If you subscribe to their service and
then hack their system to receive channels that are not on your contract, then that is a theft of
services. Even though is does not cost them a dime for you to decode that information, it costs
them an awful lot that you're not paying to subscribe to those channels.
I don't see how that's any more theft of service than before - they have already paid for those channels and flung their encoded representation across the aether (I'm getting more poetic as I post more replies to this story, don't ya know). If broadcasting those extra channels wasn't worth it to DTV, then you wouldn't be able to decode them because they wouldn't send them to you. My argument would be that if decoding any channels is OK, then how can paying for some channels and decoding the rest be less OK? At least that way DTV gets some money (not that the goal here is for them to get money (well, that's their goal), but it doesn't hurt).
You may think you can
walk the line, but the courts will disagree.
I don't see how you could make a reasonable argument in court that decoding some channels is bad, but decoding all channels is OK. According to other posts, decoding all of them in Canada is OK, so there are apparently some courts which disagree.
Actually, it's more like you wrote a program for your clients, encrypted it, and hired the Goodyear blimp to display the encrypted program for your clients so that they could write it down, decrypt it, and use it. Is it stealing for anyone else to write it down and decrypt it? Maybe you should choose a more secure delivery method if it's that valuable. Of course, that raises the cost of the service for everyone, so in the end it's probably cheaper to live with the hackers and zap them from time to time to get rid of the dumb or lazy ones.
I'll agree that if DTV owners agreed to a contract which forbade them to modify or resell their cards, then they are guilty of breaking that contract. If they didn't sign anything, though, the cards are theirs to do with as they please.
I think the point is that if you're being bombarded with EM anyway, how is it stealing to decode it? It's not like you've taken it away from someone else. If no one is missing anything after the purported theft, was there really a theft?
Actually, DirecTV is a service provided all the time to everybody. The only question is whether you feel like paying Hughes to make use of the service, or prefer to put in the time, money, and effort to make use of the service without Hughes' help.
But stealing services that cost huge $$$ to
provide is cracking, not hacking.
IMHO, hacking for hacking's sake would end with publishing all the details on your web site (soon to be taken down by your nervous ISP, of course), but I digress. I'll agree that the hackers in question didn't have motives most pure.
But I disagree that this is stealing. Today, Hughes and DirecTV are spending "huge $$$" to send their signals to my house, even though I'm without one of their receivers. Tomorrow they will be doing the same thing at the same cost. If tomorrow I have a hacked receiver, how am I stealing from them? They aren't out any more money from my deeds, and (unlike one of the reputed costs of stealing cable) my neighbors' DTV feeds are unaffected. They will send me the exact same bits (well, hopefully not the exact same bits:) as the day before, so their costs haven't changed one iota. DTV has no less property (intellectual or otherwise) as a result of my actions than they did before, so while my actions are certainly something, they are not stealing.
Well, technically, it's not public airwaves. Hughes/DirecTV/et.al. own a chunk of of the US RF
spectrum (in the 30GHz range as I recall.)
Um, no. No single entity "owns" any RF spectrum in the U.S. The RF spectrum is a public resource (like a national park) that is administered by the government because it's a scarce resource and because (although I don't totally buy this) if you let everybody transmit wherever they want, the spectrum will be useful to no one. The portion of the spectrum that DirecTV uses is leased to it by the FCC and gives DirecTV broadcast rights on that band. As far as I know there is no regulation of who can receive on what band, because unlike multiple transmitters, multiple receivers can't really hose the public RF spectrum for everyone else.
True, there are laws about decrypting phone calls but other than that receiving is legal. I don't believe the phone laws apply to DirecTV, unless you know for sure that they do?
As an aside, I don't agree with laws against phone decryption because whether or not there is a law, anyone who is sufficiently motivated can monitor your transmissions. The law provides only the appearance of safety; it doesn't really give you any privacy. Plus of course you sent me those signals onto my property, but that topic's been covered already:)
No, the majority of these chuckleheads are people who just want something for
nothing and wouldn't know a smart card from a vacuum tube.
I wouldn't disagree with that - such has been the case with other famous "hack", like the i-opener, the TiVo, etc. There's always a few smart people who figure out how to do it, and a bunch of other folks who just follow the trail that was blazed.
But to really answer the issue, even if it does take hardware to decode the bits, does that really change the issue? The bits are present inside your home (or at least outside at your satellite dish) 24 hours a day, whether you want them or not. DirecTV is constantly bombarding you with them, on the theory that you'll be too lazy or stupid to decode them. Sure, you're getting something for nothing (or at least much cheaper) if you decode them, but I still haven't heard a good argument for how this constitutes stealing from DirecTV, whether you're a master hacker or just saw the plans in an electronics magazine.
A relevant example: if Digital Convergence sends you a CueCat on your next issue of Wired, is it stealing to open it up, figure out how it works, and use it for non-Digital Convergence-approved uses? As far as I can tell, the analogy is exact - a company pays to saturate the country with something, said company makes it somewhat difficult to use this thing for uses that don't make it money, but somebody with too much time on their hands hacks it anyway. The only difference is that Digital Convergence sent you plastic, wire, and silicon (with information encoded), and DirecTV sent you modulated electromagnetic waves (with information encoded). The personal use of either free gifts is entirely ethical IMHO.
The real crime the DirecTV hackers have committed is not theivery, but whoring themselves out
to the "I seen it in the Penny-Pincher so it gotta be legal" descrambler market. These
freedom-loving hackers you so defend are just greedy slimeballs looking to make a quick buck.
True, it's not what I would have done. But to the hacker belong the spoils , and sooner or later information on how to do this for only the cost of materials will get out, and then anybody can do it given enough time. I wouldn't characterize the current set of DirecTV hackers as particularly freedom-loving, simply because if they really believed in free speech rather than just free beer, they would publish their plans on the 'net.
But ideological differences aside, I do defend the right of the average citizen to decode any stray RF that wonders across or through their property or person (in fact, my neurons are probably soaking up DirecTV as I type) with whatever legally-obtained hardware or software they need. And if that runs up against the DMCA, well, the more civil disobedience in that regard, the better!
So you don't have a right to use the airwaves where you are? Sure, transmission capability is regulated, since the RF band is a scarce public resource, but by the same token everyone does have a right to make use of it since it is a public resource.
What kind of idiotic argument is "it doesn't cost
them anything" - do you think Hughes is getting these commercial fees for free?
To be more correct, it doesn't cost them anything more, since they already have to blanket the country with bits anyway. The decoding of some of the bits by non-paying customers doesn't require them to install any more capacity in order to serve their subscriber base. The price that DirecTV pays for the content is an issue between DirecTV and its' suppliers; hopefully they've reached an agreement that they both are happy with.
As far as I'm concerned, the more outsmarting there is on both sides, the better. It's fun to watch and, like cockroaches after a nuclear war, it's breeding some stellar hw/sw hackers. Go Hughes! Go hackers!
It's true that DirecTV doesn't have as much money as they otherwise would; but it does not necessarily follow that anything has been stolen from them. Many other events could result in them not getting as much money - an economic slowdown, a competitor with a better product, or even a nasty rumor that their satellites are really being used to track people for the sinister purposes of Major League Baseball. Just the fact that they don't have as much money doesn't make it stealing.
In the normal understanding of a "theft of service", somebody is still out of some physical quantity that they would otherwise have charged for and that they do not just hand out to all and sundry. Theft of cable TV service, for example (and according to the TV industry at least) steals from your neighbors by degrading their picture quality (a measurable, quantifiable thing). Spam is a theft of network resources and hardware resources on a mail server that your ISP charges you to maintain. Trojans or worms are thefts of service in almost the same way, by consuming network bandwidth and host processing power which somebody paid for and somebody else is getting charged for.
But receiving unauthorized satellite broadcasts doesn't deprive anyone of something they are being charged for. Your neighbor's signal is not any more degraded, DirecTV doesn't have to spend any more money than they would have otherwise to achieve national coverage, and the producers of the TV content are already getting paid by DirecTV under terms that were mutually agreeable to both of them. From all of these people's perspective, things are just the same as if you didn't have a DirecTV at all.
This doesn't mean that I disapprove of Hughes' actions in this case - I think they are entirely within their rights to police their hardware under any means that are permissible under the contracts they have with DirecTV subscribers, assuming that they have such contracts (although I don't think they have the right to modify the customer's lawfully purchased software or hardware without the customer's permission in the absence of a contract allowing it). I just don't think Hughes should be surprised when other individuals make use of the bits that DirecTV is flinging around so profligately, considering that those bits would just "go to waste" anyway.
I have to add, though, that it's nice to see a company whose initial response was not "send in the lawyers". Duking it out hacker a hacker is the way to go on this, and so much more entertaining for the rest of us without DirecTV or the inclination to hack one.
I was making a joke about the US' usual isolationalist approach to world affairs, at least in the cases where involvement in those affairs would place restrictions on the US. Given the number of black helicopter-fearin' folks in the US, there's little chance that anyone from the US will be accountable to an international organization any time soon (at least unless it's the WTO).
I'm curious as to how this is really a theft of service. When that term is applied to spam, for instance, the theft occurs when spammers use up the bandwidth of their relays and the time and hardware of the targeted ISPs. In that case you can point to the extra costs that were required based on the actions of the thieves.
However, this satellite broadcast is streaming through all of us all the time. Does just possessing the knowledge to decode these ambient bits somehow make a person a thief? I'll agree that it's unfair to the legit DirecTV subscribers to have to pay for a service that some are getting for free, but I don't agree that decoding bits that are normally present in the environment is theft.
I'm pretty sure that the U.S. is not a signatory to this document, though. We only sign international trade and arms agreements, nothing humanitarian. It's a matter of principle;)
This stuff about Windows needing service packs often is bull. Linux has far more service packs,
because Microsft updates things all at once whereas with Linux you have to update individually.
I fail to see how this is an advantage - Microsoft service packs are notorious for fixing some things and breaking others. Far better to only have to upgrade things you care about. This probably brings the number of updates you have to get about on par with the number of Microsoft updates, except that you can more closely control the number of changes that you do at once.
Hell my grandmother could install a Windows service pack, but I can't see her upgrading bind
when a security hole's found in that.
Your grandma's running bind? She rocks! But seriously, all you have to do is get the RPM/DEB in response to the security bulletin from your distribution's security list, open up your favorite package manager front-end, click on the package, and then quit once it's installed. Doesn't sound too tough for Grandma if she could already click through a Windows upgrade. If Grandma's running Debian she can even get the updates automated and never mess with them again.
And of course Grandma can upgrade bind a couple hours after the hole is found if she's interested; who knows how long she'd wait for a Service Pack?
We keep hearing from you how Slashdot is becoming the newspaper for the new millennium, how
people are taking notice of it, and how it ranks alongside traditional media...
Actually, that was jonkatz:) I totally agree on the spelling issue, though - it's at the point where I just skip some of the good Cmdr's articles, because it's too difficult to determine what he's getting at. I've never understood why bright, motivated people don't have the same regard for the impression their words make that they have for the way that their code runs.
(b) you're going to have to learn about journalistic standards. If you expect to be taken seriously,
you can't write like that - you can't show such prejudice, and you can't show such a casual
dismissal of America's biggest company.
Oh, c'mon. Journalistic standards vary widely; although CmdrTaco's screed wasn't particularly literate or well-reasoned (I would have rated it Flamebait too) it falls within the realm of so-called journalism from the Microsoft Linux Myths page or from ZDNet et al. The sad truth is that yellow journalism is alive and well in the modern tech press on all sides of a given issue.
I think you still have to separate the act from the thought or the word, though. People can really only be held accountable for their actions. For example, many forms of popular entertainment foster antisocial desires by portraying violence, sex, and drug use as cool. Don't those media create a dangerous environment for the rest of us?
IMHO of course they don't. Sure, there are always some nuts that blame the media for their actions, but in the end each individual is responsible for their actions towards others.
This reminds me of a political cartoon I saw in early '93. It had a news correspondent standing in front of the White House, and the caption was "On Day One of the Failed Clinton Administration,...". Somehow, I have that sinking feeling about this new administration.
A minor clarification, but important in its own right: The Holocaust was not committed by the
government of the Reich on citizens of the Reich.
I don't know what I was thinking - in some cases the Holocaust was committed against German citizens too, of course. I guess I was thinking more of the French and Belgians, but it's true that it happened in Germany too.
Also, I think the other examples were also to show not that governments all abuse their people, but
simply that they abuse in general.
I'll definitely agree to that. Governments have a lot of power, and are composed of people. There are few people in the world that really deal with possessing power well. It's disappointing that the democratic nations of the world don't have a better track record in this regard, but they're made up of people too.
Or mabye theyre just a bit more intelligent than us. Also, nuclear reactors do not produce any
'toxic' substances.
Plutonium is extremely toxic (poisonous), in fact. IIRC, the primary reason that breeder reactors are not used in the U.S is because the breeder reaction creates more materials which could be used to create nuclear bombs, whereas non-breeder reactions produce nuclear waste but nothing that could be used to make a bomb.
Although I'd have to say I support nuclear power as well; a well-designed (see posts about the Candu reactor above) and well-regulated (including disposal) reactor can be one of the best methods of power generation around. And it's cheap - all you folks in CA should move back to IL, where there's plenty of power and a large percentage of it is nuclear-generated.
So? Is it ok to perpetrate atrocities, as long as it is towards the citizens of some other nation?
No, of course not (although in some of those cases I still think you could argue that they were mainly military maneuvers rather than a concerted effort to harm civilians, and so not necessarily "atrocities", but that's another argument and certainly not applicable to most of the examples). I'm just pointing out that not all of your examples support your point of "distrust government", because you should automatically distrust foreign governments. Although the other examples which you provided were quite enough to make the point of "distrust your own government".
The citizens of Hiroshima could indeed not have prevented the Bomb by distrusting the US govt
more, but if the Japanese had distrusted their own govt more then their country might not have
gone to war in the first place.
Good point, and very apropos to the "Lessons of the Gulf War" thread I was just reading on K5. Although that doesn't always work in the other direction - for the U.S. to have avoided the disaster of Pearl Harbor, for example, citizens of Hawaii would have had to have been urging their government to be more warlike and prepared in the Pacific, not less. You can distrust government all you want, but sometimes foreign governments will still do you in.
I have to point out that many of these tragedies were not created by the governments of the people harmed, but by other sovereign powers. I'm not sure how the Japanese citizenry of early 1945 could have averted Hiroshima by distrusting the U.S. government any more, for example. Many of these examples were in fact considered legitimate acts of war when they were committed, in fact. Actions taken by one country against another don't really support an argument for distrusting authority, since by definition it's smart to distrust the governments of other nations whether or not you distrust your own government.
The only good examples you had: the Inquisition, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust (although this wasn't really perpetrated against citizens of the Reich, but at the very least it would be a heinous war crime), the gulags, the Great Leap (and I would also count the Cultural Revolution), Pol Pot, and Rwanda. Oh, and don't forget Japanese-American internment camps during WWII.
It's not a hierarchy if you just have a big lookup table of domainname => root server. Originally domain names were administered by a big list of IP address => hostname, but this doesn't scale very well for millions of hosts that move around daily. Hierarchical DNS allows you to only query the servers that you need to track down the IP address of the host in question. Distributing a big lookup table of "slashdot => a.root-servers.net, kuro5hin => leet.root-servers.net, mydomain => d.root-servers.net" runs into the same problem that distributing a big hosts file did in the first place.
Or am I totally misunderstanding what you're proposing?
There is a technical reason, it's called "knowing which root server to go to for that domain name". DNS is hierarchical; you can't just add things at random spots in the hierarchy without considering what that will do for the performance of the whole system. If you add the.blah TLD without sufficient preparation, DNS lookups for blahblah.blah will go nowhere, and may clog up the system for those of us just looking for/. or porn:)
Actually, it's trademarks that you lose if you don't police them. Copyrights and patents, on the other hand, do not have to be continuously litigated to remain valid.
Yes, if you lose a section of brain that was used to handle long-term memory, you'd lose THOSE
memories. Oh, wah. As if you'd not have built up more memories than you'd know what to do
with, by that time. By replacing the damaged/dead segment, you'd at least be assured that new
memories could take their place.
Unless it turns out that memory is holographic, as some results have indicated. In that case, all of your memories get a little fuzzier, and some of the oldest ones may be gone.
Those segments of the brain dealing with the concious mind are perhaps the most complex. If you
believe that the mind is Turing in nature, then all you'd have to do is run a regular backup of the
configuration of those cells, and then restore from backup once the cells had been replaced.
This is the riskiest part - you're really messing with your "self" (assuming that changing your memories of the past isn't enough to seriously change your "self", which may or may not be the case). I think it might be best to always be adding some new cells so that they could be learning your thought patterns, and then periodically scrub out the old dead cells. Of course the new cells won't ever perfectly replace the old ones, so I imagine that over time your consciousness really would change as a result of the underlying cellular replacement. On the other hand, this probably wouldn't have to be any more drastic than the other consciousness-altering events of your life, like drugs, religious ecstasies, or a midlife crisis.
The periodic maintenance approach might be a little safer than just downloading from backups onto a tabula rasa mind. After all, I'm sure there are folks here who don't always verify their backups:)
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I don't see how that's any more theft of service than before - they have already paid for those channels and flung their encoded representation across the aether (I'm getting more poetic as I post more replies to this story, don't ya know). If broadcasting those extra channels wasn't worth it to DTV, then you wouldn't be able to decode them because they wouldn't send them to you. My argument would be that if decoding any channels is OK, then how can paying for some channels and decoding the rest be less OK? At least that way DTV gets some money (not that the goal here is for them to get money (well, that's their goal), but it doesn't hurt).
I don't see how you could make a reasonable argument in court that decoding some channels is bad, but decoding all channels is OK. According to other posts, decoding all of them in Canada is OK, so there are apparently some courts which disagree.
Actually, it's more like you wrote a program for your clients, encrypted it, and hired the Goodyear blimp to display the encrypted program for your clients so that they could write it down, decrypt it, and use it. Is it stealing for anyone else to write it down and decrypt it? Maybe you should choose a more secure delivery method if it's that valuable. Of course, that raises the cost of the service for everyone, so in the end it's probably cheaper to live with the hackers and zap them from time to time to get rid of the dumb or lazy ones.
I'll agree that if DTV owners agreed to a contract which forbade them to modify or resell their cards, then they are guilty of breaking that contract. If they didn't sign anything, though, the cards are theirs to do with as they please.
I think the point is that if you're being bombarded with EM anyway, how is it stealing to decode it? It's not like you've taken it away from someone else. If no one is missing anything after the purported theft, was there really a theft?
Actually, DirecTV is a service provided all the time to everybody. The only question is whether you feel like paying Hughes to make use of the service, or prefer to put in the time, money, and effort to make use of the service without Hughes' help.
IMHO, hacking for hacking's sake would end with publishing all the details on your web site (soon to be taken down by your nervous ISP, of course), but I digress. I'll agree that the hackers in question didn't have motives most pure.
But I disagree that this is stealing. Today, Hughes and DirecTV are spending "huge $$$" to send their signals to my house, even though I'm without one of their receivers. Tomorrow they will be doing the same thing at the same cost. If tomorrow I have a hacked receiver, how am I stealing from them? They aren't out any more money from my deeds, and (unlike one of the reputed costs of stealing cable) my neighbors' DTV feeds are unaffected. They will send me the exact same bits (well, hopefully not the exact same bits :) as the day before, so their costs haven't changed one iota. DTV has no less property (intellectual or otherwise) as a result of my actions than they did before, so while my actions are certainly something, they are not stealing.
Um, no. No single entity "owns" any RF spectrum in the U.S. The RF spectrum is a public resource (like a national park) that is administered by the government because it's a scarce resource and because (although I don't totally buy this) if you let everybody transmit wherever they want, the spectrum will be useful to no one. The portion of the spectrum that DirecTV uses is leased to it by the FCC and gives DirecTV broadcast rights on that band. As far as I know there is no regulation of who can receive on what band, because unlike multiple transmitters, multiple receivers can't really hose the public RF spectrum for everyone else.
True, there are laws about decrypting phone calls but other than that receiving is legal. I don't believe the phone laws apply to DirecTV, unless you know for sure that they do?
As an aside, I don't agree with laws against phone decryption because whether or not there is a law, anyone who is sufficiently motivated can monitor your transmissions. The law provides only the appearance of safety; it doesn't really give you any privacy. Plus of course you sent me those signals onto my property, but that topic's been covered already :)
I wouldn't disagree with that - such has been the case with other famous "hack", like the i-opener, the TiVo, etc. There's always a few smart people who figure out how to do it, and a bunch of other folks who just follow the trail that was blazed.
But to really answer the issue, even if it does take hardware to decode the bits, does that really change the issue? The bits are present inside your home (or at least outside at your satellite dish) 24 hours a day, whether you want them or not. DirecTV is constantly bombarding you with them, on the theory that you'll be too lazy or stupid to decode them. Sure, you're getting something for nothing (or at least much cheaper) if you decode them, but I still haven't heard a good argument for how this constitutes stealing from DirecTV, whether you're a master hacker or just saw the plans in an electronics magazine.
A relevant example: if Digital Convergence sends you a CueCat on your next issue of Wired, is it stealing to open it up, figure out how it works, and use it for non-Digital Convergence-approved uses? As far as I can tell, the analogy is exact - a company pays to saturate the country with something, said company makes it somewhat difficult to use this thing for uses that don't make it money, but somebody with too much time on their hands hacks it anyway. The only difference is that Digital Convergence sent you plastic, wire, and silicon (with information encoded), and DirecTV sent you modulated electromagnetic waves (with information encoded). The personal use of either free gifts is entirely ethical IMHO.
True, it's not what I would have done. But to the hacker belong the spoils , and sooner or later information on how to do this for only the cost of materials will get out, and then anybody can do it given enough time. I wouldn't characterize the current set of DirecTV hackers as particularly freedom-loving, simply because if they really believed in free speech rather than just free beer, they would publish their plans on the 'net.
But ideological differences aside, I do defend the right of the average citizen to decode any stray RF that wonders across or through their property or person (in fact, my neurons are probably soaking up DirecTV as I type) with whatever legally-obtained hardware or software they need. And if that runs up against the DMCA, well, the more civil disobedience in that regard, the better!
So you don't have a right to use the airwaves where you are? Sure, transmission capability is regulated, since the RF band is a scarce public resource, but by the same token everyone does have a right to make use of it since it is a public resource.
To be more correct, it doesn't cost them anything more, since they already have to blanket the country with bits anyway. The decoding of some of the bits by non-paying customers doesn't require them to install any more capacity in order to serve their subscriber base. The price that DirecTV pays for the content is an issue between DirecTV and its' suppliers; hopefully they've reached an agreement that they both are happy with.
As far as I'm concerned, the more outsmarting there is on both sides, the better. It's fun to watch and, like cockroaches after a nuclear war, it's breeding some stellar hw/sw hackers. Go Hughes! Go hackers!
It's true that DirecTV doesn't have as much money as they otherwise would; but it does not necessarily follow that anything has been stolen from them. Many other events could result in them not getting as much money - an economic slowdown, a competitor with a better product, or even a nasty rumor that their satellites are really being used to track people for the sinister purposes of Major League Baseball. Just the fact that they don't have as much money doesn't make it stealing.
In the normal understanding of a "theft of service", somebody is still out of some physical quantity that they would otherwise have charged for and that they do not just hand out to all and sundry. Theft of cable TV service, for example (and according to the TV industry at least) steals from your neighbors by degrading their picture quality (a measurable, quantifiable thing). Spam is a theft of network resources and hardware resources on a mail server that your ISP charges you to maintain. Trojans or worms are thefts of service in almost the same way, by consuming network bandwidth and host processing power which somebody paid for and somebody else is getting charged for.
But receiving unauthorized satellite broadcasts doesn't deprive anyone of something they are being charged for. Your neighbor's signal is not any more degraded, DirecTV doesn't have to spend any more money than they would have otherwise to achieve national coverage, and the producers of the TV content are already getting paid by DirecTV under terms that were mutually agreeable to both of them. From all of these people's perspective, things are just the same as if you didn't have a DirecTV at all.
This doesn't mean that I disapprove of Hughes' actions in this case - I think they are entirely within their rights to police their hardware under any means that are permissible under the contracts they have with DirecTV subscribers, assuming that they have such contracts (although I don't think they have the right to modify the customer's lawfully purchased software or hardware without the customer's permission in the absence of a contract allowing it). I just don't think Hughes should be surprised when other individuals make use of the bits that DirecTV is flinging around so profligately, considering that those bits would just "go to waste" anyway.
I have to add, though, that it's nice to see a company whose initial response was not "send in the lawyers". Duking it out hacker a hacker is the way to go on this, and so much more entertaining for the rest of us without DirecTV or the inclination to hack one.
If I had moderation points and could use 'em on this article, I'd mod this up, because you made the point much more eloquently than I did.
I was making a joke about the US' usual isolationalist approach to world affairs, at least in the cases where involvement in those affairs would place restrictions on the US. Given the number of black helicopter-fearin' folks in the US, there's little chance that anyone from the US will be accountable to an international organization any time soon (at least unless it's the WTO).
I'm curious as to how this is really a theft of service. When that term is applied to spam, for instance, the theft occurs when spammers use up the bandwidth of their relays and the time and hardware of the targeted ISPs. In that case you can point to the extra costs that were required based on the actions of the thieves.
However, this satellite broadcast is streaming through all of us all the time. Does just possessing the knowledge to decode these ambient bits somehow make a person a thief? I'll agree that it's unfair to the legit DirecTV subscribers to have to pay for a service that some are getting for free, but I don't agree that decoding bits that are normally present in the environment is theft.
I'm pretty sure that the U.S. is not a signatory to this document, though. We only sign international trade and arms agreements, nothing humanitarian. It's a matter of principle ;)
I fail to see how this is an advantage - Microsoft service packs are notorious for fixing some things and breaking others. Far better to only have to upgrade things you care about. This probably brings the number of updates you have to get about on par with the number of Microsoft updates, except that you can more closely control the number of changes that you do at once.
Your grandma's running bind? She rocks! But seriously, all you have to do is get the RPM/DEB in response to the security bulletin from your distribution's security list, open up your favorite package manager front-end, click on the package, and then quit once it's installed. Doesn't sound too tough for Grandma if she could already click through a Windows upgrade. If Grandma's running Debian she can even get the updates automated and never mess with them again.
And of course Grandma can upgrade bind a couple hours after the hole is found if she's interested; who knows how long she'd wait for a Service Pack?
Actually, that was jonkatz :) I totally agree on the spelling issue, though - it's at the point where I just skip some of the good Cmdr's articles, because it's too difficult to determine what he's getting at. I've never understood why bright, motivated people don't have the same regard for the impression their words make that they have for the way that their code runs.
Oh, c'mon. Journalistic standards vary widely; although CmdrTaco's screed wasn't particularly literate or well-reasoned (I would have rated it Flamebait too) it falls within the realm of so-called journalism from the Microsoft Linux Myths page or from ZDNet et al. The sad truth is that yellow journalism is alive and well in the modern tech press on all sides of a given issue.
"But what's really going to bake your noodle later is: would you still have dropped the ball if I hadn't said that?"
I think you still have to separate the act from the thought or the word, though. People can really only be held accountable for their actions. For example, many forms of popular entertainment foster antisocial desires by portraying violence, sex, and drug use as cool. Don't those media create a dangerous environment for the rest of us?
IMHO of course they don't. Sure, there are always some nuts that blame the media for their actions, but in the end each individual is responsible for their actions towards others.
This reminds me of a political cartoon I saw in early '93. It had a news correspondent standing in front of the White House, and the caption was "On Day One of the Failed Clinton Administration,...". Somehow, I have that sinking feeling about this new administration.
I don't know what I was thinking - in some cases the Holocaust was committed against German citizens too, of course. I guess I was thinking more of the French and Belgians, but it's true that it happened in Germany too.
I'll definitely agree to that. Governments have a lot of power, and are composed of people. There are few people in the world that really deal with possessing power well. It's disappointing that the democratic nations of the world don't have a better track record in this regard, but they're made up of people too.
Plutonium is extremely toxic (poisonous), in fact. IIRC, the primary reason that breeder reactors are not used in the U.S is because the breeder reaction creates more materials which could be used to create nuclear bombs, whereas non-breeder reactions produce nuclear waste but nothing that could be used to make a bomb.
Although I'd have to say I support nuclear power as well; a well-designed (see posts about the Candu reactor above) and well-regulated (including disposal) reactor can be one of the best methods of power generation around. And it's cheap - all you folks in CA should move back to IL, where there's plenty of power and a large percentage of it is nuclear-generated.
No, of course not (although in some of those cases I still think you could argue that they were mainly military maneuvers rather than a concerted effort to harm civilians, and so not necessarily "atrocities", but that's another argument and certainly not applicable to most of the examples). I'm just pointing out that not all of your examples support your point of "distrust government", because you should automatically distrust foreign governments. Although the other examples which you provided were quite enough to make the point of "distrust your own government".
Good point, and very apropos to the "Lessons of the Gulf War" thread I was just reading on K5. Although that doesn't always work in the other direction - for the U.S. to have avoided the disaster of Pearl Harbor, for example, citizens of Hawaii would have had to have been urging their government to be more warlike and prepared in the Pacific, not less. You can distrust government all you want, but sometimes foreign governments will still do you in.
I have to point out that many of these tragedies were not created by the governments of the people harmed, but by other sovereign powers. I'm not sure how the Japanese citizenry of early 1945 could have averted Hiroshima by distrusting the U.S. government any more, for example. Many of these examples were in fact considered legitimate acts of war when they were committed, in fact. Actions taken by one country against another don't really support an argument for distrusting authority, since by definition it's smart to distrust the governments of other nations whether or not you distrust your own government.
The only good examples you had: the Inquisition, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust (although this wasn't really perpetrated against citizens of the Reich, but at the very least it would be a heinous war crime), the gulags, the Great Leap (and I would also count the Cultural Revolution), Pol Pot, and Rwanda. Oh, and don't forget Japanese-American internment camps during WWII.
It's not a hierarchy if you just have a big lookup table of domainname => root server. Originally domain names were administered by a big list of IP address => hostname, but this doesn't scale very well for millions of hosts that move around daily. Hierarchical DNS allows you to only query the servers that you need to track down the IP address of the host in question. Distributing a big lookup table of "slashdot => a.root-servers.net, kuro5hin => leet.root-servers.net, mydomain => d.root-servers.net" runs into the same problem that distributing a big hosts file did in the first place.
Or am I totally misunderstanding what you're proposing?
There is a technical reason, it's called "knowing which root server to go to for that domain name". DNS is hierarchical; you can't just add things at random spots in the hierarchy without considering what that will do for the performance of the whole system. If you add the .blah TLD without sufficient preparation, DNS lookups for blahblah.blah will go nowhere, and may clog up the system for those of us just looking for /. or porn :)
Actually, it's trademarks that you lose if you don't police them. Copyrights and patents, on the other hand, do not have to be continuously litigated to remain valid.
Just another item for the real /. FAQ.
Unless it turns out that memory is holographic, as some results have indicated. In that case, all of your memories get a little fuzzier, and some of the oldest ones may be gone.
This is the riskiest part - you're really messing with your "self" (assuming that changing your memories of the past isn't enough to seriously change your "self", which may or may not be the case). I think it might be best to always be adding some new cells so that they could be learning your thought patterns, and then periodically scrub out the old dead cells. Of course the new cells won't ever perfectly replace the old ones, so I imagine that over time your consciousness really would change as a result of the underlying cellular replacement. On the other hand, this probably wouldn't have to be any more drastic than the other consciousness-altering events of your life, like drugs, religious ecstasies, or a midlife crisis.
The periodic maintenance approach might be a little safer than just downloading from backups onto a tabula rasa mind. After all, I'm sure there are folks here who don't always verify their backups :)