Apparently, this thing needs an "experienced P3 engineer" to run. While this is an amazing leap (and frickin' cool!), it's not as consumer ready as some would believe.
You know what we really need, though? A Beowulf of these. (Sorry!)
Actually, that first example would be COM.microsoft.software. The second example is correct.
The reason I bring this up is to point out that the Java package naming scheme is actually an inverted domain name (appended with whatever the owner of that domain sees fit).
It seems unlikely that such a change in the naming of domains would do much good.:-)
Oh...right. Oops. I think my way makes more sense, though.
I may be kinda biased (it is my idea, though undoubtedly thought up before), but I think it'd work. For instance, COM.software would contain only software companies. Microsoft would have: COM.software.microsoft, COM.hardware.microsoft, and another for research (EDU? SCI?). And no registering multiple domain names for the same business; it's just gratuitous.
Face it: with the entirety of Europe spitting in ICANN's face, it seems to have a rather limited lifetime. The Internet, once regarded as a transcendant, borderless entity (regardless of actual physical limitations and boundaries) ungovernable by any single nation, will be a hell of a lot better. ICANN...well, it can't; it's a joke.
On a slightly related topic, the entire domain-name industry is in extreme disarray, possibly irreversibly. Reorganization is too difficult; it's too late...perhaps a newer, better, system will come around (maybe SUN/Java-style package naming: COM.software.microsoft, or EDU.harvard.law) that will fix things in that respect, but I doubt it.
Freenet etc. [sic] may change the rules somewhat, but the Internet isn't some amazing flowing ether of information. It is an enormous heap of servers with bits on them and wires between them, which are physically located in countries.
The Internet isn't a fount of unending and useful information, but, at the same time, part of it transcends physical location. It would take an amazing amount of resources for all countries to get together (which, of itself, would be a feat!) and shutdown every server. Sure, the US could take down a few major backbones, but that's not enough. The beauty of it is that, as it was originally planned, the removal of a single node doesn't shut the network down. The effort involved makes it infeasible.
This is one of the best rulings pertaining to the web yet. The government just said it was un-Constitutional for them to regulate free speech on the Internet. This is a large step for the US Government and a huge leap for the Internet. It's now legally established (in the US) that the Internet is a transcendant entity who's free speech is not regulatable by the US.
This casts a shadow upon cases involving copyright on the Internet. While this doesn't nullify them as a whole, this seems like something more in copyleft's corner.
That example is irrelevant to this discussion. In that case it was war, and in war certain freedoms are suspended in the name of helping to preserve those freedoms further down the road. No such declaration of war exists here.
War isn't necessary to create a national security issue. Even without a declaration of war, the leakage of this information was, and still possibly is, dangerous to national security by the virtue that it endangers citizens (i.e., members of the original agents' families, etc.)
Of note, in Israel you're rarely allowed to talk about the military. Only recently did the Israeli government admit to having the Shin Bet, which is a mixture of the CIA and Secret Service. Israel is perhaps not a prime example because they don't have a free press. National security is prime there, but they're perhaps more locally hated than America is.
During the Gulf war, while Israel was being bombed, a CNN reporter in Tel Aviv broadcasted missile hit locations based upon street names, etc. The Israeli military ordered that he stop, and he did not. He was deported.
For the press to be free it has to be sensible. There are some things that, sadly, should not be free as in speech. Governmental SNAFUs are a minor problem, but our contemporary "aggressive" reporting style is far too much; reporters complained about being unable to know the locations of US troops and US strategy in Panama, the Gulf, and Bosnia. The truth is, however, that they have no "right" to governmental information. They can say (almost) anything, but that doesn't mean they have free reign.
Fortunately you can go to the Linux community and get help for free.
What, there isn't a Microsoft community? Or is the Microsoft community mean, and so, as a whole, it doesn't help people?
On top of that, just cause MS isn't obligated to provide you support doesn't mean that it doesn't. The MSDN database, for instance, completely documents accessible APIs and is totally public. Or their support database, which actually tracks user bugs and can be quite convenient.
If mp3.com had gotten agreements from the "big five" before launching mymp3.com, their wouldn't have been a lawsuit filed. It would've saved mp3.com at least a little bit of money.
Yeah, but there also wouldn't have been this amazing press. Tons of news sites are talking about MP3.com and My.MP3.com. This kind of press you don't get easily. Now, whether MP3.com planned this all along is dubious, but things seem to be falling into place.
On a side note, this seems to be the kind of digital licensing agreement that's been proposed. MP3.com gets money off of banner ads and what-have-you, and then pays licensing fees to the RIAA. Of course, I have no idea how it really works; if some details of the settlement were released it would be better understood.
Hmm. The USPTO is bad, right? Slashdot doesn't like patents applied to technology processes, right? That's funny. You guys seem to be happy.
Just cause a corporation you don't like (DoubleClick) got screwed doesn't make this a Good Thing. C|Net is being just as bad as DoubleClick. In all likelihood, C|Net will just license the patent out and make loads and loads of money. Nothing will change by this.
If, as a community, we're going to be against tech patents, we'd best actually be against tech patents. It's not a selective thing; if the geek community doesn't think that patents should apply to technology processes (Actual technology hardware patents are often times good, but patenting a technology process is silly; prior art is difficult to find but almost always existant, and re-innovation with no interaction with the patented art is common. In today's fast-moving world of technology, patents on processes are silly and frivolous.), then it should stand up against every single one. Just cause DoubleClick got shafted doesn't mean the day has been saved. This is just another process that was patented, and with each process the idea of patenting technology processes is reinforced.
Some things are truly shocking merely because they shouldn't be issues. For instance, gays in the military: a would-be non-issue. Whoever wants to be in the military can be, so long as they're a citizen and in good-enough standing to represent us in our army. Or, porn in cable. A non-issue. Allow me to explain.
You buy cable. If you're paying for cable and there's something on it you don't like, stop paying for it. That's what capitalism is about. This can even be said of things you must have. You need auto insurance. But you can still choose from where you get it.
I think the solution is to merely eliminate all non-common-sense legislation. (E.g., formerly there was legislation banning gays from the military.) For instance, laws dicating what can be shown on cable at certain times. That's supposed to industry-governed. Unless all of a sudden we're not a capitalist government. In which case I'm seriously spooked.
Mike "capitalist" Greenberg
Re:Reality Check - You're Not As Good As You Think
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Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
That's not true; I just don't think that I'm very good at coding. When I say I may not have much experience, I say that I haven't written tens of thousands of lines of code. I've done a few decent projects on my own, nothing major. I'm not a "bad" coder; but, as I've said, I'm no Kung Foo master. I can't grok a kernel; hell, I can only program console for Linux. But that doesn't mean I need to be taught C++ everytime I ask a question about namespaces, or what have you.
I never said I was bad-ass (and I don't think I implied it), and I didn't mean to put that off. I do have a long way to go, but some people aren't helping. That's what my post was about, not about me touting mad hacking skills.
Sure, if you don't adapt you'll not do well. There are great people who've endured since the beginning. Wozniak (sp.) is old, for instance, but he's managing.
Also note that old languages are still in use, too. (Just cause something's deprecated doesn't mean it's not used!) COBOL is still in use, probably APL, too.
I think ageism is just as bad at the other end of the spectrum. I'm 15, and while I'm no Kung Foo master, I've been frequently doubted as per my coding ability. Just cause I lack experience doesn't mean I'm bad at coding. I was best in my class (a class I took at IU), but the social dynamic was often that of condescention. It's just as hard for us little guys, I'll have you know.
How cleverly put. In other words: "Since we don't believe the industry can control the net, we should be given the authority to do it". What's wrong with this picture is that the net doesn't need to be regulated by any institution! So far it has done just fine without a one. Unfortunately, just like the Seagrams guy basically claimed that only corporations have brought (and can bring) content to the net, lots of non-tech people believe that the government is the only way to impose order in the net.
It doesn't need to be regulated, you say? I'd go so far as to say that it can't be; it's too widespread and international to be regulated. TLD-based regulation would have been an option if the TLDs were actually used correctly. It's fargone that we can't regulate the net. I hope.
As geeks, we have an easier time configuring things like Gnutella or Freenet. But what about the laypeople? What about John Q. Farmer, who can uses AOL, and had to spend an hour configuring Napster?
The problem with peer-to-peer is that it's just that; there's no one server (or one hundred eighty, or however many) that you can just connect to, you have to find some peers. This is far too much for our not-so-technical buddies.
Right now there are a lot of Gnutella IPs posted on the net. This is fine for now, I guess, but those will probably be the first IPs to be looked into. I mean, netPD looked up all those users, they can look up IPs. They can theoretically cross-reference with ISPs as per actual names and addresses, and then have a lawsuit targeting a bunch of people. This is a Bad Thing. I'm not so up on FreeNet, but from what I understand that solves most of the problems.
Pretty much, until peer-to-peer becomes easy to use, it won't gain a lot of people. The server/client model is extremely popular because it's easy to configure and centralized; it's high time for peer-to-peer to prove itself in the user friendly department.
Mike Greenberg, rambling about stuff he knows little/nothing about (flames will be unappreciated)
While some types of free-as-in-beer software may go IPO and make loads and loads (and charge loads and loads), there will always remain free-as-in-speech software, software that is so dedicated to being free-as-in-beer and open source that they'll never charge you for the software.
OpenBSD is a great example of this. Mozilla, while I'm not all up on it, seems to be dedicated to open source as well. Other systems are so global that it'd be impossible to charge for the next system, like XFree86.
Regardless, we can always fork off of old versions of formerly-open source projects. Like we talked about in a discussion of removal of Junkbuster-esque features from Mozilla, we can always just pick up where they left off.
So, as long as someone (like SourceForge.net ) is keeping CVSs of all this crap. I mean, there may be some hazy legal issues with SourceForge (IANAL), but the geek community tends to disregard most of those anyway. So, to answer your question: I wouldn't worry.
Then again, I'm 15. Erg.
Mike "Doesn't Know What He's Talking About" Greenberg
Spam is nice to rant about, and all, but there's more. So much more. Where do we draw the line? Targetted advertising via Internet? TV? Billboard? Dashboard? Earpiece? Retina? At what point do we stand up and demand to be called by a name and not a database reference? When do we demand our freedom from the technological age? At what point are we going to demand to have lives, not histories?
These questions are so amazingly important not only the in future of the Internet, but in the future of the modern world. Without rhetoric, when will we demand that the interactivity stop? Aren't we people and not IDs? Shouldn't we "Just Say No" to tracking, whether it be electronic or not?
In my wise-ass, surly, 15-year-old opinion, the time is now. The "war on tracking," however, will not go the way of the "war on drugs;" this is a fight that needs to be fought (and won!), and now is the time. We may already be too late; DoubleClick, for instance, is everywhere. This needs to be stopped.
The solution? Well, don't look at me, I'm in high school. I think the solution begins with individually disabled tracking, locally; delete those cookies from DoubleClick, set up a proxy and don't let them in. What we don't need, however, is legislation legitamizing anything, though. We, the geeks, need to stop this from happening. We made the Internet, and it's going to be our job to save it.
Spam and junk mail, at the first look, seem very similar. In fact, they are quite different. Those of you geeks who bother to leave the house (myself included) know that you need a stamp to send snail-mail. Stamps, as you know, are not cheap. What is it now, 34 cents? I can't keep track. (I just don't leave the house enough, that's my problem.) To send an e-mail? With an unlimited internet access plan, nothing, really. On bandwidth rated connections it could end up costing you a pretty penny if you were really high volume. Notwithstanding, spam is, on the whole, free to send; junk mail isn't.
This presents quite a conundrum. In the "real" world, junk mail isn't free to send, so there's less of it. Telemarketing isn't viable, either, because you need to pay people. Spam, on the other hand, can be efficiently run on an old computer with a 56K, or 33.6K (if you're patient) modem. What is there to do?
Well, nothing good. Government regulation (as in USA government) of anything on the internet is just wrong -- the internet belongs to no one, at this point. If the government wanted to regulate it, it shouldn't have ever left our borders; not so quickly, at least. It's too late for wide-scale regulation -- it'd be trivial and stupid. Trivial because anyone can route through some foreign server and stupid because it's no one's place to go around making regulations.
As mentioned previously, I think the best solutions are private. Set up some filtering software. Or, god forbid, delete the crap. If you're on a per-bandwidth payment schedule...sorry. It's what you have to deal with. The whole point of freedom is that anyone, not just geeks, can do what they want. If what they want to do is sell printer toner then by all means, sell away.
As a side note, doesn't this all seem a bit trivial to anyone?
Mikey G.
No more overdue fines? [Re:Info not toast...]
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RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 1
Of course there will be no more overdue fines: the data will delete itself, no?
Regardless, all of this arguing is silliness. Printed books will never die; I am surrounded by 4 large bookshelves, stocked with some of the best literature ever. There's 3 or 4 more in the rest of my house. The qualities held in some of these books -- a dog-eared page, faded edges, marks on the page -- contain emotion and feeling, things that cannot be digitized. (I can imagine a lame MS deal where you can 'dog-ear' pages, etc., with stupid animations/graphics, though.) To think that I would abandon this library of sorts and flock to a monitored, pay-per-use system is folly. DIVX failed for a reason, and eBooks will fail for the same.
Also, eBooks seems crackable beyond belief. Because it would be international, the key security on encryption would be 40 bits, if even that. (I think...didn't the US just allow for greater exported encryption, though?) I can't see this succeeding at all, so save your Orwellian daydreams for a more realistic issue.
In our society today, there are two types of stealing: digital and actual. If I steal a CD I will have ethical pains -- I'm not a thief; if I download an MP3 of a song I don't have on any physical medium I have no qualms. Then again, I'm a teenager, so don't look at me for ethics.
Computers + Schools = No Productivity + Pornography. I would know -- I'm in school right now, on a computer. I'm...uh...researching. Yeah. I'm researching my e-mail and...er...the geek community. Come on.
I've never been in a situation in school where computers were the only way to do something. The kids in my school can't look stuff up in an encyclopedia anymore, much less write a bibliography. Instead they're online, looking at hamsterdance.com, some random porn site, or checking their e-mail. There's absolutely nothing productive to be done with computers at school. Sure, there are computer graphics courses (and programming, but they don't have that here), and teachers like things to be typed, but that's a luxury. The entry-level computer classes are simple. Keyboarding is useless (someone else wrote about this): everyone here can type at least 35 wpm, which is more than enough for the illiterate bastards. They can hardly write a proper sentence anyway. I digress.
In conclusion (I love saying that), there shouldn't be computers in school...yeah. Instead of spending all this money on bullshit computer systems that aren't even secure or put together (WINNT 3.0 on a 10mbps network here...yay!) well. I'd rather have smaller class sizes, better teachers, and more books in the library. Argh. [insert witty comment here]
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I may be), but I believe it was *67 that turned of the Caller ID sending. ANI'll still catch you, plus whatever the phone company may be using nowadays. I heard it's this nifty GUI thing that uses ANI2, or something, but I'm not up on that. Quick, someone go to #warez and find a hax0r! They'll know.
I forget. Was it the Danes who stopped Hitler? No, I remember it being America, the UK, et al. (Please don't flame me for leaving out a country. I'm tired.) You have to wonder, though: how many kids at school read/.? I mean, I do. I've got a few friends that do. And, as I understand it, WAVE is a service so that only kids can rat out kids they don't like. This was discussed in some of the many other WAVE threads, destructing it by abuse. That, personally, is not viable, as too many people will be apathetic.
I can only speak for my school, but for the most part people don't hate me and other geeky/misunderstood. I mean, there are exceptions, but most people wouldn't really care. I think that there are places, however, that would see serious abuse of this, and not the kind you're talking about. I know some people who without a doubt would be considered 'dangerous,' as it were.
I, however, have an idea. How many of you geeks out there are parents or are kids yourselves? Ask your kid's/your principal if they will do WAVE. See if they even know about WAVE. If they do, tell them that you think it would be an awful idea and only divide your kid's/your school more. I suppose. My school never listens to me (about anything), though, so it's a long shot.
I know...we could all just shoot up the schools and kill ourselves, instead! (Kindly note the sarcasm.)
I saw that. The guy from the radio music magazine is clearly an RIAA lackey...that's not what bothered me, though.
They asked this college dude whether it bothered him that artists weren't getting money for the songs. He said, naturally, no. I don't mind the answer (I don't download enough music to constitute an album for any specific artist), but they could have at least chosen an eloquent guy. The report attempted to be objective, I think, but they did a shitty job. When the media reports correctly on a tech story I'll eat my hat. I'll have to get a hat, then, too, but it's not happening, so I won't go through the trouble.
Exactly. New Hampshire -- Live Free or Die! -- has abolished the sales tax. A great place to shop, I hear. There's a problem with that course of action, though: lowered state funding. Sales tax, as demonstrated in the case of NH, accounts for a decent portion of a states income. Loss of this income has resulted in lower funding for schools, etc.
Now, I may be wrong about the lowered funding. I only heard that they have lowered funding because of the lost sales tax. If this is not true, however, it's quite a marvelous idea. It would level the playing field (Which, I believe, does not need levelling: a local business can just as easily get on the internet with a domain name, sell goods, and design a good-looking website. Their one problem would most likely be keeping up with orders. I realize this is idealistic, but hey: I'm young and arrogant.) and also help non-Internet consumers. A good-deal all around.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, this thing needs an "experienced P3 engineer" to run. While this is an amazing leap (and frickin' cool!), it's not as consumer ready as some would believe.
You know what we really need, though? A Beowulf of these. (Sorry!)
Mike Greenberg
Actually, that first example would be COM.microsoft.software. The second example is correct.
The reason I bring this up is to point out that the Java package naming scheme is actually an inverted domain name (appended with whatever the owner of that domain sees fit).
It seems unlikely that such a change in the naming of domains would do much good. :-)
Oh...right. Oops. I think my way makes more sense, though.
I may be kinda biased (it is my idea, though undoubtedly thought up before), but I think it'd work. For instance, COM.software would contain only software companies. Microsoft would have: COM.software.microsoft, COM.hardware.microsoft, and another for research (EDU? SCI?). And no registering multiple domain names for the same business; it's just gratuitous.
I'll be damned if that made any sense.
Mike "Forgot His Signature" Greenberg
Face it: with the entirety of Europe spitting in ICANN's face, it seems to have a rather limited lifetime. The Internet, once regarded as a transcendant, borderless entity (regardless of actual physical limitations and boundaries) ungovernable by any single nation, will be a hell of a lot better. ICANN...well, it can't; it's a joke.
On a slightly related topic, the entire domain-name industry is in extreme disarray, possibly irreversibly. Reorganization is too difficult; it's too late...perhaps a newer, better, system will come around (maybe SUN/Java-style package naming: COM.software.microsoft, or EDU.harvard.law) that will fix things in that respect, but I doubt it.
Freenet etc. [sic] may change the rules somewhat, but the Internet isn't some amazing flowing ether of information. It is an enormous heap of servers with bits on them and wires between them, which are physically located in countries.
The Internet isn't a fount of unending and useful information, but, at the same time, part of it transcends physical location. It would take an amazing amount of resources for all countries to get together (which, of itself, would be a feat!) and shutdown every server. Sure, the US could take down a few major backbones, but that's not enough. The beauty of it is that, as it was originally planned, the removal of a single node doesn't shut the network down. The effort involved makes it infeasible.
Mike Greenberg
This is one of the best rulings pertaining to the web yet. The government just said it was un-Constitutional for them to regulate free speech on the Internet. This is a large step for the US Government and a huge leap for the Internet. It's now legally established (in the US) that the Internet is a transcendant entity who's free speech is not regulatable by the US.
This casts a shadow upon cases involving copyright on the Internet. While this doesn't nullify them as a whole, this seems like something more in copyleft's corner.
Mike Greenberg
That example is irrelevant to this discussion. In that case it was war, and in war certain freedoms are suspended in the name of helping to preserve those freedoms further down the road. No such declaration of war exists here.
War isn't necessary to create a national security issue. Even without a declaration of war, the leakage of this information was, and still possibly is, dangerous to national security by the virtue that it endangers citizens (i.e., members of the original agents' families, etc.)
Of note, in Israel you're rarely allowed to talk about the military. Only recently did the Israeli government admit to having the Shin Bet, which is a mixture of the CIA and Secret Service. Israel is perhaps not a prime example because they don't have a free press. National security is prime there, but they're perhaps more locally hated than America is.
Mike Greenberg
During the Gulf war, while Israel was being bombed, a CNN reporter in Tel Aviv broadcasted missile hit locations based upon street names, etc. The Israeli military ordered that he stop, and he did not. He was deported.
For the press to be free it has to be sensible. There are some things that, sadly, should not be free as in speech. Governmental SNAFUs are a minor problem, but our contemporary "aggressive" reporting style is far too much; reporters complained about being unable to know the locations of US troops and US strategy in Panama, the Gulf, and Bosnia. The truth is, however, that they have no "right" to governmental information. They can say (almost) anything, but that doesn't mean they have free reign.
Mike Greenberg
Fortunately you can go to the Linux community and get help for free.
What, there isn't a Microsoft community? Or is the Microsoft community mean, and so, as a whole, it doesn't help people?
On top of that, just cause MS isn't obligated to provide you support doesn't mean that it doesn't. The MSDN database, for instance, completely documents accessible APIs and is totally public. Or their support database, which actually tracks user bugs and can be quite convenient.
Mike Greenberg
If mp3.com had gotten agreements from the "big five" before launching mymp3.com, their wouldn't have been a lawsuit filed. It would've saved mp3.com at least a little bit of money.
Yeah, but there also wouldn't have been this amazing press. Tons of news sites are talking about MP3.com and My.MP3.com. This kind of press you don't get easily. Now, whether MP3.com planned this all along is dubious, but things seem to be falling into place.
On a side note, this seems to be the kind of digital licensing agreement that's been proposed. MP3.com gets money off of banner ads and what-have-you, and then pays licensing fees to the RIAA. Of course, I have no idea how it really works; if some details of the settlement were released it would be better understood.
Mike Greenberg
Hmm. The USPTO is bad, right? Slashdot doesn't like patents applied to technology processes, right? That's funny. You guys seem to be happy.
Just cause a corporation you don't like (DoubleClick) got screwed doesn't make this a Good Thing. C|Net is being just as bad as DoubleClick. In all likelihood, C|Net will just license the patent out and make loads and loads of money. Nothing will change by this.
If, as a community, we're going to be against tech patents, we'd best actually be against tech patents. It's not a selective thing; if the geek community doesn't think that patents should apply to technology processes (Actual technology hardware patents are often times good, but patenting a technology process is silly; prior art is difficult to find but almost always existant, and re-innovation with no interaction with the patented art is common. In today's fast-moving world of technology, patents on processes are silly and frivolous.), then it should stand up against every single one. Just cause DoubleClick got shafted doesn't mean the day has been saved. This is just another process that was patented, and with each process the idea of patenting technology processes is reinforced.
Mike Greenberg
Some things are truly shocking merely because they shouldn't be issues. For instance, gays in the military: a would-be non-issue. Whoever wants to be in the military can be, so long as they're a citizen and in good-enough standing to represent us in our army. Or, porn in cable. A non-issue. Allow me to explain.
You buy cable. If you're paying for cable and there's something on it you don't like, stop paying for it. That's what capitalism is about. This can even be said of things you must have. You need auto insurance. But you can still choose from where you get it.
I think the solution is to merely eliminate all non-common-sense legislation. (E.g., formerly there was legislation banning gays from the military.) For instance, laws dicating what can be shown on cable at certain times. That's supposed to industry-governed. Unless all of a sudden we're not a capitalist government. In which case I'm seriously spooked.
Mike "capitalist" Greenberg
That's not true; I just don't think that I'm very good at coding. When I say I may not have much experience, I say that I haven't written tens of thousands of lines of code. I've done a few decent projects on my own, nothing major. I'm not a "bad" coder; but, as I've said, I'm no Kung Foo master. I can't grok a kernel; hell, I can only program console for Linux. But that doesn't mean I need to be taught C++ everytime I ask a question about namespaces, or what have you.
I never said I was bad-ass (and I don't think I implied it), and I didn't mean to put that off. I do have a long way to go, but some people aren't helping. That's what my post was about, not about me touting mad hacking skills.
Mike "a bit too defensive" Greenberg
Sure, if you don't adapt you'll not do well. There are great people who've endured since the beginning. Wozniak (sp.) is old, for instance, but he's managing.
Also note that old languages are still in use, too. (Just cause something's deprecated doesn't mean it's not used!) COBOL is still in use, probably APL, too.
I think ageism is just as bad at the other end of the spectrum. I'm 15, and while I'm no Kung Foo master, I've been frequently doubted as per my coding ability. Just cause I lack experience doesn't mean I'm bad at coding. I was best in my class (a class I took at IU), but the social dynamic was often that of condescention. It's just as hard for us little guys, I'll have you know.
Mike "e-mail me for more" Greenberg
Who cares if it runs Linux; the real question is whether you can run a Beowulf cluster off of a bunch of these! :)
Mike "I'm Joking" Greenberg
How cleverly put. In other words: "Since we don't believe the industry can control the net, we should be given the authority to do it". What's wrong with this picture is that the net doesn't need to be regulated by any institution! So far it has done just fine without a one. Unfortunately, just like the Seagrams guy basically claimed that only corporations have brought (and can bring) content to the net, lots of non-tech people believe that the government is the only way to impose order in the net.
It doesn't need to be regulated, you say? I'd go so far as to say that it can't be; it's too widespread and international to be regulated. TLD-based regulation would have been an option if the TLDs were actually used correctly. It's fargone that we can't regulate the net. I hope.
Optimistic 'cause he's the future,
Mikey G.
As geeks, we have an easier time configuring things like Gnutella or Freenet. But what about the laypeople? What about John Q. Farmer, who can uses AOL, and had to spend an hour configuring Napster?
The problem with peer-to-peer is that it's just that; there's no one server (or one hundred eighty, or however many) that you can just connect to, you have to find some peers. This is far too much for our not-so-technical buddies.
Right now there are a lot of Gnutella IPs posted on the net. This is fine for now, I guess, but those will probably be the first IPs to be looked into. I mean, netPD looked up all those users, they can look up IPs. They can theoretically cross-reference with ISPs as per actual names and addresses, and then have a lawsuit targeting a bunch of people. This is a Bad Thing. I'm not so up on FreeNet, but from what I understand that solves most of the problems.
Pretty much, until peer-to-peer becomes easy to use, it won't gain a lot of people. The server/client model is extremely popular because it's easy to configure and centralized; it's high time for peer-to-peer to prove itself in the user friendly department.
Mike Greenberg, rambling about stuff he knows little/nothing about (flames will be unappreciated)
While some types of free-as-in-beer software may go IPO and make loads and loads (and charge loads and loads), there will always remain free-as-in-speech software, software that is so dedicated to being free-as-in-beer and open source that they'll never charge you for the software.
OpenBSD is a great example of this. Mozilla, while I'm not all up on it, seems to be dedicated to open source as well. Other systems are so global that it'd be impossible to charge for the next system, like XFree86.
Regardless, we can always fork off of old versions of formerly-open source projects. Like we talked about in a discussion of removal of Junkbuster-esque features from Mozilla, we can always just pick up where they left off.
So, as long as someone (like SourceForge.net ) is keeping CVSs of all this crap. I mean, there may be some hazy legal issues with SourceForge (IANAL), but the geek community tends to disregard most of those anyway. So, to answer your question: I wouldn't worry.
Then again, I'm 15. Erg.
Mike "Doesn't Know What He's Talking About" Greenberg
Spam is nice to rant about, and all, but there's more. So much more. Where do we draw the line? Targetted advertising via Internet? TV? Billboard? Dashboard? Earpiece? Retina? At what point do we stand up and demand to be called by a name and not a database reference? When do we demand our freedom from the technological age? At what point are we going to demand to have lives, not histories?
These questions are so amazingly important not only the in future of the Internet, but in the future of the modern world. Without rhetoric, when will we demand that the interactivity stop? Aren't we people and not IDs? Shouldn't we "Just Say No" to tracking, whether it be electronic or not?
In my wise-ass, surly, 15-year-old opinion, the time is now. The "war on tracking," however, will not go the way of the "war on drugs;" this is a fight that needs to be fought (and won!), and now is the time. We may already be too late; DoubleClick, for instance, is everywhere. This needs to be stopped.
The solution? Well, don't look at me, I'm in high school. I think the solution begins with individually disabled tracking, locally; delete those cookies from DoubleClick, set up a proxy and don't let them in. What we don't need, however, is legislation legitamizing anything, though. We, the geeks, need to stop this from happening. We made the Internet, and it's going to be our job to save it.
Sheesh, you'd think I was Jon Katz, or something.
Mike Greenberg
Spam and junk mail, at the first look, seem very similar. In fact, they are quite different. Those of you geeks who bother to leave the house (myself included) know that you need a stamp to send snail-mail. Stamps, as you know, are not cheap. What is it now, 34 cents? I can't keep track. (I just don't leave the house enough, that's my problem.) To send an e-mail? With an unlimited internet access plan, nothing, really. On bandwidth rated connections it could end up costing you a pretty penny if you were really high volume. Notwithstanding, spam is, on the whole, free to send; junk mail isn't.
This presents quite a conundrum. In the "real" world, junk mail isn't free to send, so there's less of it. Telemarketing isn't viable, either, because you need to pay people. Spam, on the other hand, can be efficiently run on an old computer with a 56K, or 33.6K (if you're patient) modem. What is there to do?
Well, nothing good. Government regulation (as in USA government) of anything on the internet is just wrong -- the internet belongs to no one, at this point. If the government wanted to regulate it, it shouldn't have ever left our borders; not so quickly, at least. It's too late for wide-scale regulation -- it'd be trivial and stupid. Trivial because anyone can route through some foreign server and stupid because it's no one's place to go around making regulations.
As mentioned previously, I think the best solutions are private. Set up some filtering software. Or, god forbid, delete the crap. If you're on a per-bandwidth payment schedule...sorry. It's what you have to deal with. The whole point of freedom is that anyone, not just geeks, can do what they want. If what they want to do is sell printer toner then by all means, sell away.
As a side note, doesn't this all seem a bit trivial to anyone?
Mikey G.
Regardless, all of this arguing is silliness. Printed books will never die; I am surrounded by 4 large bookshelves, stocked with some of the best literature ever. There's 3 or 4 more in the rest of my house. The qualities held in some of these books -- a dog-eared page, faded edges, marks on the page -- contain emotion and feeling, things that cannot be digitized. (I can imagine a lame MS deal where you can 'dog-ear' pages, etc., with stupid animations/graphics, though.) To think that I would abandon this library of sorts and flock to a monitored, pay-per-use system is folly. DIVX failed for a reason, and eBooks will fail for the same.
Also, eBooks seems crackable beyond belief. Because it would be international, the key security on encryption would be 40 bits, if even that. (I think...didn't the US just allow for greater exported encryption, though?) I can't see this succeeding at all, so save your Orwellian daydreams for a more realistic issue.
In our society today, there are two types of stealing: digital and actual. If I steal a CD I will have ethical pains -- I'm not a thief; if I download an MP3 of a song I don't have on any physical medium I have no qualms. Then again, I'm a teenager, so don't look at me for ethics.
Mikey G
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I've never been in a situation in school where computers were the only way to do something. The kids in my school can't look stuff up in an encyclopedia anymore, much less write a bibliography. Instead they're online, looking at hamsterdance.com, some random porn site, or checking their e-mail. There's absolutely nothing productive to be done with computers at school. Sure, there are computer graphics courses (and programming, but they don't have that here), and teachers like things to be typed, but that's a luxury. The entry-level computer classes are simple. Keyboarding is useless (someone else wrote about this): everyone here can type at least 35 wpm, which is more than enough for the illiterate bastards. They can hardly write a proper sentence anyway. I digress.
In conclusion (I love saying that), there shouldn't be computers in school...yeah. Instead of spending all this money on bullshit computer systems that aren't even secure or put together (WINNT 3.0 on a 10mbps network here...yay!) well. I'd rather have smaller class sizes, better teachers, and more books in the library. Argh. [insert witty comment here]
Mikey G.
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Mikey G.
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I can only speak for my school, but for the most part people don't hate me and other geeky/misunderstood. I mean, there are exceptions, but most people wouldn't really care. I think that there are places, however, that would see serious abuse of this, and not the kind you're talking about. I know some people who without a doubt would be considered 'dangerous,' as it were.
I, however, have an idea. How many of you geeks out there are parents or are kids yourselves? Ask your kid's/your principal if they will do WAVE. See if they even know about WAVE. If they do, tell them that you think it would be an awful idea and only divide your kid's/your school more. I suppose. My school never listens to me (about anything), though, so it's a long shot.
I know...we could all just shoot up the schools and kill ourselves, instead! (Kindly note the sarcasm.)
Sick of it all,
Mikey G.
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They asked this college dude whether it bothered him that artists weren't getting money for the songs. He said, naturally, no. I don't mind the answer (I don't download enough music to constitute an album for any specific artist), but they could have at least chosen an eloquent guy. The report attempted to be objective, I think, but they did a shitty job. When the media reports correctly on a tech story I'll eat my hat. I'll have to get a hat, then, too, but it's not happening, so I won't go through the trouble.
Mikey G
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Now, I may be wrong about the lowered funding. I only heard that they have lowered funding because of the lost sales tax. If this is not true, however, it's quite a marvelous idea. It would level the playing field (Which, I believe, does not need levelling: a local business can just as easily get on the internet with a domain name, sell goods, and design a good-looking website. Their one problem would most likely be keeping up with orders. I realize this is idealistic, but hey: I'm young and arrogant.) and also help non-Internet consumers. A good-deal all around.
Er...right.
Mikey G.
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