The qualitative difference is that the cop is not sitting with you in the car when he's observing you.
The problem is the mechanism of observation. I agree that while on public roads, you don't have any right to privacy. But what if I were to drive onto my own ranch? In the normal case, the police would need a warrant to enter onto my property. With a device planted onto my vehicle, they are now observing me in an area where before the law provided protection from surveillence without the consent of a judge.
I've been using winamp since.92 and ever since Justin left, maybe even when he sold out to AOL, it started to go downhill. Winamp is still the best player out there, but the passion, attention to detail and overall quality seems to have declined.
defcon is becoming more 'mainstream' every year and is a good conference on the cheap. for $75 you get many tracks from newbie to uberhax0r. its also a good excuse to get out of the office and spend a weekend in vegas.
Mr. Stottle, I too would like to thank you for an extremely well written and moving article. i've found this to have more impact on me than any of the first-person accounts from people who got out of the WTC alive. I will be referring everyone I know to read your opinion, I can only hope that the US government comes to the same conclusions that you have.
i can put my own lock on YOUR door.. does that make it illegal for you to smash it to get into your own house? when you put the lock on your own door, the legal protection is from laws aimed to prevent someone going into your house and taking your things out of your house that do not belong to them. the only law against thieves breaking your lock is destruction of personal property.
the law is on the side of the lock-breakers in this case. the law says in the home recording act, that i may make as many copies i want of my media (movies, cd's, etc..) as long as they are for personal use. there is no law that prevents people from reverse engineering the encryption on something that you already have bought rights to. note, that you bought the rights to view the ORIGINAL UNENCRYPTED CONTENT.
when they go and encrypt what you've legally bought, they try and prevent you from making copies of the content that you already legally purchased!!
there havent been, and probably wont be (unless we end up with some kind of Orwellian society) a way to technically limit piracy. the only difference between now and then is that today we can do things digitally, where before there were physical limits to copying.
so YES, i CAN blame them. they are interfering with my legal rights! shame on them FUD they spread.
They have circumvented copyright protection illegally and without authorization.
hmm.. wasnt the DeCSS code created from good old fashion reverse engineering, which isnt illegal in Norway? and merely having the code is NOT a violation the the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which again is a US only thing).
If Web sites are allowed to pass along computer "keys" that disarm protective locks, then all copyright-protected work is put in jeopardy.
slippery slope arguments never go far with me.
In the trial, the defendants no doubt can count on support from activist groups that have been seduced by the hackers' strange ideology, which equates copying and stealing software code with free speech.
Hackers (read bad people) are the real cause of our problems and should be stopped because they dont understand the difference between free (as in beer) and free (as in speech).
The keys have only one real purpose: to allow a thief to open a locked door to steal the goods he targets.
is this just blatent lying or does he actually believe this!?!
the one thing we agree on.. Those who passionately believe in freedom of expression and consumers who value creative storytelling have a lot on the line as the judge considers this matter.
i would agree, i spend my time scanning through the AC's in to find the on that got moderated up to a +1 while trying to screen out all those users with the 'bounus point'. maybe its time to do away with the bonus point. shouldnt all comments be judged on their content and not by who posted them? yes AC's tend to flame more, but im sure a 'AC filter' could easily be installed for those with sensitive ears.
another advantage to doing away with the bonus point would be that moderators can clearly see what has been moderated and what hasnt. if you are scanning for that gem of an article that might have gotten looked over, it will be much easier to look through all the '0''s' rather than trying to distinguish if its an AC at 0 or a user at 1, but what if they turned off their bonus point?!?! what a conundrum for moderators.
i agree with a lot of other posts here, the system should be made simple yet effective. we're getting there, and a lot of good input from intelligent people who have put a lot of thought into a subject they care deeply about, i think/. will reap the benefits.
hahah.. so true. i was reading through this and thought it was so bunk. i'd love for someone more creative than I to write a good segfault article on this. pretty funny stuff, amazing what writing letters on top of each other can do to a person. enuf to drive them mad!!! muahahah
before my palmpilot 1000 i had a casio with a keyboard for input. after playing around with the pilot demo unit in the store for a few minutes i was fairly proficient at 'how now brown cow' and 'now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country'. the strength of graffiti is that it is intuitive and makes it easy for me to remember. trying to remember where all the letters are and what their strokes are is quite difficult. i'm sure if i were to use it for a whole day i might get used to it, but i bet i'd still be looking up those obscure punctuation marks just like in graffiti. at least with graffiti i can try and fudge it, hmm + is.. and draw something like a plus.
i've used tealwrite for sometime and it helps a lot to distinguish between characters. graffiti ha s been fast enough for me. i'm not in class taking notes with it, i dont know if i could ever enter data with one hand, one stylus for that matter as fast as i can touch type. ok now i had to learn that too, but if i forget where a character is that i dont use that often is it doesnt take me that long to find it:P i use my palm for writing down quick things i dont want to forget, sometimes in the car where i cant look down. phone numbers, things to get at the store.. no novels here. even with the mistakes that i make (that i dont see till i look back at it later) i still undrstd th not i wrt.
its already here. a friend of mine with an everex running m$ CE showed me an mp3 player he dl'd. i was in awe. i'm quite jealous because my palm V is greatly lacking in the audio dept. i couldnt ever own a CE device, the palm is a far superior device for what its intended for, but i cant help but long for this ability. maybe one of those companies is 3com. we can always hope right?
its an established form of distribution that a good percentage of people have access to. not everyone can afford an empeg for their car. even when prices of portable or in-car mp3 devices become affordable, radio will still play an important role in the music industry. it will be a long time before every car has an mp3 player in it. even then, people will still need an avenue to listen to new music.
established radio stations will miss the boat though if they do not take advantage of this new format. streaming audio seems like a given, however given the state of the web sites of the radio stations in my area, i dont expect to see any geekish innovation from them soon.
i have a formidable mp3 collection, a laptop, and a nice car stereo. i spend a lot of time in my car listening to mp3s (6g to be exact). i still flip to the radio. sometimes i'm looking for new music, sometimes im just not in the mood for setting up a playlist or listening to the ones i already have. no matter how easy or cheap mp3 players become, radio wont go away.
from first posts to me too!s to a damn good article that i think deserves better than a 0 or 1, i wade through it all in all its "glory." these are the people who need to be moderators. if you have your threshold set anything above 0 then you are allowing the moderators to point out the better articles to you. not to say that i dont set my threshold higher on articles that im not as particularly intresetd in, esp on the gnu/linux vs linux wars/holy wars. mostly tho i read through every post in a thread that im interested in. quite a few times i've said to myself "gee, glad i've got my threshold set low otherwise i would have missed this comment."
these are the types of qualities that make for good moderators.
(no, im not trying to nominate myself not boost my ego. But _if i was a moderator_ those are the values that i would expect to uphold)
most people who read this site have at least two email address they could use. sure i can beat the system no matter what rob does. to that end why not just try and crack/.? i agree that there is a potential for abuse, but i dont know of any way to uniquely identify an induhvidual in cyberspace. your n+1 argument works even with pgp keys. it comes down to trusting the people who are moderators. 4k is a large number and as someone suggested before, 400 probably represents a good cross-section of readers anyways. lets come up with some good ways to find a few good men^H^H^H people to moderate and spend more time ensuring that they moderate well. ie, they _do_ represent varied opinions, they are active, and basically arent abusing the system. i dont see any advantages to haveing 4k+ of moderators if we can get 400 or maybe even 1000 who want to spend a little bit of time moderating. im afraid that no amount of automation can detect the misuse of identities. my hope is that/. moderators will have the integrity to follow the rules. lets put the emphasis on choosing good moderators, not on how to prevent an abusive moderator from abusing the system.
i'm not surprised to see this comment from an AC. please take no offense, like Rob i believe whole heartedly in the right to anonymous posts. i believe (and i'm sure im in the minority) that a nick is who you are. i've had my same nick for years, i use it online, in games, even IRL sometimes. personally i would consider/leave # above changing my nick. there are people on the internet who want to be anonymous and float about and changing nicks is mild help in retaining your anonimity. i belong to a different class than that.
why dont i use my real name instead of my nick if i dont need any anonimity? well there are plenty of johns and adams in the world, i use my nick as a callsign. if you see another maestro around, it may be me. send me an icq or/msg me. we'll at least have two things in common. we both read/. and read down through the depths of posts with our thresholds set boldly to -1!
i know im very much the same person online that i am in real life. i dont think i could make many friends if i was constantly changing my nick. how would people ever get to know me? isn't a big part of being a friend?
keep your identity.. deal with lamahs some other way./mode +b # *@* always helps;]
ok so they're may not be a unique identifier on the copy of office they have, but its the MAC number on the nic which whill bite them in the ass. there are some nics that can be changed, but this person's not all that bright. obviously NOT a/.'er
Slashdot Mirror
The qualitative difference is that the cop is not sitting with you in the car when he's observing you.
The problem is the mechanism of observation. I agree that while on public roads, you don't have any right to privacy. But what if I were to drive onto my own ranch? In the normal case, the police would need a warrant to enter onto my property. With a device planted onto my vehicle, they are now observing me in an area where before the law provided protection from surveillence without the consent of a judge.
THAT is the difference, and that is why this bad.
"Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the public highways" .. but they DIDNT!
The point is not that they surveilled him, but that they physically attatched a device to his vehichle which is where they invaded his privacy.
I've been using winamp since .92 and ever since Justin left, maybe even when he sold out to AOL, it started to go downhill. Winamp is still the best player out there, but the passion, attention to detail and overall quality seems to have declined.
defcon is becoming more 'mainstream' every year and is a good conference on the cheap. for $75 you get many tracks from newbie to uberhax0r. its also a good excuse to get out of the office and spend a weekend in vegas.
Mr. Stottle, I too would like to thank you for an extremely well written and moving article. i've found this to have more impact on me than any of the first-person accounts from people who got out of the WTC alive. I will be referring everyone I know to read your opinion, I can only hope that the US government comes to the same conclusions that you have.
thank again
mjk
p.s.: moderators, please mod this up!!
i can put my own lock on YOUR door.. does that make it illegal for you to smash it to get into your own house? when you put the lock on your own door, the legal protection is from laws aimed to prevent someone going into your house and taking your things out of your house that do not belong to them. the only law against thieves breaking your lock is destruction of personal property.
the law is on the side of the lock-breakers in this case. the law says in the home recording act, that i may make as many copies i want of my media (movies, cd's, etc..) as long as they are for personal use. there is no law that prevents people from reverse engineering the encryption on something that you already have bought rights to. note, that you bought the rights to view the ORIGINAL UNENCRYPTED CONTENT.
when they go and encrypt what you've legally bought, they try and prevent you from making copies of the content that you already legally purchased!!
there havent been, and probably wont be (unless we end up with some kind of Orwellian society) a way to technically limit piracy. the only difference between now and then is that today we can do things digitally, where before there were physical limits to copying.
so YES, i CAN blame them. they are interfering with my legal rights! shame on them FUD they spread.
They have circumvented copyright protection illegally and without authorization.
hmm.. wasnt the DeCSS code created from good old fashion reverse engineering, which isnt illegal in Norway? and merely having the code is NOT a violation the the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which again is a US only thing).
If Web sites are allowed to pass along computer "keys" that disarm protective locks, then all copyright-protected work is put in jeopardy.
slippery slope arguments never go far with me.
In the trial, the defendants no doubt can count on support from activist groups that have been seduced by the hackers' strange ideology, which equates copying and stealing software code with free speech.
Hackers (read bad people) are the real cause of our problems and should be stopped because they dont understand the difference between free (as in beer) and free (as in speech).
The keys have only one real purpose: to allow a thief to open a locked door to steal the goods he targets.
is this just blatent lying or does he actually believe this!?!
the one thing we agree on..
Those who passionately believe in freedom of expression and consumers who value creative storytelling have a lot on the line as the judge considers this matter.
i would agree, i spend my time scanning through the AC's in to find the on that got moderated up to a +1 while trying to screen out all those users with the 'bounus point'. maybe its time to do away with the bonus point. shouldnt all comments be judged on their content and not by who posted them? yes AC's tend to flame more, but im sure a 'AC filter' could easily be installed for those with sensitive ears.
/. will reap the benefits.
another advantage to doing away with the bonus point would be that moderators can clearly see what has been moderated and what hasnt. if you are scanning for that gem of an article that might have gotten looked over, it will be much easier to look through all the '0''s' rather than trying to distinguish if its an AC at 0 or a user at 1, but what if they turned off their bonus point?!?! what a conundrum for moderators.
i agree with a lot of other posts here, the system should be made simple yet effective. we're getting there, and a lot of good input from intelligent people who have put a lot of thought into a subject they care deeply about, i think
vive la slashdot
hahah.. so true. i was reading through this and thought it was so bunk. i'd love for someone more creative than I to write a good segfault article on this. pretty funny stuff, amazing what writing letters on top of each other can do to a person. enuf to drive them mad!!! muahahah
before my palmpilot 1000 i had a casio with a keyboard for input. after playing around with the pilot demo unit in the store for a few minutes i was fairly proficient at 'how now brown cow' and 'now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country'. the strength of graffiti is that it is intuitive and makes it easy for me to remember. trying to remember where all the letters are and what their strokes are is quite difficult. i'm sure if i were to use it for a whole day i might get used to it, but i bet i'd still be looking up those obscure punctuation marks just like in graffiti. at least with graffiti i can try and fudge it, hmm + is .. and draw something like a plus.
:P i use my palm for writing down quick things i dont want to forget, sometimes in the car where i cant look down. phone numbers, things to get at the store.. no novels here. even with the mistakes that i make (that i dont see till i look back at it later) i still undrstd th not i wrt.
i've used tealwrite for sometime and it helps a lot to distinguish between characters. graffiti ha s been fast enough for me. i'm not in class taking notes with it, i dont know if i could ever enter data with one hand, one stylus for that matter as fast as i can touch type. ok now i had to learn that too, but if i forget where a character is that i dont use that often is it doesnt take me that long to find it
not to be picky but they actually have their own label, Grand Royal. They also have a shoutcast server set up too. kick ass :)
so skinny and livin so phat
its already here. a friend of mine with an everex running m$ CE showed me an mp3 player he dl'd. i was in awe. i'm quite jealous because my palm V is greatly lacking in the audio dept. i couldnt ever own a CE device, the palm is a far superior device for what its intended for, but i cant help but long for this ability. maybe one of those companies is 3com. we can always hope right?
its an established form of distribution that a good percentage of people have access to. not everyone can afford an empeg for their car. even when prices of portable or in-car mp3 devices become affordable, radio will still play an important role in the music industry. it will be a long time before every car has an mp3 player in it. even then, people will still need an avenue to listen to new music.
established radio stations will miss the boat though if they do not take advantage of this new format. streaming audio seems like a given, however given the state of the web sites of the radio stations in my area, i dont expect to see any geekish innovation from them soon.
i have a formidable mp3 collection, a laptop, and a nice car stereo. i spend a lot of time in my car listening to mp3s (6g to be exact). i still flip to the radio. sometimes i'm looking for new music, sometimes im just not in the mood for setting up a playlist or listening to the ones i already have. no matter how easy or cheap mp3 players become, radio wont go away.
from first posts to me too!s to a damn good article that i think deserves better than a 0 or 1, i wade through it all in all its "glory." these are the people who need to be moderators. if you have your threshold set anything above 0 then you are allowing the moderators to point out the better articles to you. not to say that i dont set my threshold higher on articles that im not as particularly intresetd in, esp on the gnu/linux vs linux wars/holy wars. mostly tho i read through every post in a thread that im interested in. quite a few times i've said to myself "gee, glad i've got my threshold set low otherwise i would have missed this comment."
these are the types of qualities that make for good moderators.
(no, im not trying to nominate myself not boost my ego. But _if i was a moderator_ those are the values that i would expect to uphold)
most people who read this site have at least two email address they could use. sure i can beat the system no matter what rob does. to that end why not just try and crack /.? i agree that there is a potential for abuse, but i dont know of any way to uniquely identify an induhvidual in cyberspace. your n+1 argument works even with pgp keys. it comes down to trusting the people who are moderators. 4k is a large number and as someone suggested before, 400 probably represents a good cross-section of readers anyways. lets come up with some good ways to find a few good men^H^H^H people to moderate and spend more time ensuring that they moderate well. ie, they _do_ represent varied opinions, they are active, and basically arent abusing the system. i dont see any advantages to haveing 4k+ of moderators if we can get 400 or maybe even 1000 who want to spend a little bit of time moderating. im afraid that no amount of automation can detect the misuse of identities. my hope is that /. moderators will have the integrity to follow the rules. lets put the emphasis on choosing good moderators, not on how to prevent an abusive moderator from abusing the system.
i'm not surprised to see this comment from an AC. please take no offense, like Rob i believe whole heartedly in the right to anonymous posts. i believe (and i'm sure im in the minority) that a nick is who you are. i've had my same nick for years, i use it online, in games, even IRL sometimes. personally i would consider /leave # above changing my nick. there are people on the internet who want to be anonymous and float about and changing nicks is mild help in retaining your anonimity. i belong to a different class than that.
/msg me. we'll at least have two things in common. we both read /. and read down through the depths of posts with our thresholds set boldly to -1!
/mode +b # *@* always helps ;]
why dont i use my real name instead of my nick if i dont need any anonimity? well there are plenty of johns and adams in the world, i use my nick as a callsign. if you see another maestro around, it may be me. send me an icq or
i know im very much the same person online that i am in real life. i dont think i could make many friends if i was constantly changing my nick. how would people ever get to know me? isn't a big part of being a friend?
keep your identity.. deal with lamahs some other way.
maestro
ok so they're may not be a unique identifier on the copy of office they have, but its the MAC number on the nic which whill bite them in the ass. there are some nics that can be changed, but this person's not all that bright. obviously NOT a /.'er
all i need to know i learnt from /.
check out the story