I do believe he was actually criticizing people who are driven by a desire for accumulating money itself, rather than a desire to accumulate money that they will spend on their enjoyment (i.e.: a Scrooge McDuck)
Not really, if they took your hard drive and wrote seekrit_bomb_plans.txt to your main partition, you could easily prove it wasn't you by comparing the date it was taken with the date the file was created. Any tampering would be fairly easy to detect - in fact, early filesystems were designed that way, so that the edit date would make it easy to track down who was using the system at the time, in case people had ideas about tampering.
Maybe people who thought that no lawyer could possibly be stupid enough to actually support an obviously insane woman like that? Basically, people who have never known a lawyer...
Exactly. It's why I've been using any excuse to get rid of my old CD-Rs and DVD-Rs; they (and optical media in general) are just not long for this world, simply because of the inefficiency - too easy to damage, too large, don't hold enough. Originally the iea was that they were a cheap distribution media form, but (storage) sizes are topping out - the max for discs without having to increase the diameter (unless they radically increased the width) is probably not much more than BD-Rs; once they max out the density, they are essentially screwed.
The future (or my perception of it) is digital - using your desktop PC or gaming console's processing power to decode video which it will transfer to various devices, or wirelessly copying music from your hard drive to your iPod.
This "problem" has mostly been solved by backwards compatibility with optical media - however, once optical media reaches the point where it's too expensive and difficult to produce a large enough (storage-wise) disc, everyone with optical media will be sunk unless they rip. The problem with encrypted content is that when it goes "out of print"/abandonware (or whatever the movie equivalent would be) and the versions of it stored on out-of-date technology would be almost impossible to salvage, meaning the content itself (regardless of media) might be lost. This is why digital media is so revolutionary - theoretically, no content could ever be unintentionally lost if you maintain backups. DRM, in my opinion, is a hindrance to this and ultimately harms culture by possibly preventing important works from being preserved.
The problem is that these conflicts are generally fuelled by foreign meddling (see, Italy's governance of Somalia before it abandoned it), and foreign aid generally are a patch on the problem without actually fixing it. Simply throwing food and money at people will not cause them to form stable governments, rein in crime and provide a social support network. While it does not, in an absolute sense, make the problem worse, it is basically the Western world's way of saying "See? I've contributed! I'm doing my part!" without delving deeper into the issues that causes this more-or-less self-perpetuating cycle.
I also use Scroogle, except with SSL. It provides a degree of security between me and Scroogle's server, so that the only weak points are Scroogle communicating with Google and Google itself. However, since it's Scroogle doing the search, not me, Google couldn't find out anything. This is a very good model, and Scroogle.org, even with SSL, tends to load almost as quickly as Google Search itself. Some people might criticize the security model because of a few weak points, but it's like discussion of Linux malware - something can't be perfectly sure, only more secure.
Since it's two organizations being referred to (DHS and TSA) it should be plural: "how have..." If it was only one, "How has..." would have been correct.
The problem with your "failover system" is when telcos dominate entire areas. Then the only solution is to create a homegrown alternative, like some municipalities have.
The root of the problem is that ISPs and telcos (especially larger ones) have such a high subscriber base that they can afford to lose 5% or 10% of their more educated users (which they will judge as being "bandwidth-wasters"), since it'll make more room for legions of Joe Sixpacks who only want to check their email.
This might seem justified, except for the fact that, if you believe statistics, almost everyone, especially teenagers, are pirates - and whether they are or aren't, they will watch lots and lots of streaming video and download files. It has become commonplace, but many ISPs are stuck in the 90s or early 00s, when there was a divide between users who browsed and checked email, and users who ran warez FTPs and maxed out their bandwidth limit every month in a row. Due to the spreading of technical information, this is no longer true - EVERYONE is the guy with the internet-connected fileserver in his basement (at least to some degree) and infrastructure hasn't scaled up to meet the demand. This is the issue; the only division of opinion is how to solve it, either through capitalistic means (break monopolies and collusion, try to ensure a fair playing field) or "socialist" (restrict the monopolies from doing too much harm).
I see your point: the enemy you know, not the enemy you don't. However, wouldn't you say that network neutrality, if properly managed, is still a step in the right direction? At its heart, it's a good idea, all it needs is to have its integrity maintained so that it isn't reworked into a national internet monitoring system, such as what Australia is thinking about. If we can do that, I think I we could say that it would be a good thing.
So you're saying that you would rather pay through the nose on parts because it isn't worth your time to do a little bit of research? It adds up, especially when you want to buy a "high-end" machine. In my experience, they won't screw you on a low-end machine that they sell for cheap because it has cheap components. The "high-end" machines are the same, they just have better components that the consumer knows (ram, hard drives, CPU) but have a cheap motherboard, and often no ability to overclock.
If, on the other hand, you want to build it yourself, you can get a machine customized to what you want and often a machine that you can extend the lifetime on considerably through overclocking and upgrading if you buy a decent processor and a decent motherboard. Compare that to Dell, which routinely damages its own motherboards to prevent overclocking to try and force people to buy new computers.
The fact is, assemblers and retailers are slowly trying to encourage people to think of their machines as something that must be replaced, not repaired when broken or upgraded when old. This is because it is profitable for them to do so, but it's EXTREMELY wasteful (e-waste only became a concern when people started treating electronics like they were disposable) and hurts the consumer.
Why does everyone automatically assume that a government will abuse power? While it has happened in the past, it doesn't happen automatically.
This is really a debate between socialists and libertarians (at least on/.), if you want to polarize it. It's basically a conflict between people who hate all governments, and people who believe that a government (which, ostensibly, has a mandate to protect and help people) or a corporation, which has no such mandate.
This is what I like to call "tech/science news deceptive timeline". It's sort of like a short-term version of "where's my jetpack?!" Basically, someone will read an article in a magazine or online about a new discovery or invention which has just been tested. It'll seem like it falls into an abyss until it is eventually available to consumers in a few years, mostly because article writers want to make it seem as exciting as possible and that it's just around the corner.
The fast progression from DX10 to DX10.1 to DX11 is a result of highly advanced hardware which is constantly being improved. The relatively low number of games that USE those technologies is due to the fact that very few developers will pay to have their programmers retrained, and the programmers would prefer to work with something they already know on games.
So, while to you DX11 seems premature, it will be a year or two before it begins appearing in games, and three or four before it becomes widespread or even ubiquitous (that is, completely replacing its predecessor, something DX10 STILL hasn't done)... just in time for the appearance of DX12.
This is ridiculous. NN has no government interference aside from enforcement of the basic ideas - the desire to make it more or less uniform and to not have people have to pay more based on where they live or other factors that SHOULD NOT be factors.
The only situation I can imagine where your dire warnings would come to pass would be if the government added to the main NN idea to include government monitoring, which it has not done so far.
heh, I bet that's not used too often any more.
In all seriousness, though - the Amiga community is pretty stubborn. Most of them have a single machine, and just order new parts as stuff breaks - some of them are pretty brilliant about diagnosing problems and hacking their software.
It'd actually make a pretty interesting study - take a group of computer hobbyists, then give them the same hardware to work with for 20+ years. It'd be interesting to see what they could probably reverse-engineer if they had a mind to.
I always knew Wizards of the Coast wasn't too great - they've cheapened tabletop gaming to an almost insane degree and discouraged many people from playing... but suing gamers?
From my experience, I've found that when most people start out, they aren't too sure about what to get and tend to borrow or download materials. Gamers who have been playing a long time will usually buy handbooks, custom dice sets, player figurines, etc. So basically, WotC is driving away NEW players with this - and people wonder why tabletop gaming is getting stale and too introverted for its own good?
To provide a comparison - imagine if there was a company from the mainframe days which created the first operating systems, and copyrighted the hell out of them. Now imagine that almost every other operating system was derivative from those original ones. This means that everyone would essentially be enslaved to that company, and to get freedom they would have to start from scratch, and couldn't use any of the ideas and refinements that that company had used.
You're right about that one. I know from experience that direct download sites are NOT as safe as torrents because anyone who got a virus from a torrent would not likely seed it, whereas direct download just keeps on going.
Add in the fact that torrents are more reliable, in that all you need is the tracker and seeder - Rapidshare tends to delete stuff fairly quickly.
The only thing you're forgetting, though, is that people don't necessarily need to PAY to get paid accounts. Phishing and heavy Rapidshare use tend to go hand-in-hand, and there are massive lists of hundreds of thousands of logins floating around online for Rapidshare, and probably thousands more for Hotfile, Megaupload, and all the others. Add in proxies and anyone using a Rapidshare account for warez would be virtually untraceable.
I'd like to say that this would be a blow to filtering, but I know it won't be - the average person doesn't even know what "datamining" is, never mind the average parent. As it has been said above - most parents would probably agree to sign away all their child(ren)'s privacy and rights, as long as there was no chance of them accidentally glimpsing anything sexual in nature, and it won't matter to them - the majority don't give their children rights or privacy anyway, so why should they care if it's a company doing the same thing as them? They wouldn't be able to reproach the companies without looking like hypocrites.
I agree with the grandparent. The problem is that, while the majority of the people on/. are probably able to set up a webserver, the 'regular user' has no real hope. What disturbs ME are people relying on third-party sites like Youtube of the numerous file- or picture-hosting sites to allow download of their files at 24/7. if they don't, they end up having to pay someone else for hosting that is usually only accessible through something like Vistapanel (full-control VPSs aren't cheap), which brings additional risks - sure, professional hosting companies have rugged, powerful servers, but they also tend to be under attack more often than not - by having a site that might be under attack hosted on the same server, they could end up having their site deleted or taken offline.
If everyone has their own fileserver and webserver, it will bring true community internet to another level - hosting companies will have to provide unique and useful features to convince people to pay, and people will be able to transfer files and host their own websites easily.
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I do believe he was actually criticizing people who are driven by a desire for accumulating money itself, rather than a desire to accumulate money that they will spend on their enjoyment (i.e.: a Scrooge McDuck)
Not really, if they took your hard drive and wrote seekrit_bomb_plans.txt to your main partition, you could easily prove it wasn't you by comparing the date it was taken with the date the file was created. Any tampering would be fairly easy to detect - in fact, early filesystems were designed that way, so that the edit date would make it easy to track down who was using the system at the time, in case people had ideas about tampering.
I'd like to see someone trying to microwave data held in a cloud...
Maybe people who thought that no lawyer could possibly be stupid enough to actually support an obviously insane woman like that? Basically, people who have never known a lawyer...
Exactly. It's why I've been using any excuse to get rid of my old CD-Rs and DVD-Rs; they (and optical media in general) are just not long for this world, simply because of the inefficiency - too easy to damage, too large, don't hold enough. Originally the iea was that they were a cheap distribution media form, but (storage) sizes are topping out - the max for discs without having to increase the diameter (unless they radically increased the width) is probably not much more than BD-Rs; once they max out the density, they are essentially screwed.
The future (or my perception of it) is digital - using your desktop PC or gaming console's processing power to decode video which it will transfer to various devices, or wirelessly copying music from your hard drive to your iPod.
This "problem" has mostly been solved by backwards compatibility with optical media - however, once optical media reaches the point where it's too expensive and difficult to produce a large enough (storage-wise) disc, everyone with optical media will be sunk unless they rip. The problem with encrypted content is that when it goes "out of print"/abandonware (or whatever the movie equivalent would be) and the versions of it stored on out-of-date technology would be almost impossible to salvage, meaning the content itself (regardless of media) might be lost. This is why digital media is so revolutionary - theoretically, no content could ever be unintentionally lost if you maintain backups. DRM, in my opinion, is a hindrance to this and ultimately harms culture by possibly preventing important works from being preserved.
It doesn't, he's simply insulting a variety of things in the hope of getting a rise out of someone.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was all just an attention grab.
The problem is that these conflicts are generally fuelled by foreign meddling (see, Italy's governance of Somalia before it abandoned it), and foreign aid generally are a patch on the problem without actually fixing it. Simply throwing food and money at people will not cause them to form stable governments, rein in crime and provide a social support network. While it does not, in an absolute sense, make the problem worse, it is basically the Western world's way of saying "See? I've contributed! I'm doing my part!" without delving deeper into the issues that causes this more-or-less self-perpetuating cycle.
I also use Scroogle, except with SSL. It provides a degree of security between me and Scroogle's server, so that the only weak points are Scroogle communicating with Google and Google itself. However, since it's Scroogle doing the search, not me, Google couldn't find out anything. This is a very good model, and Scroogle.org, even with SSL, tends to load almost as quickly as Google Search itself. Some people might criticize the security model because of a few weak points, but it's like discussion of Linux malware - something can't be perfectly sure, only more secure.
Since it's two organizations being referred to (DHS and TSA) it should be plural: "how have ..." If it was only one, "How has ..." would have been correct.
The problem with your "failover system" is when telcos dominate entire areas. Then the only solution is to create a homegrown alternative, like some municipalities have.
The root of the problem is that ISPs and telcos (especially larger ones) have such a high subscriber base that they can afford to lose 5% or 10% of their more educated users (which they will judge as being "bandwidth-wasters"), since it'll make more room for legions of Joe Sixpacks who only want to check their email.
This might seem justified, except for the fact that, if you believe statistics, almost everyone, especially teenagers, are pirates - and whether they are or aren't, they will watch lots and lots of streaming video and download files. It has become commonplace, but many ISPs are stuck in the 90s or early 00s, when there was a divide between users who browsed and checked email, and users who ran warez FTPs and maxed out their bandwidth limit every month in a row. Due to the spreading of technical information, this is no longer true - EVERYONE is the guy with the internet-connected fileserver in his basement (at least to some degree) and infrastructure hasn't scaled up to meet the demand. This is the issue; the only division of opinion is how to solve it, either through capitalistic means (break monopolies and collusion, try to ensure a fair playing field) or "socialist" (restrict the monopolies from doing too much harm).
If it's an international treaty, then why is the secrecy a "national security" matter?
I see your point: the enemy you know, not the enemy you don't. However, wouldn't you say that network neutrality, if properly managed, is still a step in the right direction? At its heart, it's a good idea, all it needs is to have its integrity maintained so that it isn't reworked into a national internet monitoring system, such as what Australia is thinking about. If we can do that, I think I we could say that it would be a good thing.
Then the trick is not deciding which you want to abuse you, but creating a system that isn't conducive to abuse.
So you're saying that you would rather pay through the nose on parts because it isn't worth your time to do a little bit of research? It adds up, especially when you want to buy a "high-end" machine. In my experience, they won't screw you on a low-end machine that they sell for cheap because it has cheap components. The "high-end" machines are the same, they just have better components that the consumer knows (ram, hard drives, CPU) but have a cheap motherboard, and often no ability to overclock.
If, on the other hand, you want to build it yourself, you can get a machine customized to what you want and often a machine that you can extend the lifetime on considerably through overclocking and upgrading if you buy a decent processor and a decent motherboard. Compare that to Dell, which routinely damages its own motherboards to prevent overclocking to try and force people to buy new computers.
The fact is, assemblers and retailers are slowly trying to encourage people to think of their machines as something that must be replaced, not repaired when broken or upgraded when old. This is because it is profitable for them to do so, but it's EXTREMELY wasteful (e-waste only became a concern when people started treating electronics like they were disposable) and hurts the consumer.
Why does everyone automatically assume that a government will abuse power? While it has happened in the past, it doesn't happen automatically.
/.), if you want to polarize it. It's basically a conflict between people who hate all governments, and people who believe that a government (which, ostensibly, has a mandate to protect and help people) or a corporation, which has no such mandate.
This is really a debate between socialists and libertarians (at least on
This is what I like to call "tech/science news deceptive timeline". It's sort of like a short-term version of "where's my jetpack?!" Basically, someone will read an article in a magazine or online about a new discovery or invention which has just been tested. It'll seem like it falls into an abyss until it is eventually available to consumers in a few years, mostly because article writers want to make it seem as exciting as possible and that it's just around the corner.
... just in time for the appearance of DX12.
The fast progression from DX10 to DX10.1 to DX11 is a result of highly advanced hardware which is constantly being improved. The relatively low number of games that USE those technologies is due to the fact that very few developers will pay to have their programmers retrained, and the programmers would prefer to work with something they already know on games.
So, while to you DX11 seems premature, it will be a year or two before it begins appearing in games, and three or four before it becomes widespread or even ubiquitous (that is, completely replacing its predecessor, something DX10 STILL hasn't done)
This is ridiculous. NN has no government interference aside from enforcement of the basic ideas - the desire to make it more or less uniform and to not have people have to pay more based on where they live or other factors that SHOULD NOT be factors. The only situation I can imagine where your dire warnings would come to pass would be if the government added to the main NN idea to include government monitoring, which it has not done so far.
"Manditory"? Really?
heh, I bet that's not used too often any more. In all seriousness, though - the Amiga community is pretty stubborn. Most of them have a single machine, and just order new parts as stuff breaks - some of them are pretty brilliant about diagnosing problems and hacking their software. It'd actually make a pretty interesting study - take a group of computer hobbyists, then give them the same hardware to work with for 20+ years. It'd be interesting to see what they could probably reverse-engineer if they had a mind to.
I always knew Wizards of the Coast wasn't too great - they've cheapened tabletop gaming to an almost insane degree and discouraged many people from playing... but suing gamers? From my experience, I've found that when most people start out, they aren't too sure about what to get and tend to borrow or download materials. Gamers who have been playing a long time will usually buy handbooks, custom dice sets, player figurines, etc. So basically, WotC is driving away NEW players with this - and people wonder why tabletop gaming is getting stale and too introverted for its own good? To provide a comparison - imagine if there was a company from the mainframe days which created the first operating systems, and copyrighted the hell out of them. Now imagine that almost every other operating system was derivative from those original ones. This means that everyone would essentially be enslaved to that company, and to get freedom they would have to start from scratch, and couldn't use any of the ideas and refinements that that company had used.
You're right about that one. I know from experience that direct download sites are NOT as safe as torrents because anyone who got a virus from a torrent would not likely seed it, whereas direct download just keeps on going. Add in the fact that torrents are more reliable, in that all you need is the tracker and seeder - Rapidshare tends to delete stuff fairly quickly. The only thing you're forgetting, though, is that people don't necessarily need to PAY to get paid accounts. Phishing and heavy Rapidshare use tend to go hand-in-hand, and there are massive lists of hundreds of thousands of logins floating around online for Rapidshare, and probably thousands more for Hotfile, Megaupload, and all the others. Add in proxies and anyone using a Rapidshare account for warez would be virtually untraceable.
Would IP over avian carriers be called "flappernet"?
I'd like to say that this would be a blow to filtering, but I know it won't be - the average person doesn't even know what "datamining" is, never mind the average parent. As it has been said above - most parents would probably agree to sign away all their child(ren)'s privacy and rights, as long as there was no chance of them accidentally glimpsing anything sexual in nature, and it won't matter to them - the majority don't give their children rights or privacy anyway, so why should they care if it's a company doing the same thing as them? They wouldn't be able to reproach the companies without looking like hypocrites.
If everyone has their own fileserver and webserver, it will bring true community internet to another level - hosting companies will have to provide unique and useful features to convince people to pay, and people will be able to transfer files and host their own websites easily.