But why limit it to politicians? Thugs like this need to be resisted, and no, 100 people from Slashdot refusing to buy their music isn't going to be noticed. Sure, it's a radical and extreme idea, but frankly I'm tired of getting fscked around by the likes of the RIAA.
Nokia has reiterated that it is turning to the Linux community to ensure that its Media Terminal set-top box, due to be launched later this year, has plenty of applications from the word go.
In particular, it wants games developers to get coding for MT, based around what Nokia is now calling its Open Source Terminal platform.
I've always thought the init level concept was a good one that was implemented poorly. I've never seen any rational explanation as to why, for example, Solaris defines init level 5 to be 'shut the machine down and power it off if possible'-- if the init levels are supposed to be a linear sequence, then shouldn't that be like level -1 instead, presuming that 0 is 'stop the OS'? And shouldn't single-user be one of the steps between 0 and multi-user, instead of state 'S'? Or maybe I just don't grok the higher zen of it, and need enlightenment. Anyone?
My advice may be a bit old, since I went to grad school in 1987, but when I was going to grad school in CS, pretty much everyone there originally entered because they were going for their Ph.D. The school didn't accept very many Masters-only students simply because their philosophy was 'if they're going to aim low, they can aim low somewhere else'.
Granted, about half or maybe more of said students ended up taking the Masters consolation prize and leaving (your author among them), but out of 100 grad students or so, maybe 5 of them entered with the intention of just getting a Masters. This was just my experience, YMMV, Insert Disclaimer Here, etc.
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Do this, it's for your own good!
on
Republic.Com
·
· Score: 2
As much as I'm in favor of considering opposing viewpoints, and even think it's necessary to be a truly healthy individual, I think personal freedom is even more important. You're not going to get someone to consider another point of view by cramming it down their throats; anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. You can't force anyone to be a 'better' person-- it just doesn't work that way. Think of the 55mph speed limit, which originally was imposed to save energy but then was continued for 20 years because it was 'safer', despite no supporting evidence.
The really important thing is to maintain freedom of speech-- because then opposing viewpoints can always be heard by those that want to hear them.
Interesting, when you compare that fact to what's written in the biblical text, book of Genesis; before the flood of Noah, people routinely lived for 600-900 years or so.
Ok, so combining several people's suggestions here, and asking some questions of my own:
How often does the AIM server change what it asks for? Every time? Once per day? If it's once per day, then adding caching to the equation helps eliminate the disconnect problem. Sure your first try to connect might not get the md5 from the web server or dns server or what have you in time, but it'll come back eventually and be cached for the second try. I think having a chance of not connecting the first try is an acceptable workaround.
Given that, what we need is a server (whether web or dns or what have you) that can be fed a start and length and will spit back the appropriate md5 key. Preferably multiple servers mirrored appropriately, of course. These servers wouldn't even have to have aim.exe, just a db of all possible keys from aim.exe (which I come out with, using 24K aim.exe and 128-bit md5 keys, to be about 4.5G). Generating this db should be legal from fair use if you have aim.exe already, but IANAL so I can't tell you whether distributing this db is legal. But it'd be easy enough to distribute code that generates that db given aim.exe, so there are workarounds.
So what's missing from this picture? Sounds like an acceptable workaround to me overall. Not a pleasant one, but doable.
What with 83 percent of 5477 voters voting no, that makes around 4546 pirates, according to RIAA-logic.
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In the tradition of Quincy and The Rockford Files
on
C.S.I.
·
· Score: 3
Is it just me? It seems that tv has in general has gone bland, no odd quirky shows like Quincy or The Rockford Files any more. Granted, there's the X Files, and Twin Peaks, but I'm hard-pressed to think of any others in the last 10 years or so.
I seem to remember something written about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'. I dunno about you, but using Napster seems to fall into that third category there.
If you discount that argument, then I challenge you to find the right to 'walk down the street' in the Constitution in anything other than generalities like the 9th and 10th Amendments. And last I checked, using the legal system as a club to get something you want that doesn't have anything to do with the law is itself a crime. The RIAA wants Napster dead, and it will do anything, legal or illegal, to accomplish its goals, including (ab)using the legal system.
The whole idea behind a karma-type system is that you want to reward behavior that you want, and discourage behavior you don't want. Unless you're omniscient, you're not going to build the perfect karma system on the first or even the second, third or fourth tries. It requires tuning and adjustment. People *will* find holes in your system, and exploit them. So you make adjustments, and eventually you make the costs of exploiting holes not really worth it. Most of the complaints about slashdot karma stem from the fact that it really hasn't undergone a lot of tuning.
A good example of a karma-like system is the shops in the game nethack. The devteam has generally indicated that there are two 'approved' ways to get objects from shops: paying for them, and getting your pet to steal from the shop for you. This was originally enforced by making shopkeepers tough (generally tougher than the average adventurer can have a hope of killing), and having them be human, with an in-game penalty for killing a fellow human. To make simply teleporting out of a shop with stuff less attractive, the Keystone Kops were added. Also the shopkeeper himself would track you down and beat the stuffing out of you.
This was roughly the state of shops when I started playing back in version 2.2. There were literally dozens of ways around these deterrents to shoplifting-- dig a hole in the shop's floor and jump through, dig a second entrance to the shop, use a high-powered wand on the shopkeeper, teleport objects out of the shop and go grab them elsewhere, etc. Over the years, things have been added to the game that negate these: if you jump down a hole in a shop, the shopkeeper grabs your pack so then he has all your stuff, shopkeepers repair holes in shop walls, shopkeepers stay out of direct wand path when you're a distance away from them, shopkeepers keep track of stuff teleported out of the shop and charge you for them anyways, etc. The effect is that nowadays, the 'approved' ways to get items from shops are generally the easiest. The game has been tuned that way in response to player abuse.
So, yes of course, no karma system is perfect. But it doesn't have to be-- all it has to do is keep up with those who try to abuse it. Takes a little effort, but what doesn't?
So you restricted Fnord Software from using v4.0 of Frobnitz software, because of them being Evil Greedy Slime and such. But lo and behold, they mend their evil ways. What do you do? Release v4.0.1 (all you need change is the copyright notice and the license notice), with the restriction against them removed. Voila, problem solved.
Heck, the release history of your program could serve as a list of who was Evil at the time.
Your point about compromising principles is a valid one, but we don't all have to be Gandhi to get our principles across. Sometimes you have to play the Greedy Slime game in order to fight them. What you can't let it do is dull your purpose. Preventing companies or individuals from using your code purely on a capricious or arbitrary basis only serves as ego gratification; but trying to keep the gun that you yourself made out of your enemy's hands because he'll try to kill you with it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even the highest-minded open source advocates must admit that they get a sour feeling in their stomach if they stop to think how much use emacs and gcc is to, say, the programmers at Microsoft.
Please tell me how the local ISP, the backbone providers, or Dave at CCS is supposed to tell that I'm sending a pirated copy of Office to my friend instead of a netscape core dump, if I'm using his and my public key?
All pirates need to do is go to more of a drug dealer-type exchange, instead of a post-it-to-the-world exchange. CCS then has the more difficult challenge of posing as a pirate, instead of just trolling the latest Usenet feed.
But then again, I wouldn't expect you to think of that. It requires something called a clue.
It may be a bit gauche to reply to one's own post, but in the time I wrote my post, someone else posted my general idea, but even better: Hit them where it will hurt.
All the cooperation from backbone providers et al won't do them a damn bit of good if they can't tell what's being passed thru them.
The moral to the story? Use strong encryption on *everything*. Hell, Napster could fsck over lots of its enemies simply by integrating strong encryption into its client.
Probably lots of you are wondering how to fight a company like this. Granted, there are countless legal, quasi-legal, and illegal methods, but here's one that's totally above board and reasonable.
If you write open-source software, consider adding something like the following to your license of choice: "The following companies are forbidden from using this software in any manner: __________. Violation of this clause means said company agrees to give $1 million or 10 percent of their yearly gross combined domestic and international sales, whichever is greater, to the Free Software Foundation, per violation." I'm not a lawyer, so I'm sure someone could make that legally firm by rewriting it appropriately.
Why let companies like this use our own tools against us?
Going to referee.com, they've announced an alliance with Sports Illustrated. Looks like it's time to let SI know that their corporate partner is being a crying spoiled brat on the Internet and generally making bad net.press for themselves, and that maybe they should think twice about being associated with them.
The solution to this is that if the loser's costs are less than the winner's, the loser doesn't pay any more than his own costs. So if you sue Microsoft (or they sue you) and you lose, your legal bill will at most double. To this add some rules to keep the actual cost honest, and it eliminates the majority of objections to 'loser pays'.
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So which OSen have ksh93 installed by default?
on
David Korn Tells All
·
· Score: 2
Does anyone know which OSen (or Linux dists) have ksh93 installed with them? Even if it's installed as (/usr)/bin/ksh93 it'd still be nice to see it get out there and get used, since it sounds like it has some really cool features.
Most video games (I'm talking arcade standups, not PC games) that let multiple people play at the same time are non-zero-sum. Gauntlet is probably the most well-known one (I saw it mentioned already at least once), but it's certainly not the only one.
There's a difference in types, though-- most such games are just individuals in the same space that can either help each other or not. Others, though are like Space Duel, a color vector sequel to Asteroids, which had a mode where two players played at the same time with two ships that were connected-- if you thrusted the wrong way, you'd end up with the two ships spinning around each other wildly. The final score that was put on the scoreboard was the combined score of the two players. Other examples are the old vector game Ripoff, or Cyberball 2084, where two players can play on the same team against the computer (or on opposite teams against each other), now taken up by more modern games like NBA Jam and the like. I've even seen pinball machines that had a built-in mode where two players' scores were combined for scoreboard and high score purposes.
I'd classify these as strong cooperative, whereas Gauntlet and Mario Bros (not Super Mario Bros) and the other multiplayer games are weak cooperative, where the players can cooperate but don't necessarily have to. I'm sure there are tons of more examples, but those are the first ones I can think of off the top of my head.
More like the influx of ignorants spam up our language the same way they've spammed up Usenet and other such forums that used to be useful. Go read the followup to my post that describes how they're abusing the perfectly good word 'software' down in Brazil. It's all part of the dumbing down of America and by proxy, the world. We already have television that plays to the lowest common denominator; the last thing I want to see is an Internet that ends up AOLized.
I will adjust my rant on this subject accordingly in the future.:-) Thanks.
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More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN
on
"e-mail" vs "email"
·
· Score: 5
What bugs the hell out of me is the all-too-common usage of 'email' as a singular noun. I see all the time people saying 'I'll send him an email' or 'I have 3 emails'.
Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck. The noun 'email' is plural, and should be used exactly the same way as the plural noun 'mail'. You check your email, you send a piece of email, you send some email if you insist on a shorter way of saying the previous. This used to be standard usage before about 1993 or so (see Sep tem ber that never ended), but sadly seems to be the minority usage now.
Slashdot Mirror
(WARNING: -1 Flamebait ahead)
If you've never heard of assassination politics, go read the following url:
http://jya.com/ap.htm
But why limit it to politicians? Thugs like this need to be resisted, and no, 100 people from Slashdot refusing to buy their music isn't going to be noticed. Sure, it's a radical and extreme idea, but frankly I'm tired of getting fscked around by the likes of the RIAA.
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Since Slashdot saw fit to post the story they did rather than my submission :-) I'll put the link here:
From The Register: Nokia calls on Linux coders for set-top box apps
Nokia has reiterated that it is turning to the Linux community to ensure that its Media Terminal set-top box, due to be launched later this year, has plenty of applications from the word go.
In particular, it wants games developers to get coding for MT, based around what Nokia is now calling its Open Source Terminal platform.
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Liquid Audio today laid off its entire Customer Care department today. This from a friend of mine who (now formerly) worked for them.
Shows you how much they think of Customer Care.
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Whenever I read a story like this, it reminds me of something I read that was attributed to Brian Kernighan-- paraphrasing from memory:
"A smart terminal is not a smart-ass terminal, rather it is one you can educate."
Hopefully these 'smart' systems will be able to be educated, instead of just being programmed to do what they think is best.
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I've always thought the init level concept was a good one that was implemented poorly. I've never seen any rational explanation as to why, for example, Solaris defines init level 5 to be 'shut the machine down and power it off if possible'-- if the init levels are supposed to be a linear sequence, then shouldn't that be like level -1 instead, presuming that 0 is 'stop the OS'? And shouldn't single-user be one of the steps between 0 and multi-user, instead of state 'S'? Or maybe I just don't grok the higher zen of it, and need enlightenment. Anyone?
---
My advice may be a bit old, since I went to grad school in 1987, but when I was going to grad school in CS, pretty much everyone there originally entered because they were going for their Ph.D. The school didn't accept very many Masters-only students simply because their philosophy was 'if they're going to aim low, they can aim low somewhere else'.
Granted, about half or maybe more of said students ended up taking the Masters consolation prize and leaving (your author among them), but out of 100 grad students or so, maybe 5 of them entered with the intention of just getting a Masters. This was just my experience, YMMV, Insert Disclaimer Here, etc.
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As much as I'm in favor of considering opposing viewpoints, and even think it's necessary to be a truly healthy individual, I think personal freedom is even more important. You're not going to get someone to consider another point of view by cramming it down their throats; anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. You can't force anyone to be a 'better' person-- it just doesn't work that way. Think of the 55mph speed limit, which originally was imposed to save energy but then was continued for 20 years because it was 'safer', despite no supporting evidence.
The really important thing is to maintain freedom of speech-- because then opposing viewpoints can always be heard by those that want to hear them.
---
Interesting, when you compare that fact to what's written in the biblical text, book of Genesis; before the flood of Noah, people routinely lived for 600-900 years or so.
---
Ok, so combining several people's suggestions here, and asking some questions of my own:
How often does the AIM server change what it asks for? Every time? Once per day? If it's once per day, then adding caching to the equation helps eliminate the disconnect problem. Sure your first try to connect might not get the md5 from the web server or dns server or what have you in time, but it'll come back eventually and be cached for the second try. I think having a chance of not connecting the first try is an acceptable workaround.
Given that, what we need is a server (whether web or dns or what have you) that can be fed a start and length and will spit back the appropriate md5 key. Preferably multiple servers mirrored appropriately, of course. These servers wouldn't even have to have aim.exe, just a db of all possible keys from aim.exe (which I come out with, using 24K aim.exe and 128-bit md5 keys, to be about 4.5G). Generating this db should be legal from fair use if you have aim.exe already, but IANAL so I can't tell you whether distributing this db is legal. But it'd be easy enough to distribute code that generates that db given aim.exe, so there are workarounds.
So what's missing from this picture? Sounds like an acceptable workaround to me overall. Not a pleasant one, but doable.
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What with 83 percent of 5477 voters voting no, that makes around 4546 pirates, according to RIAA-logic.
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Is it just me? It seems that tv has in general has gone bland, no odd quirky shows like Quincy or The Rockford Files any more. Granted, there's the X Files, and Twin Peaks, but I'm hard-pressed to think of any others in the last 10 years or so.
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I seem to remember something written about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'. I dunno about you, but using Napster seems to fall into that third category there.
If you discount that argument, then I challenge you to find the right to 'walk down the street' in the Constitution in anything other than generalities like the 9th and 10th Amendments. And last I checked, using the legal system as a club to get something you want that doesn't have anything to do with the law is itself a crime. The RIAA wants Napster dead, and it will do anything, legal or illegal, to accomplish its goals, including (ab)using the legal system.
---
The whole idea behind a karma-type system is that you want to reward behavior that you want, and discourage behavior you don't want. Unless you're omniscient, you're not going to build the perfect karma system on the first or even the second, third or fourth tries. It requires tuning and adjustment. People *will* find holes in your system, and exploit them. So you make adjustments, and eventually you make the costs of exploiting holes not really worth it. Most of the complaints about slashdot karma stem from the fact that it really hasn't undergone a lot of tuning.
A good example of a karma-like system is the shops in the game nethack. The devteam has generally indicated that there are two 'approved' ways to get objects from shops: paying for them, and getting your pet to steal from the shop for you. This was originally enforced by making shopkeepers tough (generally tougher than the average adventurer can have a hope of killing), and having them be human, with an in-game penalty for killing a fellow human. To make simply teleporting out of a shop with stuff less attractive, the Keystone Kops were added. Also the shopkeeper himself would track you down and beat the stuffing out of you.
This was roughly the state of shops when I started playing back in version 2.2. There were literally dozens of ways around these deterrents to shoplifting-- dig a hole in the shop's floor and jump through, dig a second entrance to the shop, use a high-powered wand on the shopkeeper, teleport objects out of the shop and go grab them elsewhere, etc. Over the years, things have been added to the game that negate these: if you jump down a hole in a shop, the shopkeeper grabs your pack so then he has all your stuff, shopkeepers repair holes in shop walls, shopkeepers stay out of direct wand path when you're a distance away from them, shopkeepers keep track of stuff teleported out of the shop and charge you for them anyways, etc. The effect is that nowadays, the 'approved' ways to get items from shops are generally the easiest. The game has been tuned that way in response to player abuse.
So, yes of course, no karma system is perfect. But it doesn't have to be-- all it has to do is keep up with those who try to abuse it. Takes a little effort, but what doesn't?
---
So you restricted Fnord Software from using v4.0 of Frobnitz software, because of them being Evil Greedy Slime and such. But lo and behold, they mend their evil ways. What do you do? Release v4.0.1 (all you need change is the copyright notice and the license notice), with the restriction against them removed. Voila, problem solved.
Heck, the release history of your program could serve as a list of who was Evil at the time.
Your point about compromising principles is a valid one, but we don't all have to be Gandhi to get our principles across. Sometimes you have to play the Greedy Slime game in order to fight them. What you can't let it do is dull your purpose. Preventing companies or individuals from using your code purely on a capricious or arbitrary basis only serves as ego gratification; but trying to keep the gun that you yourself made out of your enemy's hands because he'll try to kill you with it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even the highest-minded open source advocates must admit that they get a sour feeling in their stomach if they stop to think how much use emacs and gcc is to, say, the programmers at Microsoft.
That's just my view on it, anyways.
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Please tell me how the local ISP, the backbone providers, or Dave at CCS is supposed to tell that I'm sending a pirated copy of Office to my friend instead of a netscape core dump, if I'm using his and my public key?
All pirates need to do is go to more of a drug dealer-type exchange, instead of a post-it-to-the-world exchange. CCS then has the more difficult challenge of posing as a pirate, instead of just trolling the latest Usenet feed.
But then again, I wouldn't expect you to think of that. It requires something called a clue.
---
It may be a bit gauche to reply to one's own post, but in the time I wrote my post, someone else posted my general idea, but even better: Hit them where it will hurt.
---
All the cooperation from backbone providers et al won't do them a damn bit of good if they can't tell what's being passed thru them.
The moral to the story? Use strong encryption on *everything*. Hell, Napster could fsck over lots of its enemies simply by integrating strong encryption into its client.
---
Probably lots of you are wondering how to fight a company like this. Granted, there are countless legal, quasi-legal, and illegal methods, but here's one that's totally above board and reasonable.
If you write open-source software, consider adding something like the following to your license of choice: "The following companies are forbidden from using this software in any manner: __________. Violation of this clause means said company agrees to give $1 million or 10 percent of their yearly gross combined domestic and international sales, whichever is greater, to the Free Software Foundation, per violation." I'm not a lawyer, so I'm sure someone could make that legally firm by rewriting it appropriately.
Why let companies like this use our own tools against us?
---
Going to referee.com, they've announced an alliance with Sports Illustrated. Looks like it's time to let SI know that their corporate partner is being a crying spoiled brat on the Internet and generally making bad net.press for themselves, and that maybe they should think twice about being associated with them.
---
The solution to this is that if the loser's costs are less than the winner's, the loser doesn't pay any more than his own costs. So if you sue Microsoft (or they sue you) and you lose, your legal bill will at most double. To this add some rules to keep the actual cost honest, and it eliminates the majority of objections to 'loser pays'.
---
Does anyone know which OSen (or Linux dists) have ksh93 installed with them? Even if it's installed as (/usr)/bin/ksh93 it'd still be nice to see it get out there and get used, since it sounds like it has some really cool features.
---
Most video games (I'm talking arcade standups, not PC games) that let multiple people play at the same time are non-zero-sum. Gauntlet is probably the most well-known one (I saw it mentioned already at least once), but it's certainly not the only one.
There's a difference in types, though-- most such games are just individuals in the same space that can either help each other or not. Others, though are like Space Duel, a color vector sequel to Asteroids, which had a mode where two players played at the same time with two ships that were connected-- if you thrusted the wrong way, you'd end up with the two ships spinning around each other wildly. The final score that was put on the scoreboard was the combined score of the two players. Other examples are the old vector game Ripoff, or Cyberball 2084, where two players can play on the same team against the computer (or on opposite teams against each other), now taken up by more modern games like NBA Jam and the like. I've even seen pinball machines that had a built-in mode where two players' scores were combined for scoreboard and high score purposes.
I'd classify these as strong cooperative, whereas Gauntlet and Mario Bros (not Super Mario Bros) and the other multiplayer games are weak cooperative, where the players can cooperate but don't necessarily have to. I'm sure there are tons of more examples, but those are the first ones I can think of off the top of my head.
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More like the influx of ignorants spam up our language the same way they've spammed up Usenet and other such forums that used to be useful. Go read the followup to my post that describes how they're abusing the perfectly good word 'software' down in Brazil. It's all part of the dumbing down of America and by proxy, the world. We already have television that plays to the lowest common denominator; the last thing I want to see is an Internet that ends up AOLized.
---
I will adjust my rant on this subject accordingly in the future. :-) Thanks.
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What bugs the hell out of me is the all-too-common usage of 'email' as a singular noun. I see all the time people saying 'I'll send him an email' or 'I have 3 emails'.
Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck. The noun 'email' is plural, and should be used exactly the same way as the plural noun 'mail'. You check your email, you send a piece of email, you send some email if you insist on a shorter way of saying the previous. This used to be standard usage before about 1993 or so (see Sep tem ber that never ended), but sadly seems to be the minority usage now.
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