I don't see freenet having those issues though. Node administrators for sure, but not freenet users. Freenet users don't really have keys or even any necessary knowledge of the technical layer of encryption. They need to know how to connect to a node.
You have a misunderstanding. Every freenet user is a node administrator. The freenet node is what actually does all the work. Every user runs a node, and every node has a data store. The node has a web interface on port localhost:8888, to which a browser can connect, so that the user can see the files in freenet in a comfortable and familiar environment.
Beyond that, if the user plans to publish content within freenet, then he must understand the basic freenet concepts of keys, keypairs, hops to live, and so on.
Even if you have a $2,000/month mechanic bill, it doesn't give you the right to steal tires. Or something.
Once again, someone has fallen into the propaganda trap put forth by the content industries. You've taken a discussion about copyright infringement and made an analogy about theft in physical space. The two cases have nothing in common. Physical objects are composed of matter. They can only be in one place at a time. TV shows are made up of either photons or bytes, depending on how you're watching them. They can exist in an infinite number of places at once.
Any analogy between theft of physical objects, and infringement of copyrights on expressions of ideas, is wrong. Not just "flawed" -- it's wrong through and through, and it can't be fixed.
It's important to acknowledge that a TV-Rip is not of DVD quality. Hell, it isn't even of TV quality, most of the time.
In my experience, they're usually HDTV quality (which is in the same ballpark as DVD quality), but lossily encoded, and with some artifacts. If you get lucky, the artifacts will be minimal -- a half-second jump, etc. More commonly, there will be at least one major artifact per episode, such as white streaks across the middle of the picture for a few seconds, or "block meltdown" for a few seconds, or the like. It seems to be a crap-shoot, but I've seen some really high-quality work out there.
Given that I grew up with broadcast television (VHF and UHF), what I consider "TV quality" is a hell of a lot worse than that.
If I had the equipment, I'd just do my own recordings. But I don't really feel like investing in a video capture card (plus the hassle of finding one with Free drivers for Linux -- if one even exists!), finding a coax jack near my computer, running a coax line to it, then trying to figure out how to get software to record it and encode it... since I only watch one or two shows.
enter your site, answer some questions and you will get the correct code for a meta tag for your site/page
Aha! (Why don't they put things like that in the article?) By the way, I never did manage to find the questionnaire part where it's supposed to generate a label for you, but that's not really what I wanted anyway. The full set of labels and their meanings is what I actually needed.
How do I actually put one of these so-called ratings on my web site? I want everyone to know that my mail tutorial and my picture of myself in my T-shirt (and so on) are not safe for children, old ladies, hamsters, or gastropods. In fact, all multicellular organisms should beware! I'm not currently in Utah, but I don't think that should be an excuse. It's clearly my civic duty to warn everyone, regardless of their geographic location, that my "content" is dangerous. After all, someone might mirror it.
So how do I do it? Is there a "meta" tag I need to put in? Do I need to have a special file in each directory, like robots.txt?
If you need instructions on how to use a condom, I'd prefer you allowed Darwinian evolution to do its thing.;-)
I believe you have it backwards. Failure to use a condom properly would spread the genes you seem to find undesirable.
On a more serious note, proper use of a condom is not quite as intuitive as you seem to think. Condoms with a reservoir tip need to have the tip pinched shut while it's being rolled onto the penis. Condoms without one need to have about a quarter of an inch pinched shut for the same purpose. And of course there are always the standard disclaimers for those who aren't quite thinking straight at the moment of passion: never reuse a condom, and never try to wear multiple condoms at the same time. Finally, be sure to hold the condom tightly against the penis while withdrawing.
That should cover about 98% of it. The rest, I'll leave to the professionals.
I have a half-formed conspiracy theory which states that if anyone ever sets up a fully distributed peer-to-peer mirror of a large file with high demand before posting the story to slashdot, one or more of the following will come to pass:
The slashdot editors will reject the story.
One of the four-letter "content" cartels will sue someone over it.
Cows will be seen flying barrel-rolls over the Pentagon.
The world as we know it will come to an end.
Ian Clarke will write something in a portable language instead of Java.;-)
It sometimes seems that slashdot is an active Tool Of The Industry (conspiracy caps) aimed at destroying any small independent publishers by intentionally not mirroring anything.
I think he was using "WTF" as "Why The Fuck" in that particular paragraph. And in "Wtf are the Romans putting cities are pure rock!", the second "are" was clearly supposed to be "on" or "in".
Alpha Centauri might still be fun if you could play it online so you are matched against players and not the lame AI's.
It has perfectly good Play By E-Mail (PBEM) capabilities. Well, OK, not perfect... there are some major bugs that pop up in multi-player mode. If you join a PBEM SMAC game, you'll usually end up agreeing to a set of rules in advance (no exploiting this bug, no exploiting that bug, etc.). Since such a game usually lasts for months, it's not for everyone. But you might want to try it some time.
I didn't like Alpha Centauri [...] and that the only way to keep order is through blatant mind control of "drones".
Well, "drones" are just "unhappy workers" from Civ2, with a different label slapped on 'em. "Talents" are just "happy workers". "Psych" is just "luxuries". It's incredibly obvious to those of us who've played both games that all they did was slap a different name and picture on the exact same concept and virtually the same implementation. (I think there's a subtle difference in how happiness is calculated, but that's a side issue.)
So if it makes you more comfortable, you can just think of "Doctors" as "Elvises", and so on.
And I really liked the Gaia aspect. If you pollute the planet, it fights back. That's just cool.:)
I'm into exploration and planning of cities and infrastructure. Once the whole world gets revealed, Civ bores me. [...] Maybe I just don't like 4x games at all.
No, you're right -- they all tend to drag on and on toward the endgame. Once you have half of the planet's resources under your direct control, you're going to win; it's just a matter of endurance to get to the end. (With the AI in these games, you really only need something like 1/3 to ensure victory.) This is simply the nature of the genre; I've never seen any 4x game that is as fun at the end as it is in the beginning.
SMAC's "vote for me as supreme leader and end this charade" is one of its saving graces. It saves you 50 turns of boring mop-up if you're going for military victory. Once you've conquered 3/4 of the world, you can just end it.
Or play as the Eco-freaks... subduing worms is the most unbalancing ability ever!
Nope. The most unbalancing abilities are Clean Reactors (to make units that don't require upkeep), or Dissociative Wave in the Alien Crossfire expansion pack (which makes your choppers ignore the Anti-Aircraft ability of defending units).
Capturing mind worms is great in the early game, but they seriously lack punch by the time your opponents have Trance ability (and/or 3Res armor, in the Crossfire expansion). Their best use is really exploration and pod-grabbing. (This is especially true for the Isles of the Deep, the aquatic worms. Make a gunship, keep running into the fungus until you manage to turn up a wild IoD, capture it, and voila -- you now have the perfect exploration vessel, especially if you got one far enough away from your bases to be "Independent".)
The Loki installer (for SMAC et al.) uses historically correct/bin/sh syntax that breaks under bash 3.0. Since Debian unstable (and sarge, too) now has bash 3.0 as the default shell, this means you'll have a bit of a tough time running the installer. (And if you edit it, as I did, you'll have to redo the md5sum manually... or perform equivalent hacking.)
Obviously, running it under bash 2.x or ksh should also suffice. I haven't tried that personally, though, except for back in days when bash 2.x was the default shell.;-)
As long as I'm here, I might as well also point out that the Linux port of SMAC is actually better than the Windows version. We beta-testers found some of the annoying little bugs, and convinced Loki to fix them, on the grounds that they didn't change gameplay. (Example: the number of talents/drones shown in the main city display is often incorrect in the Windows version; you have to click the PSYCH button to see the real count. This is fixed in the Loki port; but it's still broken for the alien factions (Progenitor/Usurper), probably because nobody tested it with them. I didn't notice the bug in the alien factions until Loki had already gone out of business. I rarely play as the aliens.)
You're using funny math. Been taking lessons from the RIAA lately?
The part you omitted in your analysis of Freenet is the caching of popular content. If I request a key that 75% of all the Freenet nodes already have (like, say, the HTML text of the "Caveat Lector" page from The Freedom Engine, which hasn't changed in months), then the odds are quite good that I'll get it from the first node I talk to, rather than having to follow a chain of 24 relays.
You don't anonymously receive and send packets on the Internet, you have a designated IP address and that can be followed to you.
That's where designs like Freenet (also Freenet) come in. You can trade ease and bandwidth-efficiency for a smidgeon of anonymity -- not in the sense of "they can't tell I'm running Freenet", but in the lesser plausible deniability sense: "I didn't ask for that file; I was just relaying another node's requests."
In theory, a Freenet node is supposed to cache all of the requests that pass through it, but in practice, it doesn't work very well just yet.... Well, maybe if we're lucky, our children will have free speech before they die.
Use standard GNU autoconf for the builds. Get rid of all the code that says things like "#ifdef HPUX... then do this and that and this and that because HP's C++ compiler (no, not that one, the other one... and that specific version, too!) can't make a negative zero or some such tomfoolery... #endif". When I try to build Firefox 1.0 (One Point Fucking Oh!) on HP-UX 10.20 it falls over and dies because I'm not using HP's C++ compiler... nor the other one... and especially not that version... I'm using gcc! What do you think I am, an idiot? Why would I use anything but gcc/g++?
But it's worse than that. A few simple platform-checking #ifdefs could be fixed, the code converted into autoconf checks and replaced with HAS_FOO macros... but no. The build tree isn't even a tree -- it's a fucking forest! There are like 17 different build trees, each one gnarly and moss-covered and subtly (or not so subtly) different from the next, all plastered together into one shambling mass of code. Some of the sub-trees hard code ld -foo -bar -ZxCvB commands instead of invoking $(CXX) to be the linker. Some of them hard code cc as the compiler instead of using $(CC). I shit you not. Oh, and you can't type "make" in a sub-trees to build just that sub-tree. You have to start all over from the top level. After a few days, I gave up.
It's bad, folks. Really, really bad.
I'd be embarrassed to release something like that as a 1.0 version. 0.6 alpha 2? Sure thing, no problem. But 1.0 is supposed to be finished.
P.S.: your "Firefox" code still unpacks itself in a directory named "mozilla". Not "mozilla-1.7" or "firefox-1.0" either... just plain "mozilla". It looks like a CVS snapshot to me.
No, it's a link to a.php script that has a JPEG file as one of its parameters. But it's a perfectly legitimate link, and the JPEG does indeed appear to be a letter from an MPAA lawyer. No tomfoolery detected.
There would be nothing in/usr/bin of any consequence. In fact if you were to do a "rm -rf/usr/bin/*" (or whatever) and then reboot, the runtime composer would build the "correct" contents for the directories from the "real" package locations.
You're insane. The story is "What's Wrong with Unix?", not "How Can I Make Unix Not Worth Using Any More?".
You seem to have mistaken Unix for a single-user PC. This is a humongous step backward.
and when a newbie comes walking through the door we're glad to help, no matter how stupid the question is. (Hey, the easier the question the easier it is to help, right?)
No. The easier and stupider the question is, the more I just want to pound my head against a brick wall.
Just wait 5 or 10 years, and we'll see how eager you are to answer Yet Another Newbie asking for the name of the package with make in it.(*)
(*) Answer: make (**) Yes, we REALLY DO get questions that stupid.
For a really good time, try going into #debian on freenode and asking any question, no matter how esoteric. You're bound to get about three or four RTFMs
Well, maybe that's because you:
Did not read the channel topic.
Did not read the channel FAQ whose URL is the very first thing in the channel topic.
Did not read the channel guidelines that the bots sent you in private/msg when you joined the channel.
Did not ask the channel bots any obvious questions.
Did not read the man page for whatever command you were using.
Did not search Google for the error message you received.
Did not tell the channel what command you were using.
Did not tell the channel what error message you received.
Did not tell the channel what you are trying to accomplish.
Are running Knoppix, MEPIS, Ubuntu, Gentoo or Fedora instead of Debian.
Or, the greatest mortal sin of all time:
Came into #debian with the intent of telling us how elitist we are and attempting to change us.
But no, we're the bad guys if we tell you to read "man ls" instead of taking 5 minutes to type out part of the man page for you and explain it to you like we would to a pre-schooler.
No, people do not have the right to make and distribute copies of a work because they "have the information".
Yes, they do.
Imagine you see a really cool rainbow one day. You paint a picture of it. You have now made a copy. Who gave you the "right" to do that? NOBODY! Nobody had to! It is your "right" to do that, simply because it is within your power to do it, and it does not hurt anyone.
Start with that basic analogy and work up the line.
Suppose you see a rather beautiful woman on the sidewalk one day. As she looks to the side of the sidewalk, at a store window, she sees a magnificent dress in the window. She's captivated by it, and makes the most incredibly expressive exclamation of joy and rapture you've ever seen. You happen to have your camera out, and you take a photograph of her in this pose.
Who gave you the "right" to take this photograph? Nobody. Have you harmed anyone? No. And yet... this is somehow considered a different issue from the rainbow, because a woman walking on the sidewalk has some sort of expectation of personal privacy, even in a public place. You haven't broken any laws; you're allowed to take this photograph for personal use. In some jurisdictions, you're probably even allowed to distribute copies of it without her permission.
Let's say you've got a VCR and a subscription to a cable television service. Your friend has a VCR, but she doesn't subscribe to cable TV; she only gets locally broadcast signals. Now, one day you record a really cool show that's being shown on one of the cable networks. You take the video tape over to your friend's house and play it for her in her VCR. She loves the show! She asks you to make a copy of it for her, so she can show it to her husband when he gets home from work.
Who gave you the "right" to do this for her? Nobody! You don't need permission to help your friend and make her happy. It's your "right" as a human being to do anything you damn well please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
Did you hurt anyone by making a copy of a video tape for her? No! There's no other way she could get this show. Even if she subscribed to cable TV, it's too late; the show won't come on again. It's not being sold in stores. So you can't even come up with some whiny corporate-protectionist "lost revenue" fascist bullshit excuse. You have a right to copy things. By default.
Now, we get to the part of the story where everyone gets all upset and emotional. Let's say you have a DVD with a movie on it. It's a movie that was produced as a "work for hire" by a corporation in the US, and was published in a full commercial release, with (C) symbols on it, advertising, affiliated merchandising, etc. The whole enchilada.
Let's say your friend also doesn't have a DVD player. She wants to watch the movie, though, so she asks you if you could make a copy onto VHS tape and bring it over. You do this, and the two of you watch the movie together. Then you take the VHS copy back home with you.
Is that copyright infringement, if you don't leave the VHS tape at her house? To be honest, I don't know. Morally, it's clearly no different from the case where you bring both your DVD player and your DVD to her house, hook them up, watch the movie with her, then take it all back home with you. The only difference in this case is that you had less stuff to carry around, at the cost of a lower-quality home theater experience.
Is it copyright infringement if you let her borrow the VHS tape for a while? I think most people in the US would say "yes", because you still have the DVD, and you can watch the DVD while she's watching the VHS tape. But it's clearly a gray area.
Is it copyright infringement if you give her the VHS tape as a gift? Again, most people in the US would probably say "yes". This is a much darker gray area than the previous question. Yet, there are certainly countries in the world where this would not be
Dijjer's a nice thing, but it's nowhere near being a hybrid of BT and Freenet. Dijjer still enforces the need for a central, original server, and every Dijjer download contacts that central web server to get the HTTP headers before it hits the Dijjer peers to get the data. If the original web server goes away or gets slashdotted under a million HEAD requests, you get no file. For that very same reason, there's no anonymity -- not for publishers and not for requesters. So it's really got very little in common with Freenet.
Also, it doesn't work very well just yet. Give it a bit more time.
But for what it's designed for, which is to ease the burden on traditional content distributors, it seems pretty promising.
Someone who takes the product without paying is by definition not a "customer." Customers pay.
You fucking troll. Get a real argument. No, better yet, don't get an argument -- just go back to your television and leave the interwebthing to those of us with functional brains.
I've been boycotting the RIAA for over one year now. I was hoping I wouldn't have to boycott the MPAA too -- oh well, I guess I have to.
I will not give them ANY MORE of my money.
What's that? Yes, you, the troll with the blue shirt... you want to know how I can say "ANY MORE" when I didn't give them any money in the first place because I'm a "MUVIE THEIF" [sic]?
Well, I have news for you. I've bought literally thousands of dollars worth of CDs in the past. That's done now, except for used CDs and non-RIAA releases. When they started suing people, they lost me as a customer. A damned good, paying customer, too.
I haven't bought so many movies. Movies aren't really my thing. My wife buys just about every kids' movie that comes out, though.
I'll have to find a diplomatic way to avoid going with her to see Spongebob when it comes out this weekend. Not that I was really interesting in going in the first place, but... well, those of you who are married will understand.
/me recommends Snow Crash as the first book (then Cryptonomicon)---the Boroque Cycle tends to get a bit looooong after a very short while.
Ironically, that's a very good review. "If you speak in IRCisms on a web forum, and can't spell 'Baroque', then you probably won't like Stephenson's latest trilogy."
That sums it up pretty well.
(Disclaimer: I haven't read The System of the World yet; I've only read the first two books of that trilogy.)
Slashdot Mirror
Go see Greg Wooledge's wiki
Just not all at once, please.
I don't see freenet having those issues though. Node administrators for sure, but not freenet users. Freenet users don't really have keys or even any necessary knowledge of the technical layer of encryption. They need to know how to connect to a node.
You have a misunderstanding. Every freenet user is a node administrator. The freenet node is what actually does all the work. Every user runs a node, and every node has a data store. The node has a web interface on port localhost:8888, to which a browser can connect, so that the user can see the files in freenet in a comfortable and familiar environment.
Beyond that, if the user plans to publish content within freenet, then he must understand the basic freenet concepts of keys, keypairs, hops to live, and so on.
Even if you have a $2,000/month mechanic bill, it doesn't give you the right to steal tires. Or something.
Once again, someone has fallen into the propaganda trap put forth by the content industries. You've taken a discussion about copyright infringement and made an analogy about theft in physical space. The two cases have nothing in common. Physical objects are composed of matter. They can only be in one place at a time. TV shows are made up of either photons or bytes, depending on how you're watching them. They can exist in an infinite number of places at once.
Any analogy between theft of physical objects, and infringement of copyrights on expressions of ideas, is wrong. Not just "flawed" -- it's wrong through and through, and it can't be fixed.
It's important to acknowledge that a TV-Rip is not of DVD quality. Hell, it isn't even of TV quality, most of the time.
In my experience, they're usually HDTV quality (which is in the same ballpark as DVD quality), but lossily encoded, and with some artifacts. If you get lucky, the artifacts will be minimal -- a half-second jump, etc. More commonly, there will be at least one major artifact per episode, such as white streaks across the middle of the picture for a few seconds, or "block meltdown" for a few seconds, or the like. It seems to be a crap-shoot, but I've seen some really high-quality work out there.
Given that I grew up with broadcast television (VHF and UHF), what I consider "TV quality" is a hell of a lot worse than that.
If I had the equipment, I'd just do my own recordings. But I don't really feel like investing in a video capture card (plus the hassle of finding one with Free drivers for Linux -- if one even exists!), finding a coax jack near my computer, running a coax line to it, then trying to figure out how to get software to record it and encode it... since I only watch one or two shows.
http://www.icra.org/
enter your site, answer some questions and you will get the correct code for a meta tag for your site/page
Aha! (Why don't they put things like that in the article?) By the way, I never did manage to find the questionnaire part where it's supposed to generate a label for you, but that's not really what I wanted anyway. The full set of labels and their meanings is what I actually needed.
How do I actually put one of these so-called ratings on my web site? I want everyone to know that my mail tutorial and my picture of myself in my T-shirt (and so on) are not safe for children, old ladies, hamsters, or gastropods. In fact, all multicellular organisms should beware! I'm not currently in Utah, but I don't think that should be an excuse. It's clearly my civic duty to warn everyone, regardless of their geographic location, that my "content" is dangerous. After all, someone might mirror it.
So how do I do it? Is there a "meta" tag I need to put in? Do I need to have a special file in each directory, like robots.txt?
If you need instructions on how to use a condom, I'd prefer you allowed Darwinian evolution to do its thing. ;-)
I believe you have it backwards. Failure to use a condom properly would spread the genes you seem to find undesirable.
On a more serious note, proper use of a condom is not quite as intuitive as you seem to think. Condoms with a reservoir tip need to have the tip pinched shut while it's being rolled onto the penis. Condoms without one need to have about a quarter of an inch pinched shut for the same purpose. And of course there are always the standard disclaimers for those who aren't quite thinking straight at the moment of passion: never reuse a condom, and never try to wear multiple condoms at the same time. Finally, be sure to hold the condom tightly against the penis while withdrawing.
That should cover about 98% of it. The rest, I'll leave to the professionals.
I have a half-formed conspiracy theory which states that if anyone ever sets up a fully distributed peer-to-peer mirror of a large file with high demand before posting the story to slashdot, one or more of the following will come to pass:
It sometimes seems that slashdot is an active Tool Of The Industry (conspiracy caps) aimed at destroying any small independent publishers by intentionally not mirroring anything.
I think he was using "WTF" as "Why The Fuck" in that particular paragraph. And in "Wtf are the Romans putting cities are pure rock!", the second "are" was clearly supposed to be "on" or "in".
Alpha Centauri might still be fun if you could play it online so you are matched against players and not the lame AI's.
It has perfectly good Play By E-Mail (PBEM) capabilities. Well, OK, not perfect... there are some major bugs that pop up in multi-player mode. If you join a PBEM SMAC game, you'll usually end up agreeing to a set of rules in advance (no exploiting this bug, no exploiting that bug, etc.). Since such a game usually lasts for months, it's not for everyone. But you might want to try it some time.
I didn't like Alpha Centauri [...] and that the only way to keep order is through blatant mind control of "drones".
:)
Well, "drones" are just "unhappy workers" from Civ2, with a different label slapped on 'em. "Talents" are just "happy workers". "Psych" is just "luxuries". It's incredibly obvious to those of us who've played both games that all they did was slap a different name and picture on the exact same concept and virtually the same implementation. (I think there's a subtle difference in how happiness is calculated, but that's a side issue.)
So if it makes you more comfortable, you can just think of "Doctors" as "Elvises", and so on.
And I really liked the Gaia aspect. If you pollute the planet, it fights back. That's just cool.
I'm into exploration and planning of cities and infrastructure. Once the whole world gets revealed, Civ bores me. [...] Maybe I just don't like 4x games at all.
No, you're right -- they all tend to drag on and on toward the endgame. Once you have half of the planet's resources under your direct control, you're going to win; it's just a matter of endurance to get to the end. (With the AI in these games, you really only need something like 1/3 to ensure victory.) This is simply the nature of the genre; I've never seen any 4x game that is as fun at the end as it is in the beginning.
SMAC's "vote for me as supreme leader and end this charade" is one of its saving graces. It saves you 50 turns of boring mop-up if you're going for military victory. Once you've conquered 3/4 of the world, you can just end it.
Or play as the Eco-freaks... subduing worms is the most unbalancing ability ever!
Nope. The most unbalancing abilities are Clean Reactors (to make units that don't require upkeep), or Dissociative Wave in the Alien Crossfire expansion pack (which makes your choppers ignore the Anti-Aircraft ability of defending units).
Capturing mind worms is great in the early game, but they seriously lack punch by the time your opponents have Trance ability (and/or 3Res armor, in the Crossfire expansion). Their best use is really exploration and pod-grabbing. (This is especially true for the Isles of the Deep, the aquatic worms. Make a gunship, keep running into the fungus until you manage to turn up a wild IoD, capture it, and voila -- you now have the perfect exploration vessel, especially if you got one far enough away from your bases to be "Independent".)
The Loki installer (for SMAC et al.) uses historically correct /bin/sh syntax that breaks under bash 3.0. Since Debian unstable (and sarge, too) now has bash 3.0 as the default shell, this means you'll have a bit of a tough time running the installer. (And if you edit it, as I did, you'll have to redo the md5sum manually... or perform equivalent hacking.)
;-)
Obviously, running it under bash 2.x or ksh should also suffice. I haven't tried that personally, though, except for back in days when bash 2.x was the default shell.
As long as I'm here, I might as well also point out that the Linux port of SMAC is actually better than the Windows version. We beta-testers found some of the annoying little bugs, and convinced Loki to fix them, on the grounds that they didn't change gameplay. (Example: the number of talents/drones shown in the main city display is often incorrect in the Windows version; you have to click the PSYCH button to see the real count. This is fixed in the Loki port; but it's still broken for the alien factions (Progenitor/Usurper), probably because nobody tested it with them. I didn't notice the bug in the alien factions until Loki had already gone out of business. I rarely play as the aliens.)
You're using funny math. Been taking lessons from the RIAA lately?
The part you omitted in your analysis of Freenet is the caching of popular content. If I request a key that 75% of all the Freenet nodes already have (like, say, the HTML text of the "Caveat Lector" page from The Freedom Engine, which hasn't changed in months), then the odds are quite good that I'll get it from the first node I talk to, rather than having to follow a chain of 24 relays.
You don't anonymously receive and send packets on the Internet, you have a designated IP address and that can be followed to you.
That's where designs like Freenet (also Freenet) come in. You can trade ease and bandwidth-efficiency for a smidgeon of anonymity -- not in the sense of "they can't tell I'm running Freenet", but in the lesser plausible deniability sense: "I didn't ask for that file; I was just relaying another node's requests."
In theory, a Freenet node is supposed to cache all of the requests that pass through it, but in practice, it doesn't work very well just yet.... Well, maybe if we're lucky, our children will have free speech before they die.
Use standard GNU autoconf for the builds. Get rid of all the code that says things like "#ifdef HPUX ... then do this and that and this and that because HP's C++ compiler (no, not that one, the other one... and that specific version, too!) can't make a negative zero or some such tomfoolery ... #endif". When I try to build Firefox 1.0 (One Point Fucking Oh!) on HP-UX 10.20 it falls over and dies because I'm not using HP's C++ compiler... nor the other one... and especially not that version... I'm using gcc! What do you think I am, an idiot? Why would I use anything but gcc/g++?
But it's worse than that. A few simple platform-checking #ifdefs could be fixed, the code converted into autoconf checks and replaced with HAS_FOO macros... but no. The build tree isn't even a tree -- it's a fucking forest! There are like 17 different build trees, each one gnarly and moss-covered and subtly (or not so subtly) different from the next, all plastered together into one shambling mass of code. Some of the sub-trees hard code ld -foo -bar -ZxCvB commands instead of invoking $(CXX) to be the linker. Some of them hard code cc as the compiler instead of using $(CC). I shit you not. Oh, and you can't type "make" in a sub-trees to build just that sub-tree. You have to start all over from the top level. After a few days, I gave up.
It's bad, folks. Really, really bad.
I'd be embarrassed to release something like that as a 1.0 version. 0.6 alpha 2? Sure thing, no problem. But 1.0 is supposed to be finished.
P.S.: your "Firefox" code still unpacks itself in a directory named "mozilla". Not "mozilla-1.7" or "firefox-1.0" either... just plain "mozilla". It looks like a CVS snapshot to me.
No, it's a link to a .php script that has a JPEG file as one of its parameters. But it's a perfectly legitimate link, and the JPEG does indeed appear to be a letter from an MPAA lawyer. No tomfoolery detected.
There would be nothing in /usr/bin of any consequence. In fact if you were to do a "rm -rf /usr/bin/*" (or whatever) and then reboot, the runtime composer would build the "correct" contents for the directories from the "real" package locations.
You're insane. The story is "What's Wrong with Unix?", not "How Can I Make Unix Not Worth Using Any More?".
You seem to have mistaken Unix for a single-user PC. This is a humongous step backward.
and when a newbie comes walking through the door we're glad to help, no matter how stupid the question is. (Hey, the easier the question the easier it is to help, right?)
No. The easier and stupider the question is, the more I just want to pound my head against a brick wall.
Just wait 5 or 10 years, and we'll see how eager you are to answer Yet Another Newbie asking for the name of the package with make in it.(*)
(*) Answer: make
(**) Yes, we REALLY DO get questions that stupid.
Well, maybe that's because you:
Or, the greatest mortal sin of all time:
But no, we're the bad guys if we tell you to read "man ls" instead of taking 5 minutes to type out part of the man page for you and explain it to you like we would to a pre-schooler.
No, people do not have the right to make and distribute copies of a work because they "have the information".
Yes, they do.
Imagine you see a really cool rainbow one day. You paint a picture of it. You have now made a copy. Who gave you the "right" to do that? NOBODY! Nobody had to! It is your "right" to do that, simply because it is within your power to do it, and it does not hurt anyone.
Start with that basic analogy and work up the line.
Suppose you see a rather beautiful woman on the sidewalk one day. As she looks to the side of the sidewalk, at a store window, she sees a magnificent dress in the window. She's captivated by it, and makes the most incredibly expressive exclamation of joy and rapture you've ever seen. You happen to have your camera out, and you take a photograph of her in this pose.
Who gave you the "right" to take this photograph? Nobody. Have you harmed anyone? No. And yet... this is somehow considered a different issue from the rainbow, because a woman walking on the sidewalk has some sort of expectation of personal privacy, even in a public place. You haven't broken any laws; you're allowed to take this photograph for personal use. In some jurisdictions, you're probably even allowed to distribute copies of it without her permission.
Let's say you've got a VCR and a subscription to a cable television service. Your friend has a VCR, but she doesn't subscribe to cable TV; she only gets locally broadcast signals. Now, one day you record a really cool show that's being shown on one of the cable networks. You take the video tape over to your friend's house and play it for her in her VCR. She loves the show! She asks you to make a copy of it for her, so she can show it to her husband when he gets home from work.
Who gave you the "right" to do this for her? Nobody! You don't need permission to help your friend and make her happy. It's your "right" as a human being to do anything you damn well please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
Did you hurt anyone by making a copy of a video tape for her? No! There's no other way she could get this show. Even if she subscribed to cable TV, it's too late; the show won't come on again. It's not being sold in stores. So you can't even come up with some whiny corporate-protectionist "lost revenue" fascist bullshit excuse. You have a right to copy things. By default.
Now, we get to the part of the story where everyone gets all upset and emotional. Let's say you have a DVD with a movie on it. It's a movie that was produced as a "work for hire" by a corporation in the US, and was published in a full commercial release, with (C) symbols on it, advertising, affiliated merchandising, etc. The whole enchilada.
Let's say your friend also doesn't have a DVD player. She wants to watch the movie, though, so she asks you if you could make a copy onto VHS tape and bring it over. You do this, and the two of you watch the movie together. Then you take the VHS copy back home with you.
Is that copyright infringement, if you don't leave the VHS tape at her house? To be honest, I don't know. Morally, it's clearly no different from the case where you bring both your DVD player and your DVD to her house, hook them up, watch the movie with her, then take it all back home with you. The only difference in this case is that you had less stuff to carry around, at the cost of a lower-quality home theater experience.
Is it copyright infringement if you let her borrow the VHS tape for a while? I think most people in the US would say "yes", because you still have the DVD, and you can watch the DVD while she's watching the VHS tape. But it's clearly a gray area.
Is it copyright infringement if you give her the VHS tape as a gift? Again, most people in the US would probably say "yes". This is a much darker gray area than the previous question. Yet, there are certainly countries in the world where this would not be
Dijjer's a nice thing, but it's nowhere near being a hybrid of BT and Freenet. Dijjer still enforces the need for a central, original server, and every Dijjer download contacts that central web server to get the HTTP headers before it hits the Dijjer peers to get the data. If the original web server goes away or gets slashdotted under a million HEAD requests, you get no file. For that very same reason, there's no anonymity -- not for publishers and not for requesters. So it's really got very little in common with Freenet.
Also, it doesn't work very well just yet. Give it a bit more time.
But for what it's designed for, which is to ease the burden on traditional content distributors, it seems pretty promising.
Someone who takes the product without paying is by definition not a "customer." Customers pay.
You fucking troll. Get a real argument. No, better yet, don't get an argument -- just go back to your television and leave the interwebthing to those of us with functional brains.
I've been boycotting the RIAA for over one year now. I was hoping I wouldn't have to boycott the MPAA too -- oh well, I guess I have to.
I will not give them ANY MORE of my money.
What's that? Yes, you, the troll with the blue shirt... you want to know how I can say "ANY MORE" when I didn't give them any money in the first place because I'm a "MUVIE THEIF" [sic]?
Well, I have news for you. I've bought literally thousands of dollars worth of CDs in the past. That's done now, except for used CDs and non-RIAA releases. When they started suing people, they lost me as a customer. A damned good, paying customer, too.
I haven't bought so many movies. Movies aren't really my thing. My wife buys just about every kids' movie that comes out, though.
I'll have to find a diplomatic way to avoid going with her to see Spongebob when it comes out this weekend. Not that I was really interesting in going in the first place, but... well, those of you who are married will understand.
However, you are dead wrong if you are claiming that the United States has never blown up unarmed civilians, going to work or otherwise.
Hey, don't forget about that time when the USA bombed its own citizens in Philadelphia.
/me recommends Snow Crash as the first book (then Cryptonomicon)---the Boroque Cycle tends to get a bit looooong after a very short while.
Ironically, that's a very good review. "If you speak in IRCisms on a web forum, and can't spell 'Baroque', then you probably won't like Stephenson's latest trilogy."
That sums it up pretty well.
(Disclaimer: I haven't read The System of the World yet; I've only read the first two books of that trilogy.)