Apologies for replying to myself, but something else I thought of that would be awesome is a network game where some hacks are allowed. It could have a relatively complex goal that is hard to obtain doing it by hand, but the "real" purpose of the game is to write a hacked client that tries to fool the server into thinking its legit that performs this task. Sort of a honeypot MMO.
Obviously, this idea is incompatible with the goals of the above idea. Just something that popped into my head.
Okay, so you do enough server side checking to make sure users aren't doing anything stupid, you might have an issue worst case where people are using some sort of bot to automate their processes, like Glider. (I think that was the name of it...)
Why are you letting non trusted clients dictate their own behavior anyway? You don't let someone who is VNC'ed into a remote box get root because they compiled their own client, right? Same thing. Assume cheating is going to be the norm and treat every client as hostile. Implement something like punkbuster that periodically will send updates to the server. What you could do is open source the client/server engines, but in the server application specific to the MMO running, have some sort of module they compile and release. The person running the client then takes this module and compiles it into their client. It can send back its checksum and sit running as a watchdog against the client application. This can handle all of the client side anti-cheating stuff since its unmodified and can be trusted. There are probably holes in this, but that's what I come up with after about four minutes of thinking about it.
Yup, Open Source in insecure. Because people can see the code, you can't validate who is on the other side or secure a connection. Looks like someone is going to have to break the news to md5 and ssh.
but I gotta respect this guy's dedication to the job. If we could get American CEO's to take this level of responsibility when their companies completely faceplant, the world would be a better place.
I think his take on things is part of the problem that damages whatever brand might have been able to exist. Linux is what I would call generically the flagship "product" of the F/OSS "Brand" (with the realization that I'm using all of those words deliberately imprecisely, like a typical user would). People can't even agree on the name of it. GNU/RMS GNU/wants GNU/it GNU/to GNU/be GNU/called GNU/something GNU/else, but most of the rest of the free world simply calls it Linux. To others its "Ubuntu", and there is no other term for it. I'm not sure you can take something that isn't centrally managed and effectively establish a firm brand on it. It seems to me like while you can do your best to help improve an image, it still remains that the branding is only a product of what the public perceive it as. While that may seem like a rather obvious statement, I don't think there is much that can be done until you clear up the internal squabbling. Check the ego's at the door and allow for one group to handle standardization on naming and other "conventions". Focus some funding/volunteer work toward softskills as well as development like marketing and advertising. Have someone release a solid distro that has an easy to pronounce, catchy name (Ku-boon-TOO? Ku-bun-TOO? K-Ubun-TU? I have heard it called all these things by different people. If they can't figure out how to pronounce it, they won't like talking about it). Find some people who are technically minded enough to be able to grasp what is going on, but at the same time capable of making catchy advertisements, have some donations or fundraisers to build revenue to plaster them on websites and maybe even TV. Lord knows there are enough "geek" t-shirt sites out there plastering the same tired old witticisms. Maybe co-opt with one of them to actually bring about some new designs and donate a part of the profit toward such an initiative, otherwise, start your own and do so.
That's about all I have for my rant. I will leave you with this:
Blake: A-I-D-A. Attention, Interest, Decision, Action. Attention - Do I have you attention? Interest - Are you interested? I know you are, because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks. Decision - Have you made your decision for Christ? And Action.
Part of the problem is that there isn't that much stuff on Hulu worth paying for. I spent some time looking for stuff on Hulu. Simpsons, check. Family Guy, check, South Park (links back to the southpark.com website). Okay, so they have recent cartoons. Lets look for some more mainstream stuff. Dr. Who? They have clips, but no full episodes I could find. Okay, how about something older? Flying Circus? Just Clips. Faulty Towers? 9/11 stuff (which was a beautiful irony). If they want me to pay for their service, they need to have old stuff as well as new stuff. I'm sure they probably have the Heroes/Lost/whathaveyou, but last time I checked, I can get that free over the air, so where is the benefit?
Depends. Are there other people interested in it? Am I doing something with it? Was there some non-profiteering reason I bought it to begin with? If the answer to all of these questions is no, then I probably would, but I'm not interested in making profit off artificial scarcity because it seems to be a losing battle, as you'll find if you peruse the comments in most sections of/.
The problem here is a matter of what is "fair". You say that there are loads of offers which are "too low by two-three orders of magnitude." What is a good offer for something like spoon.com? $10000? You paid about 15 bucks for it. I think the problem is the level of expectation that you should get paid two-three orders of magnitude more than what the domain is worth. The problem is that there is no value-add to what you do. It is quite literally just running up to something screaming "I was here first, pay me for this for that reason alone!" Most people resent paying more for a service that doesn't really get them anything. One of the reasons why SEO is such a scam. I might feed the domain trolls and give $100 for something like spoon.com if it was payday and I felt like being frivolous. At the same time you say that you have on it "a website filled with some adds in order to earn some money to finance the cost of domain renewal plus sometimes a few bucks extra." So you are already drawing even if not making a profit, so (in my mind) you can just enjoy your profitable little site, and I will look for a different name.
Oh, and as an afterthought though, props for having the balls to post this with your real UID.
In my humble opinion, and briefest experience observing politics, I've typically noticed that when something changes, its for the worst. It is in the name of agenda, abuse, and grabs for power. I'm not saying that the US should run it, but I have a feeling that anyone else who runs it would do a worse job. United Nations? I've not heard of them doing anything meaningful in the last 20-30 years. At any rate, I doubt they'd have the teeth to run it successfully? Maybe the EU? Probably not. They make draconian laws serving interests other than that of their subjects, and then have problems enforcing them. (Which is not always a bad thing). Maybe we should try giving it to another country outright? Rules out Australia, with their 'decide-to-censor-off-and-on-based-on-the-whims-of-the-day' mentality. Germany too. Last I heard they were on the censorship bandwagon. There are other countries that don't censor that might seem like a good idea, being fairly impartial and not arbitrarily declaring war on abstract concepts, but you can't trust that they wont serve their (lobbyists) best interests at the detriment of the world. Moral of my story: When picking between two evils, pick the known one. You can at least imagine how far they will fall.
Registrant:
Michael Sharp
12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
Box 238
Kent, Washington 98030
United States
Domain Name: ITSBETTERWITHWINDOWS.COM
Created on: 05-Dec-08
Expires on: 05-Dec-09
Last Updated on: 05-Dec-08
Administrative Contact:
Sharp, Michael
12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
Box 238
Kent, Washington 98030
United States
(877) 788-8066 Fax --
Technical Contact:
Sharp, Michael
12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
Box 238
Kent, Washington 98030
United States
(877) 788-8066 Fax --
Domain servers in listed order:
NS61.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS62.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Not everything on the internet is real. Whois is your friend.
...I don't even know what the gun-grabbers think it means.
It means that everyone has the right to own a set of bear arms, displayed prominently in their den, obviously! How could you not realize that?
Alternatively, I suppose it could have been an archaic construction/misspelling of bare, implying that the founding fathers, in their infinite wisdom and benevolence, realized that in the future, nanny state fascists would try to usurp the essential freedoms of Americans by legislating laws demanding the banning of sleeveless/shortsleeved shirts.
Really, in preparation for the coming flame war, I feel it necessary to point out that you can use visual studio to compile and run Zune games without fear of the heavy hand of Microsoft crashing down upon you and your work. I dislike Microsoft, but free update to run homebrew software that doesn't have to have a corporate blessing? I still have Windows on one box for games anyway though (not a WoW/Quake junkie), so I guess things might be different for me.
Until that Linux company I keep hearing about comes out with MP3 players, then this is the way to go for me.:)
And restraint without freedom is fascism. Last week's Hour of Slack had a jarringly coherient monologue done by Joe Paulino that reminds me of this. It starts about 14 minutes in.
Then, at the risk of being contrary for the sake of it, wouldn't it be fair to say that due to the fact that you would (I assume) not allow the RIAA to openly listen and monitor every phone call you make to be positive that you aren't sharing music over the phone lines, that you are probably doing something illegal over the phone?
Where does their apparent self-assumed "right" to be invasive begin and end? Maybe just as you don't want people snooping in on your assumed private phone conversations, I just don't like asshats using my hypothetical communication protocol just because they think its being used for file transfer?
Maybe this has come up before, and I apologize for being off topic, but has anyone proposed the idea of a p2p network where the clients are licensed under a relatively open licensing, but have caveats in there denying that they can be used by specific groups? Not a lawyer and not very knowledgeable on how this stuff works, but it seems like if you could explicitly define what the **AA does to find the infringers is not permitted as acceptable use of the software, then I would think you might be able to hit them with DMCA complaints / C&D letters when they do.
Well, I am no lawyer nor do I claim to have an extensive understanding of the legal system or law, but I'm willing to guess that free lawyer > no lawyer.
Well, in this initial prototype, yes. Eventually when they get it in the water supply, you won't notice a thing. Does that thought depress you? Don't worry about that; the lithium in the water will curb those feelings of desire for suicide.
Slashdot Mirror
Asshole. I looked up the name because of your post, but it's a dude. Asshole.
But, yeah, the show sounds good.
I don't think you saw what he did there...
Apologies for replying to myself, but something else I thought of that would be awesome is a network game where some hacks are allowed. It could have a relatively complex goal that is hard to obtain doing it by hand, but the "real" purpose of the game is to write a hacked client that tries to fool the server into thinking its legit that performs this task. Sort of a honeypot MMO.
Obviously, this idea is incompatible with the goals of the above idea. Just something that popped into my head.
Okay, so you do enough server side checking to make sure users aren't doing anything stupid, you might have an issue worst case where people are using some sort of bot to automate their processes, like Glider. (I think that was the name of it...)
Why are you letting non trusted clients dictate their own behavior anyway? You don't let someone who is VNC'ed into a remote box get root because they compiled their own client, right? Same thing. Assume cheating is going to be the norm and treat every client as hostile. Implement something like punkbuster that periodically will send updates to the server. What you could do is open source the client/server engines, but in the server application specific to the MMO running, have some sort of module they compile and release. The person running the client then takes this module and compiles it into their client. It can send back its checksum and sit running as a watchdog against the client application. This can handle all of the client side anti-cheating stuff since its unmodified and can be trusted. There are probably holes in this, but that's what I come up with after about four minutes of thinking about it.
Yup, Open Source in insecure. Because people can see the code, you can't validate who is on the other side or secure a connection. Looks like someone is going to have to break the news to md5 and ssh.
People are in strange moods today. Here I am expecting offtopic/funny/maybe redundant, and I get flamebait/interesting. Go figure.
but I gotta respect this guy's dedication to the job. If we could get American CEO's to take this level of responsibility when their companies completely faceplant, the world would be a better place.
Fair enough. I get it was a joke after rereading it (I'm tired. Go easy on me.) But I argue that my point still stands.
I think his take on things is part of the problem that damages whatever brand might have been able to exist. Linux is what I would call generically the flagship "product" of the F/OSS "Brand" (with the realization that I'm using all of those words deliberately imprecisely, like a typical user would). People can't even agree on the name of it. GNU/RMS GNU/wants GNU/it GNU/to GNU/be GNU/called GNU/something GNU/else, but most of the rest of the free world simply calls it Linux. To others its "Ubuntu", and there is no other term for it. I'm not sure you can take something that isn't centrally managed and effectively establish a firm brand on it. It seems to me like while you can do your best to help improve an image, it still remains that the branding is only a product of what the public perceive it as. While that may seem like a rather obvious statement, I don't think there is much that can be done until you clear up the internal squabbling. Check the ego's at the door and allow for one group to handle standardization on naming and other "conventions". Focus some funding/volunteer work toward softskills as well as development like marketing and advertising. Have someone release a solid distro that has an easy to pronounce, catchy name (Ku-boon-TOO? Ku-bun-TOO? K-Ubun-TU? I have heard it called all these things by different people. If they can't figure out how to pronounce it, they won't like talking about it). Find some people who are technically minded enough to be able to grasp what is going on, but at the same time capable of making catchy advertisements, have some donations or fundraisers to build revenue to plaster them on websites and maybe even TV. Lord knows there are enough "geek" t-shirt sites out there plastering the same tired old witticisms. Maybe co-opt with one of them to actually bring about some new designs and donate a part of the profit toward such an initiative, otherwise, start your own and do so.
That's about all I have for my rant. I will leave you with this:
Blake: A-I-D-A. Attention, Interest, Decision, Action. Attention - Do I have you attention? Interest - Are you interested? I know you are, because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks. Decision - Have you made your decision for Christ? And Action.
Part of the problem is that there isn't that much stuff on Hulu worth paying for. I spent some time looking for stuff on Hulu. Simpsons, check. Family Guy, check, South Park (links back to the southpark.com website). Okay, so they have recent cartoons. Lets look for some more mainstream stuff. Dr. Who? They have clips, but no full episodes I could find. Okay, how about something older? Flying Circus? Just Clips. Faulty Towers? 9/11 stuff (which was a beautiful irony). If they want me to pay for their service, they need to have old stuff as well as new stuff. I'm sure they probably have the Heroes/Lost/whathaveyou, but last time I checked, I can get that free over the air, so where is the benefit?
Your comment still does not change the fact that you are not adding value to the object in question. Read SQLGuru's above first sentence.
Depends. Are there other people interested in it? Am I doing something with it? Was there some non-profiteering reason I bought it to begin with? If the answer to all of these questions is no, then I probably would, but I'm not interested in making profit off artificial scarcity because it seems to be a losing battle, as you'll find if you peruse the comments in most sections of /.
The problem here is a matter of what is "fair". You say that there are loads of offers which are "too low by two-three orders of magnitude." What is a good offer for something like spoon.com? $10000? You paid about 15 bucks for it. I think the problem is the level of expectation that you should get paid two-three orders of magnitude more than what the domain is worth. The problem is that there is no value-add to what you do. It is quite literally just running up to something screaming "I was here first, pay me for this for that reason alone!" Most people resent paying more for a service that doesn't really get them anything. One of the reasons why SEO is such a scam. I might feed the domain trolls and give $100 for something like spoon.com if it was payday and I felt like being frivolous. At the same time you say that you have on it "a website filled with some adds in order to earn some money to finance the cost of domain renewal plus sometimes a few bucks extra." So you are already drawing even if not making a profit, so (in my mind) you can just enjoy your profitable little site, and I will look for a different name.
Oh, and as an afterthought though, props for having the balls to post this with your real UID.
Links or it didn't happen.
However, the article is braying horse shit.
Noted and I agree.
In my humble opinion, and briefest experience observing politics, I've typically noticed that when something changes, its for the worst. It is in the name of agenda, abuse, and grabs for power. I'm not saying that the US should run it, but I have a feeling that anyone else who runs it would do a worse job. United Nations? I've not heard of them doing anything meaningful in the last 20-30 years. At any rate, I doubt they'd have the teeth to run it successfully? Maybe the EU? Probably not. They make draconian laws serving interests other than that of their subjects, and then have problems enforcing them. (Which is not always a bad thing). Maybe we should try giving it to another country outright? Rules out Australia, with their 'decide-to-censor-off-and-on-based-on-the-whims-of-the-day' mentality. Germany too. Last I heard they were on the censorship bandwagon. There are other countries that don't censor that might seem like a good idea, being fairly impartial and not arbitrarily declaring war on abstract concepts, but you can't trust that they wont serve their (lobbyists) best interests at the detriment of the world. Moral of my story: When picking between two evils, pick the known one. You can at least imagine how far they will fall.
Registrant: Michael Sharp 12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd. Box 238 Kent, Washington 98030 United States Domain Name: ITSBETTERWITHWINDOWS.COM Created on: 05-Dec-08 Expires on: 05-Dec-09 Last Updated on: 05-Dec-08 Administrative Contact: Sharp, Michael 12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd. Box 238 Kent, Washington 98030 United States (877) 788-8066 Fax -- Technical Contact: Sharp, Michael 12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd. Box 238 Kent, Washington 98030 United States (877) 788-8066 Fax -- Domain servers in listed order: NS61.DOMAINCONTROL.COM NS62.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Not everything on the internet is real. Whois is your friend.
...I don't even know what the gun-grabbers think it means.
It means that everyone has the right to own a set of bear arms, displayed prominently in their den, obviously! How could you not realize that?
Alternatively, I suppose it could have been an archaic construction/misspelling of bare, implying that the founding fathers, in their infinite wisdom and benevolence, realized that in the future, nanny state fascists would try to usurp the essential freedoms of Americans by legislating laws demanding the banning of sleeveless/shortsleeved shirts.
Really, in preparation for the coming flame war, I feel it necessary to point out that you can use visual studio to compile and run Zune games without fear of the heavy hand of Microsoft crashing down upon you and your work. I dislike Microsoft, but free update to run homebrew software that doesn't have to have a corporate blessing? I still have Windows on one box for games anyway though (not a WoW/Quake junkie), so I guess things might be different for me. :)
Until that Linux company I keep hearing about comes out with MP3 players, then this is the way to go for me.
from the no-in-soviet-russia-jokes-i-swear-to-god dept.
In soviet Russia, god swears to you?
Freedom without restraint is chaos...
And restraint without freedom is fascism. Last week's Hour of Slack had a jarringly coherient monologue done by Joe Paulino that reminds me of this. It starts about 14 minutes in.
Then, at the risk of being contrary for the sake of it, wouldn't it be fair to say that due to the fact that you would (I assume) not allow the RIAA to openly listen and monitor every phone call you make to be positive that you aren't sharing music over the phone lines, that you are probably doing something illegal over the phone?
Where does their apparent self-assumed "right" to be invasive begin and end? Maybe just as you don't want people snooping in on your assumed private phone conversations, I just don't like asshats using my hypothetical communication protocol just because they think its being used for file transfer?
Maybe this has come up before, and I apologize for being off topic, but has anyone proposed the idea of a p2p network where the clients are licensed under a relatively open licensing, but have caveats in there denying that they can be used by specific groups? Not a lawyer and not very knowledgeable on how this stuff works, but it seems like if you could explicitly define what the **AA does to find the infringers is not permitted as acceptable use of the software, then I would think you might be able to hit them with DMCA complaints / C&D letters when they do.
Well, I am no lawyer nor do I claim to have an extensive understanding of the legal system or law, but I'm willing to guess that free lawyer > no lawyer.
News is available to everybody, but you can't share it.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/ap_to_sue_google_news_blogs_someone/
Well, in this initial prototype, yes. Eventually when they get it in the water supply, you won't notice a thing. Does that thought depress you? Don't worry about that; the lithium in the water will curb those feelings of desire for suicide.
I'm going to take the tinfoil hat off now.