable of being civilized.
The embarassment to the OSS movement and the DRM debate caused by Slashdot posters has probably set both respective causes back 6 months.
Now I understand the trolls.
Now I agree with the trolls!
Please people, learn how to be decent human beings!
How is this relevant to fair use? Fair use is not about market share. It doesn't matter if a game has one player or 10 million players, it is still legal to reverse engineer it to achieve compatibility with your own creation.
You have a valid point, I think.
Still, there's plenty of examples of propritary interfaces in the non-software world. Every printer uses different ink cartriges. Every american cellphone provider sells you a phone, because they can, even though the phone is exchangable if it follows the same band. Selling things that only interact with what you want them to interact with is a common thing these days. I'd rather play WC3 than fight that battle.
Is it really a fair use issue? If I have a movie, and you take 90% of the movie and cut it into your own movie, you've infringed on my copyright. Most of us would agree that stealing 90% of a movie and reusing it would be wrong. If I write my own server, and use 100% of your client to render my server, how is that right?
You people make my head hurt.
I want you to shut up about open source. And the time at which I want you to shut up about it, is now, to paraphrase Douglas Adams. Not every thread on Slashdot has to be about open source! Can't you go advocate open source in a thread where someone is actually supporting closed source, or even discussing open source, instead of pretending it's on topic everywhere? Or are you still working towards the karma cap? Good principles of software design are relevant in both models!
I submit to you that the 2001 refrigerator is approaching perfection.
It is perfect. The 1950 fridge is less efficient than the 1970 fridge, which is less efficient than the 2000 fridge. Off the shelf, the 2000 fridge is cheaper to run and keeps things colder.
The 2000 fridge is also an improvement on the 1950 fridge in one very, very significant way - it breaks sooner. Lighter materials, and lots of stupid little unnecessary components add up to a fridge that will be on the scrap heap sooner.
What? That's not an improvement? It is if you sell refrigerators. Companies that make fridges sell them.
In contrast, Microsoft software seems just sloppy. For example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has 18 unpatched security bugs [jscript.dk] (when this was written).
Ah, but you miss the point of the discussion. It's not that Microsoft software is better than OSS software, or that OSS software is better than Microsoft software. We all have well established opinions on that matter; it all depends on what is really important to you as to which you like more.
What we're talking about is that while one paradigm or another may produce better software, surely there's a better way of doing it than either well-traveled road... Some way of doing design where anything designed to a spec will be bug free because the spec is well designed. There have been some articles here in the past that discussed the habits of software houses that build software that can not afford to fail. We need the tools to build all software like that.
We're not out of touch with reality. You're just grounded in a very specific part of reality - the OSS CSS war. Many closed source shops produce crap code - thus, open source provides an alternative. Open source, however, only guarantees correctness for large projects which hackers are willing to throw thier eyes at. Small projects don't magically fix thier problems just because they're open source. For the purposes of this discussion, however, we don't care either way - we want better principles of design, that can be used for open source and closed source projects.
Right. But what *is* a design for a computer program? Most designs I see are pseudocode, which is begging the question, or pretty diagrams with fuzzy clouds that look like a kid was drawing a stick man and started going crazy with the limbs.
How are people going to be designing computer programs in 30 years? I'm sure that they will be doing a lot of design before coding. What will those designs look like?
What is the difference between a unicorn and a picture of a unicorn? What's the difference between a cpu and the design of a cpu? How can these principles be brought to the software?
Somewhere, someone's doing a phd thesis on this.
Software's so bad because it's still handcrafted, and the interchangable parts don't. Cars sucked too when when they were done the same way. OSS isn't the solution. The solution is for Computer Engineering to someday become as rigorous as other areas of Engineering.
Does the Kernel throw a nonblockable signal before it throws the blockable signal? Would XFree respond sanely to a blockable kill?
Please consider the fact that Blizzard is suing people who write software to interoperate with theirs when deciding whether you want to purchase this game.
Somehow I don't think that a game publisher needs to be held to quite the same interoperatibility standards as an operating systems publisher ... because it's a game. Odds are, no matter how much they sue or how inoperable they are, they're not going to push all other games out of the market.
Am I going to buy it? I'll wait for the reviews on the single player campaign. I never liked warcraft I or II multiplayer - it seemed to be the simple art of running exploding suicide troops at the enemy.
Which borders on unpatriotic these days, now that I think about it.
Why isn't XFree86 written to handle a kill -9 in a more friendly manner? As I recall, processes can catch a 'kill -9' and respond sanely to it.
So I guess it is an X bug after all... But personally, I feel it should be fixed on both sides. Mozilla shouldn't be able to overload X, and X shouldn't be able to crash the video hardware when it's killed.
Server-linking features allow the assembly of distributed MMORPGs.
That's the hope of the fans. They haven't promised to deliver it, and have in fact stated some design decisions that would make this very hard to do, if possible at all. The fans, you see, are hopeless optimists who are sure they can outdo the professionals.
If you had doors between quake servers, would that make quake a MMORPG? No?
Students can log in to a Web site from anywhere and check where their friends are.
I don't see it on the public site.
But use a real moderation system, not the cockneyed moderation metamoderation metametamoderation point scale hack that is Slashdot's moderation.
Because of said deterministic requirements, you couldn't just release patches to air traffic controller code - but wouldn't it be cool to find a bug and send in a fix? A lazy Saturday afternoon spent reading code could make every air traveller in the sky safer.
Yet another 5 rating on a post from someone who did scanty research. They have a link to the chess engine they use - it has a long article on how it does decision making.
I can not find the CIS benchmarks on the CIS page. Do they only release tools and not the result of benchmark tests?
I wonder if they're pushing it through because the new software has some nice government supplied code to send the Air Force a fax in the case of a dangerously misdirected plane. If the system does that, then the use of the emergency powers act would be justified because the new system provides "critical homeland security" - not that they'll tell us about it or anything.
One bug later, and your plane is reported as speeding towards the Sears tower and you're shot down by a fighter craft.