OK, so what have the top games of the last few years been?
Starsiege Tribes
Age of Empires
CounterStrike
Half-Life
Descent
Quake
Quake 2
Command and Conquer
If I go to Best Buy right now and look for the "game of the year" editions of the various games that won the various "game of the year" awards...how many have skimpily dressed women on them? Not as many as you'd think. Why? Mostly because...well, they're good games, and people buy them because they're good games, they have gotten good reviews, their friends are playing them.
Look at the best selling games of the last few years (in the US anyway). Deer Hunter. Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The ones usually disdained as the "average guy" games.
All that said, I think that No One Lives Forever won a few awards last year....:)
I know this is a huge place to rail on big business, but look at what the topic for this would be if it was in a publisher's trade magazine:
"Freelance Authors Ask Court to Invalidate Contracts"
This is not a case of publishers trying to screw writers. The freelance authors signed the rights to the content away to the publishers. The only thing that the freelance authors have to stand on is that placing the media into a different media is a "revision".
OK, so by that same argument is moving a song from a CD to an MP3 a revision, so you should have to pay for it again, because it's a different version of the song.
You can't have it both ways. The freelance writers are competent adults who signed contracts that gave the rights to the work to the publisher. If you take the stand that making that work electronic constitutes a revision of the work, you're opening the door wide open for everyone to charge you money every time you move something from paper to electronic media.
Oh, if they scan it, is that a revision or not? How about if they scan it and OCR it? How about if they hire a few dozen data entry clerks to type it in, is that a revision? How about if it's audio on a CD and you rip it to a WAV file and put it into an MP3. By the arguments of the freelancers, that's a revision.
rocketscientist.
Re:Welcome to the free world!
on
NSA Inside?
·
· Score: 1
I'll chime in with a hearty "preach it brother".
I think you nailed it. This is the NSA wanting to give back to the community. I'm not seeing the problem here.
In this case we have every capability to look the gift horse square in the mouth and make sure the teeth are all straight and pearly white (or whatever color a horse's teeth are supposed to be).
If this was any other government agency (of any other government, for that matter) we'd be embracing this.
They also sewed up a monopoly on RAM by getting their patents set as the standard for memory.
This is going to be in court for a LONG time. After the patent and standards association dust settles, people will start wondering why memory costs 4 times more than it used to. It won't take long for the antitrust lawyers and class action suits to start.
Oh, and let's not forget. This is the new economy. We don't compete on technological innovation anymore, but on lawyers and marketing.
What, you thought you'd change the world or something? Nope, that's the lawyers' job.
We have both a RaidZone NAS as well as a Network Appliance F740 and a variety of Compaq FibreChannel cabinets.
We're in a CIFS environment (all Windows clients) and the RaidZone has been having issues trying to keep up with the clients, so we're switching that data back to Compaq gear. We purchased the smaller of the two RaidZone offerings (the single-processor model) and it just couldn't keep up, but we were asking a LOT of it (60 users or so, all doing very intense data access). During the testing phase, however, we could keep the RaidZone at about 7 to 12 MBytes/Sec of througput, but that nearly maxed out the CPU. We installed an Intel dual-port NIC and we're using Cisco Fast EtherChannel to get enough network behind it. RaidZone, the model we have anyway, is a good solution for data that's read-heavy but not write-heavy, or a good solution for a smaller environment of say 10-30 users. Their dual-CPU option might have been better for us. We haven't really needed their tech support folks.
So, the RaidZone is good cheap disk, but it's not nearly as fast or as redundant as our Filer. The Filer can fill up it's dual ports completely and it's sitting at 50% CPU. Very cool. The Filer is a total rock, we throw more stuff at it and it keeps sitting there churning out data. It's faster than you could imagine, and it's extremely extremely extremely stable (Sun Nov 26 17:00:00 CST [statd]: 5:00pm up 169 days, 15:40 0 NFS ops, 2519961566 CIFS ops, 78 HTTP ops) (yes, that's 2.5 billion CIFS operations). The only complaint we have about the Filer is the price: we have two (clustered via Tandem ServerNet) and they were very expensive, but very worth it.
I make more money, therefore the government should take a higher percentage of my money away from me than from someone who makes less money, even though I use the same (or even fewer) government services.
Your argument is that people who are successful and work hard should be penalized. ANY progressive tax scheme penalizes good people.
Nader is a socialist. Gore is a little bit less so. Bush is a little bit less so.
There is only ONE choice in this election that makes any sense for people who actually pay taxes: Vote Libertarian. Vote for the party that wants YOU to make decisions, instead of having decisions made for you by the government, which has shown throughout history that it can't do anything right.
Oracle and DB2 have similar clauses in their license agreements that forbid the publication or disclosure of benchmarks without express written consent of the company.
Yes, it's a load of crap, but it's not a "New Innovation" from Redmond. They weren't first, and they actually didn't start to put this into licenses until SQL Server version 7, last year.
This society gives women the right to choose whether or not to have sex, whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, and whether or not to keep the child or put it up for adoption. Why is it MY responsibility to pay for the choices other people make? What gives the government the right to take my money and give it to someone else?
I made lots of choices and overcame a lot of adversity to get where I am. Some people will need to do more, and many will need to do less to get where they want to be.
My whole point is that where people are is the result of the decisions they made, decisions to study or not study, to work more or play more, to have children or not to have children. Immediate gratification versus delayed gratification.
As a society, the US has built up a huge safety net to protect people who choose wrong. As a result, more people choose wrong knowing that their big brother will be there to provide them with bread and circuses.
I'm projecting that Gore will win this presidential race. Why? Because he's promisng the most handouts. Only 43% of the people in this country pay income taxes at all. So, if he promises to hand out more money to people who aren't paying taxes, he gets 57% of the vote. So promising tax cuts and lower amounts of handouts is the losing strategy.
The democracy is ending people. The same way the Romans' did. What's next?
None of the things you mention are significantly funded by the federal government's income tax with the possible exception of education spending. I pay higher property taxes, and get better schools, a tradeoff I'm willing to make. I don't get significantly better services or roads, because I live in the city and not in the 'burbs. Other people may not want to make that decision,
One of the founding fathers said that any government that taxed its people more than 5% would be fostering a heavy burden upon them (www.libertarian.org has the exact quote if you're interested). 33% is way more than that.
As for your housewife example, I think you're missing my point. Why exactly should I be forced to pay for this? I am willing to give more to charitible organizations that help needy people, especially organizations that help build character and a sense of responsibility along with job skills.
Why is the government, which is the least efficient and most heavy-handed of organizations, handling this? Before we started this welfare state it was handled by churches and similar non-religious organizations. Since we started welfare programs, the number of poor (in absolute numbers and as a percentage) has increased. Government programs don't work to reduce the number of poor people.
I'm actually in favor of a head tax. Everyone pays exactly the same amount of money every year. Parents pay for their children. We all derive the same benefit from the government, so we should all pay the same.
OK, first I've seen what auto workers make. And I'm kinda thinking that it's a hell of a lot more than $20K. And we're not voting for president of Mexico or Indonesia, but if we were, at least the folks that are making $0.02 per hour are making that much, where if automakers weren't there the people wouldn't have any income at all. Oh, and I don't drive an SUV. Nyah.
Second, the examples that they're using for all of their campaign rhetoric involve people who have made bad life decisions, either decisions not to get a good education or to have children too early in their lives, usually both. I know not everyone wants to be a computer programmer when they grow up. I also know that if you choose a career that pays $20K per year you probably won't be able to support 3 children, and I happen to think it's not ethical to ask the government to help you with that by giving you money or reducing your taxes to the point where they are nonexistant.
Those of us who actually pay taxes get to pay even more taxes to cover people without enough responsibility to "keep it in their pants" until they can afford to have children. The tax code we have rewards irresponsibility and penalizes responsibility.
Given that the various candidates have been using some sample waitress making $20K per year who has 3 kids and lots of debt, I'm wondering what the respective candidates are going to do for us.
In general, technical folks tend to make good money. We're driving the "new economy", but we're getting taxed like crazy, and we see next to no benefit from the taxes we are paying (the military is less prepared now than in my lifetime, the schools are bad and getting worse, our foreign policy is ineffective at best, and there are more people in prisons than ever before).
Essentially, we're doing well and working hard, and the government is penalizing us for doing the right things and making good decisions.
So, respective candidates or representatives thereof, here's my question: What are you going to do about a federal government that places extremely burdensome taxes on productive, intelligent, hard working citizens who have made good life decisions while it simultaneously rewards unproductive citizens who have made bad life decisions?
We have laws that protect top-secret things. But guess what, if the document leaks to the press the press can report it. There have been cases in the past (a space shuttle lauch in the 80's) where there was a leak and the press all agreed not to publish anything unless someone else did. Someone else did, then everyone else did. Guess what, that's not illegal.
The press can publish anything they want if they can get their hands on it, the secrets acts are all based around trying to prevent the press from getting ahold of things. And when the press does get ahold of secrets, the responsibility part of "freedom of the press" is that they have to decide whether or not to publish it, but the decision that is made is not whether or not they CAN publish it. Welcome to the United States. Go read the Constitution.
Oh, yeah, and normal white-hat practice when you find a security hole is to notify the vendor, give them a "reasonable" amount of time to respond, and if they don't, then you publish. You publish to force action when you can't get it any other way. I look at DeCSS this way: They knew people were working on cracking DVD so they could write players. They didn't do anything to improve their security. They didn't build their security strong enough to keep anyone out. So how do they protect their stuff: litigation.
This is just another great offshoot of our new economy/old economy fight. The old economy companies really see litigation as their sole means of competition. They can't compete technologically (because of their entrenched fear of change) and they're scared of losing control of their markets. Boo-hoo. This isn't 1970 anymore, they're going to have to start looking at better ways to do business than hiring a bunch of lawyers and buying off some congressmen. What happens when the programmers all move to . They publish what they want, and the only recourse is to censor the entire Internet (welcome to China). Even better, you just publish it all anonymously on Gnutella or Freenet.
The real issue here is freedom, not the freedom of "information wants to be free", or the freedom of being able to watch what you want to watch/how you want to watch it. Grow up, information does not want to be free (it actually wants to be about $5.99). And the freedom to watch what you want where you want is not really valid (you get commercials without Tivo, you get previews at the movies, you get the picture).
This is pretty much a judgement against you being able to write the computer programs that you want to write. The US Government is taking a stand here that is going to limit (in an admittedly small way) what you're allowed to write, and what it can do. If we examine this in the light of what the pro-life folks are trying to do (slowly erode granted rights) or what the gun control lobby is trying to do (slowly erode granted rights) we begin to see what's going on here. This is a slow erosion of our rights to be able to create what we want.
Up to now, you could write any software you want. From now on, you'll only be able to write what's not on the government's proscribed list. Soon, you won't be able to write software at all without providing a warranty. The big companies are winning, and we either aren't fighting hard enough or the fight is already over and we've lost.
The FBI and one university story is right above(and linked to via the "previous story" link") the Katz article about how trustworthy a university (or any academic institution) is to do academic research....
You're missing the point. All napster did was remove the porn-banner-factor from finding MP3's. After Napster and the next and next bit of technology all go through litigation, and the RIAA wins (they have more money, and OJ proved that with enough money you can buy justice) what's next?
All of the search engines will have to go. I can't imagine that it'll be cheap for them to remove all possible MP3-type files from their links. OK, so any file named MP3 will not be linked. And you'll all start not naming your files MP3. So, search engines are gone.
Next, there will have to be some agency set up to monitor and block all Internet traffic, to make sure it doesn't contain any music. Any encryption will be illegal, and obfuscation of data will be illegal, because we have to be able to find the pirates, doncha know.
There will still be piracy, they'll have to go after somebody. So, they'll go after the CD-R manufacturers, the hard drive manufacturers, folks like Iomega, Seagate, Maxtor, and IBM, for making it possible to store pirated music. Let's have a big registration program for every piece of writable media. Let's require technological locks on every piece of media that will limit file sizes/file formats. You'll only be able to store on proprietary "approved" media.
Then they'll go after broadband providers, who make it way to easy to pirate music.
OK, so I don't have the extensive MP3 collection, or the time to keep up with the newest stuff coming out of Napter. For those of you that do, this isn't aimed at you. This is aimed at folks like me who live in Kansas City who have no decent radio stations AT ALL (ok, we have a 1000 watt modern rock station that is good that's in the extreme northeastern part of town that you can get with static over some of the city). I want decent radio. I'll pay $10/month to get it with no commercials and -fewer- annoying DJ's. I have a fairly long commute (It's Kansas City, we don't have public transportation, we've got highways). I can get NPR without it fuzzing out on me. I can get good music without the 30-minute commercial marathons that plague our local station.
The local stations here spend 15 minutes every hour playing that one ACDC song, you know, that one. It doesn't matter which one, they all sound alike. Oh, and something from Pink Floyd's The Wall. They put out like 500 albums and they only play stuff from The Wall. It gets really old, folks.
I'm thinking this satellite radio thing will either get me better music directly by subscription or indirectly through competition. Here's hoping anyway.
First, VLF is not very useful for any kind of "modern" usage. Keep in mind that the BPS of a signal can't (without some tricks) exceed the hertz of the signal, and 30 BPS is a bit pokey (if you're sending telegraphy-style messages, it's probably OK, but a decent size picture would take hours). So most of the low bands are out. With respect to the higher bands, keep in mind that under normal atmospheric conditions, there's not adequate propagation for anything above about 30-40 MHz to go beyond line of site. Yeah, there are exceptions (meteor scatter, satellites, moonbounce, various types of tropospheric ducting, etc) but that's the general rule. All that said, the FCC and other countries already belong to a treaty organization that regulates the usage of frequency bands and divvys them up according to usage. The International Telecommunications Union handles almost all of that stuff and act as a pseudo-international FCC organization to an extent. I won't vouch for the goodness/badness of how the ITU works specifically, but the need for such an organization is pretty clear.
I'm looking through the articles posted before me, and they seem to boil down to two arguments for newspapers (community news and readability mechanics) and several arguments against (timliness, expense, and I'll throw in my own "environmentally unfriendly"). I think that the readability mechanics problem will be solved sooner than many people think, and at that point we'll probably be looking at subscription-based electronic information services of some kind to provide commmunity news and events.
An even bigger problem is that the "more educated" part of the newspaper-reading demographic is getting tired of reading things at the 2nd grade reading level that the average newspaper is written to. As a result, while newspapers tend to provide information on issues, it's at such a low level that there isn't enough information on some topics and too much condescencion(sp) on the other topics. And it's a lot harder for me to click a link in my newspaper to get somewhere for more information (heh).
For example, when the local media covered the DDOS attacks last week, they glossed over a lot of things that I found interesting and wanted to know more about. On the other hand, they were very careful to make sure that I knew what the Internet is a group of computer networks.
Before the rise of Internet news services like the sites provided by CNN, ABCNews, and (gasp) MSNBC, I didn't have much choice on where I got my news unless I wanted to spend a couple hours at a library reading papers from around the world. Now I can get summarized news and dig in to what I'm interested in to the level I'm interested in spending time on it, without relying on some editor at a newspaper with different priorities than mine.
Face it: newspapers are written to speak to the lowest common denominator in our society. We (we meaning "Slashdot readers") tend to be a much better educated group, and I for one don't have the patience to put up with a newspaper that's talking to me like I was 6 years old.
I think you're missing the point. DoD asked him to change the story, and he made a decision based on his personal values to make (or not make for all I know) the changes that he made (if any).
My point is, he made a decision to do something after his government asked him to, not after someone told him to. He could have been "courageous" and put in more material that was classified, but he understands that sometimes things get classified for a reason, like to protect our soldiers in the line of fire. I can respect that.
I'd be ticked off if the US Govt wasn't. Think about it. If they weren't making the preparations, and the need arises (heaven forbid) that they would need to declare martial law, they'd be in trouble.
I mean, if they prepare for it, everyone gets scared. If they don't prepare for it, we think they're unprepared and everyone gets scared.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so what have the top games of the last few years been?
Starsiege Tribes
Age of Empires
CounterStrike
Half-Life
Descent
Quake
Quake 2
Command and Conquer
If I go to Best Buy right now and look for the "game of the year" editions of the various games that won the various "game of the year" awards...how many have skimpily dressed women on them? Not as many as you'd think. Why? Mostly because...well, they're good games, and people buy them because they're good games, they have gotten good reviews, their friends are playing them.
Look at the best selling games of the last few years (in the US anyway). Deer Hunter. Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The ones usually disdained as the "average guy" games.
All that said, I think that No One Lives Forever won a few awards last year....:)
rocketscientist.
Actually, rec.humor.funny has been around since the dawn of time. Or at least the dawn of usenet.
Yeah, pretty much the rest aren't funny. Rec.humor.funny is the only moderated ones, the rest are just massive flamefests. Or, they were anyway.
And I think this templeton guy has been moderating it for years.
rocketscientist.
I know this is a huge place to rail on big business, but look at what the topic for this would be if it was in a publisher's trade magazine:
"Freelance Authors Ask Court to Invalidate Contracts"
This is not a case of publishers trying to screw writers. The freelance authors signed the rights to the content away to the publishers. The only thing that the freelance authors have to stand on is that placing the media into a different media is a "revision".
OK, so by that same argument is moving a song from a CD to an MP3 a revision, so you should have to pay for it again, because it's a different version of the song.
You can't have it both ways. The freelance writers are competent adults who signed contracts that gave the rights to the work to the publisher. If you take the stand that making that work electronic constitutes a revision of the work, you're opening the door wide open for everyone to charge you money every time you move something from paper to electronic media.
Oh, if they scan it, is that a revision or not? How about if they scan it and OCR it? How about if they hire a few dozen data entry clerks to type it in, is that a revision? How about if it's audio on a CD and you rip it to a WAV file and put it into an MP3. By the arguments of the freelancers, that's a revision.
rocketscientist.
I'll chime in with a hearty "preach it brother".
I think you nailed it. This is the NSA wanting to give back to the community. I'm not seeing the problem here.
In this case we have every capability to look the gift horse square in the mouth and make sure the teeth are all straight and pearly white (or whatever color a horse's teeth are supposed to be).
If this was any other government agency (of any other government, for that matter) we'd be embracing this.
rocketscientist.
Wow. A good argument from a reasonable-sounding person. Is that allowed on slashdot?
rocketscientist.
Maybe just name it "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US"
Wow, you're right, they have the patents.
They also sewed up a monopoly on RAM by getting their patents set as the standard for memory.
This is going to be in court for a LONG time. After the patent and standards association dust settles, people will start wondering why memory costs 4 times more than it used to. It won't take long for the antitrust lawyers and class action suits to start.
Oh, and let's not forget. This is the new economy. We don't compete on technological innovation anymore, but on lawyers and marketing.
What, you thought you'd change the world or something? Nope, that's the lawyers' job.
We have both a RaidZone NAS as well as a Network Appliance F740 and a variety of Compaq FibreChannel cabinets.
We're in a CIFS environment (all Windows clients) and the RaidZone has been having issues trying to keep up with the clients, so we're switching that data back to Compaq gear. We purchased the smaller of the two RaidZone offerings (the single-processor model) and it just couldn't keep up, but we were asking a LOT of it (60 users or so, all doing very intense data access). During the testing phase, however, we could keep the RaidZone at about 7 to 12 MBytes/Sec of througput, but that nearly maxed out the CPU. We installed an Intel dual-port NIC and we're using Cisco Fast EtherChannel to get enough network behind it. RaidZone, the model we have anyway, is a good solution for data that's read-heavy but not write-heavy, or a good solution for a smaller environment of say 10-30 users. Their dual-CPU option might have been better for us. We haven't really needed their tech support folks.
So, the RaidZone is good cheap disk, but it's not nearly as fast or as redundant as our Filer. The Filer can fill up it's dual ports completely and it's sitting at 50% CPU. Very cool. The Filer is a total rock, we throw more stuff at it and it keeps sitting there churning out data. It's faster than you could imagine, and it's extremely extremely extremely stable (Sun Nov 26 17:00:00 CST [statd]: 5:00pm up 169 days, 15:40 0 NFS ops, 2519961566 CIFS ops, 78 HTTP ops) (yes, that's 2.5 billion CIFS operations). The only complaint we have about the Filer is the price: we have two (clustered via Tandem ServerNet) and they were very expensive, but very worth it.
chris.
Let me see if I understand your point.
I make more money, therefore the government should take a higher percentage of my money away from me than from someone who makes less money, even though I use the same (or even fewer) government services.
Your argument is that people who are successful and work hard should be penalized. ANY progressive tax scheme penalizes good people.
Nader is a socialist. Gore is a little bit less so. Bush is a little bit less so.
There is only ONE choice in this election that makes any sense for people who actually pay taxes: Vote Libertarian. Vote for the party that wants YOU to make decisions, instead of having decisions made for you by the government, which has shown throughout history that it can't do anything right.
Oracle and DB2 have similar clauses in their license agreements that forbid the publication or disclosure of benchmarks without express written consent of the company.
Yes, it's a load of crap, but it's not a "New Innovation" from Redmond. They weren't first, and they actually didn't start to put this into licenses until SQL Server version 7, last year.
This society gives women the right to choose whether or not to have sex, whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, and whether or not to keep the child or put it up for adoption. Why is it MY responsibility to pay for the choices other people make? What gives the government the right to take my money and give it to someone else?
I made lots of choices and overcame a lot of adversity to get where I am. Some people will need to do more, and many will need to do less to get where they want to be.
My whole point is that where people are is the result of the decisions they made, decisions to study or not study, to work more or play more, to have children or not to have children. Immediate gratification versus delayed gratification.
As a society, the US has built up a huge safety net to protect people who choose wrong. As a result, more people choose wrong knowing that their big brother will be there to provide them with bread and circuses.
I'm projecting that Gore will win this presidential race. Why? Because he's promisng the most handouts. Only 43% of the people in this country pay income taxes at all. So, if he promises to hand out more money to people who aren't paying taxes, he gets 57% of the vote. So promising tax cuts and lower amounts of handouts is the losing strategy.
The democracy is ending people. The same way the Romans' did. What's next?
Ok, your points, in order:
None of the things you mention are significantly funded by the federal government's income tax with the possible exception of education spending. I pay higher property taxes, and get better schools, a tradeoff I'm willing to make. I don't get significantly better services or roads, because I live in the city and not in the 'burbs. Other people may not want to make that decision,
One of the founding fathers said that any government that taxed its people more than 5% would be fostering a heavy burden upon them (www.libertarian.org has the exact quote if you're interested). 33% is way more than that.
As for your housewife example, I think you're missing my point. Why exactly should I be forced to pay for this? I am willing to give more to charitible organizations that help needy people, especially organizations that help build character and a sense of responsibility along with job skills.
Why is the government, which is the least efficient and most heavy-handed of organizations, handling this? Before we started this welfare state it was handled by churches and similar non-religious organizations. Since we started welfare programs, the number of poor (in absolute numbers and as a percentage) has increased. Government programs don't work to reduce the number of poor people.
Very simple answer.
They're going to spend the money. Chances are good they won't use it to pay off the debt. I'd rather them give me my money back than spend it.
It's not a budget surplus. It's overtaxation.
I'm actually in favor of a head tax. Everyone pays exactly the same amount of money every year. Parents pay for their children. We all derive the same benefit from the government, so we should all pay the same.
I'm only kinda joking.
OK, first I've seen what auto workers make. And I'm kinda thinking that it's a hell of a lot more than $20K. And we're not voting for president of Mexico or Indonesia, but if we were, at least the folks that are making $0.02 per hour are making that much, where if automakers weren't there the people wouldn't have any income at all. Oh, and I don't drive an SUV. Nyah.
Second, the examples that they're using for all of their campaign rhetoric involve people who have made bad life decisions, either decisions not to get a good education or to have children too early in their lives, usually both. I know not everyone wants to be a computer programmer when they grow up. I also know that if you choose a career that pays $20K per year you probably won't be able to support 3 children, and I happen to think it's not ethical to ask the government to help you with that by giving you money or reducing your taxes to the point where they are nonexistant.
Those of us who actually pay taxes get to pay even more taxes to cover people without enough responsibility to "keep it in their pants" until they can afford to have children. The tax code we have rewards irresponsibility and penalizes responsibility.
Given that the various candidates have been using some sample waitress making $20K per year who has 3 kids and lots of debt, I'm wondering what the respective candidates are going to do for us.
In general, technical folks tend to make good money. We're driving the "new economy", but we're getting taxed like crazy, and we see next to no benefit from the taxes we are paying (the military is less prepared now than in my lifetime, the schools are bad and getting worse, our foreign policy is ineffective at best, and there are more people in prisons than ever before).
Essentially, we're doing well and working hard, and the government is penalizing us for doing the right things and making good decisions.
So, respective candidates or representatives thereof, here's my question: What are you going to do about a federal government that places extremely burdensome taxes on productive, intelligent, hard working citizens who have made good life decisions while it simultaneously rewards unproductive citizens who have made bad life decisions?
We have laws that protect top-secret things. But guess what, if the document leaks to the press the press can report it. There have been cases in the past (a space shuttle lauch in the 80's) where there was a leak and the press all agreed not to publish anything unless someone else did. Someone else did, then everyone else did. Guess what, that's not illegal.
The press can publish anything they want if they can get their hands on it, the secrets acts are all based around trying to prevent the press from getting ahold of things. And when the press does get ahold of secrets, the responsibility part of "freedom of the press" is that they have to decide whether or not to publish it, but the decision that is made is not whether or not they CAN publish it. Welcome to the United States. Go read the Constitution.
Oh, yeah, and normal white-hat practice when you find a security hole is to notify the vendor, give them a "reasonable" amount of time to respond, and if they don't, then you publish. You publish to force action when you can't get it any other way. I look at DeCSS this way: They knew people were working on cracking DVD so they could write players. They didn't do anything to improve their security. They didn't build their security strong enough to keep anyone out. So how do they protect their stuff: litigation.
This is just another great offshoot of our new economy/old economy fight. The old economy companies really see litigation as their sole means of competition. They can't compete technologically (because of their entrenched fear of change) and they're scared of losing control of their markets. Boo-hoo. This isn't 1970 anymore, they're going to have to start looking at better ways to do business than hiring a bunch of lawyers and buying off some congressmen. What happens when the programmers all move to . They publish what they want, and the only recourse is to censor the entire Internet (welcome to China). Even better, you just publish it all anonymously on Gnutella or Freenet.
chris.
The real issue here is freedom, not the freedom of "information wants to be free", or the freedom of being able to watch what you want to watch/how you want to watch it. Grow up, information does not want to be free (it actually wants to be about $5.99). And the freedom to watch what you want where you want is not really valid (you get commercials without Tivo, you get previews at the movies, you get the picture).
This is pretty much a judgement against you being able to write the computer programs that you want to write. The US Government is taking a stand here that is going to limit (in an admittedly small way) what you're allowed to write, and what it can do. If we examine this in the light of what the pro-life folks are trying to do (slowly erode granted rights) or what the gun control lobby is trying to do (slowly erode granted rights) we begin to see what's going on here. This is a slow erosion of our rights to be able to create what we want.
Up to now, you could write any software you want. From now on, you'll only be able to write what's not on the government's proscribed list. Soon, you won't be able to write software at all without providing a warranty. The big companies are winning, and we either aren't fighting hard enough or the fight is already over and we've lost.
How long until the revolution?
The FBI and one university story is right above(and linked to via the "previous story" link") the Katz article about how trustworthy a university (or any academic institution) is to do academic research....
You're missing the point. All napster did was remove the porn-banner-factor from finding MP3's. After Napster and the next and next bit of technology all go through litigation, and the RIAA wins (they have more money, and OJ proved that with enough money you can buy justice) what's next?
All of the search engines will have to go. I can't imagine that it'll be cheap for them to remove all possible MP3-type files from their links. OK, so any file named MP3 will not be linked. And you'll all start not naming your files MP3. So, search engines are gone.
Next, there will have to be some agency set up to monitor and block all Internet traffic, to make sure it doesn't contain any music. Any encryption will be illegal, and obfuscation of data will be illegal, because we have to be able to find the pirates, doncha know.
There will still be piracy, they'll have to go after somebody. So, they'll go after the CD-R manufacturers, the hard drive manufacturers, folks like Iomega, Seagate, Maxtor, and IBM, for making it possible to store pirated music. Let's have a big registration program for every piece of writable media. Let's require technological locks on every piece of media that will limit file sizes/file formats. You'll only be able to store on proprietary "approved" media.
Then they'll go after broadband providers, who make it way to easy to pirate music.
Very farfetched. I hope.
chris.
OK, so I don't have the extensive MP3 collection, or the time to keep up with the newest stuff coming out of Napter. For those of you that do, this isn't aimed at you. This is aimed at folks like me who live in Kansas City who have no decent radio stations AT ALL (ok, we have a 1000 watt modern rock station that is good that's in the extreme northeastern part of town that you can get with static over some of the city). I want decent radio. I'll pay $10/month to get it with no commercials and -fewer- annoying DJ's. I have a fairly long commute (It's Kansas City, we don't have public transportation, we've got highways). I can get NPR without it fuzzing out on me. I can get good music without the 30-minute commercial marathons that plague our local station.
The local stations here spend 15 minutes every hour playing that one ACDC song, you know, that one. It doesn't matter which one, they all sound alike. Oh, and something from Pink Floyd's The Wall. They put out like 500 albums and they only play stuff from The Wall. It gets really old, folks.
I'm thinking this satellite radio thing will either get me better music directly by subscription or indirectly through competition. Here's hoping anyway.
First, VLF is not very useful for any kind of "modern" usage. Keep in mind that the BPS of a signal can't (without some tricks) exceed the hertz of the signal, and 30 BPS is a bit pokey (if you're sending telegraphy-style messages, it's probably OK, but a decent size picture would take hours). So most of the low bands are out. With respect to the higher bands, keep in mind that under normal atmospheric conditions, there's not adequate propagation for anything above about 30-40 MHz to go beyond line of site. Yeah, there are exceptions (meteor scatter, satellites, moonbounce, various types of tropospheric ducting, etc) but that's the general rule. All that said, the FCC and other countries already belong to a treaty organization that regulates the usage of frequency bands and divvys them up according to usage. The International Telecommunications Union handles almost all of that stuff and act as a pseudo-international FCC organization to an extent. I won't vouch for the goodness/badness of how the ITU works specifically, but the need for such an organization is pretty clear.
I'm looking through the articles posted before me, and they seem to boil down to two arguments for newspapers (community news and readability mechanics) and several arguments against (timliness, expense, and I'll throw in my own "environmentally unfriendly"). I think that the readability mechanics problem will be solved sooner than many people think, and at that point we'll probably be looking at subscription-based electronic information services of some kind to provide commmunity news and events.
An even bigger problem is that the "more educated" part of the newspaper-reading demographic is getting tired of reading things at the 2nd grade reading level that the average newspaper is written to. As a result, while newspapers tend to provide information on issues, it's at such a low level that there isn't enough information on some topics and too much condescencion(sp) on the other topics. And it's a lot harder for me to click a link in my newspaper to get somewhere for more information (heh).
For example, when the local media covered the DDOS attacks last week, they glossed over a lot of things that I found interesting and wanted to know more about. On the other hand, they were very careful to make sure that I knew what the Internet is a group of computer networks.
Before the rise of Internet news services like the sites provided by CNN, ABCNews, and (gasp) MSNBC, I didn't have much choice on where I got my news unless I wanted to spend a couple hours at a library reading papers from around the world. Now I can get summarized news and dig in to what I'm interested in to the level I'm interested in spending time on it, without relying on some editor at a newspaper with different priorities than mine.
Face it: newspapers are written to speak to the lowest common denominator in our society. We (we meaning "Slashdot readers") tend to be a much better educated group, and I for one don't have the patience to put up with a newspaper that's talking to me like I was 6 years old.
I think you're missing the point. DoD asked him to change the story, and he made a decision based on his personal values to make (or not make for all I know) the changes that he made (if any).
My point is, he made a decision to do something after his government asked him to, not after someone told him to. He could have been "courageous" and put in more material that was classified, but he understands that sometimes things get classified for a reason, like to protect our soldiers in the line of fire. I can respect that.
I'd be ticked off if the US Govt wasn't. Think about it. If they weren't making the preparations, and the need arises (heaven forbid) that they would need to declare martial law, they'd be in trouble.
I mean, if they prepare for it, everyone gets scared. If they don't prepare for it, we think they're unprepared and everyone gets scared.