Having one person or business try to get all this data would be hard. It would cost money and would not be free without the risk of abuse. However, there is a way we can do that. The operative word is "we". What it takes is for the right people in each TV market area to convince the stations in that market (that they can communicate directly with or even visit) to provide them their listings (free, with no restrictions). As soon as one is convinced, more will follow. They might need to be converted to a common XML/RSS format. Then we merge them together at a few central points, and redistribute. If those stations can be convinced to do so in an RSS feed, that could make it easy. But what we should do is work with them to make it easy for them.
Then we'll need other approaches to get the national cable/satellite listings. This might get harder.
And keep in mind there will be resistance from those who make revenues from listings.
The "security" problem is that when running Windows Vista under virtualization, the user could access certain things Microsoft or the Mafi*aa doesn't want them to be able to access. If Vista runs under VMware under Linux, someone might be able to trap bit-perfect audio and maybe even video inside the Linux kernel, and save it to a file. People would be able to readily see what Windows is actually doing, too. It's not your security they are concerned with; it's their own "security".
Banks sell your info. Read the privacy policy. Read the weasel words they stick in, usually near the end, where they say they do go ahead and provide information where permitted by law. Sounds like they are restricted, but selling your information to marketing and credit businesses is permitted by law and they are basically saying they will do it. And most do it, even when you ask them not to. Then if you threaten to close the account if they don't stop, they will let you close the account because they are probably losing money on you, anyway.
But does it have the most important feature for me, which is a permanently unlocked version that can be used with any phone provider, without sticking me on some plan (I just want month to month, even pre-paid).
And of course it needs to be durable (drop it from head height every day w/o damage, except for scuffing on the case), last for at least 3 years, and have a reasonable charge time.
wel i'mm givvig ttthis grettt idea aa ttry tooo se oww welll ittt wokss... sinc ii cantt ussse itt untttil aaftr it driess i hav t us aan oldd keyybarddd for nnow.
... grab Orrin Hatch and a few other select Congresspeople by their lapels and shake some sense into them.
You better bring a lot of that sense with you. There's a huge vacuum of it there, especially between the ears. Trouble is, I think it will just leak back out the same way the first bunch of sense did.
This is another net neutrality issue. It's double billing to get an advantage. It just happens to be email messages in this case, and packets in other cases.
What are you getting for the 1/4 cent per email, assuming your email is not spam? An assurance that Goodmail will not misclassify it as spam?
What are you getting for the 1/4 cent per email, assuming your email is spam? A new spamming partner?
I can set up Sendmail properly and securely. I've done so before, and I could again, if I wanted to burden myself with such a monumental task. By comparison, Postfix can be set up properly and securely more quickly, and with less pain.
Given the dilution of system administration jobs, in large part due to businesses wanting to pay admins less, there will be a lot of people in such jobs that fall into the "gap" between "cannot configure sendmail properly and securely" and "can configure postfix properly and securely". It might not be a huge gap, but there is one.
GPL3 License: Use our code, give back your code, and do not use DRM or Patents to restrict your code or derivative program in any way.
GPL3 License: Use our code, give back your code, and make sure I can still use it on the hardware you distributed it on even if I recompile it from source myself.
... if they would just drop the stupid login requirement for reading articles. I can understand needing it to post a comment. But it should be entirely voluntary for reading. Maybe their reporter should be doing a story on this silliness that seems to be rampant among a lot of major newspapers.
If there's any way to organize and refuse to relay mail from any of these greedy self-appointed guardians, I'd certainly be interested.
This is easy to do. Most mail server software lets you block by domain name of the SMTP client host and/or the host part of the sender email address. If you don't have this option, but can refuse email from SMTP client hosts without valid reverse DNS, you can force the reverse DNS to be bad by adding empty zones for their domain to your DNS server that your mail server uses.
Blacklisting all mail out of their domains would probably be extremely educational for them.
They cannot be educated. They would never notice, anyway. Their customers may notice. A few might even quit. But they (the corporate executives) won't notice.
What we do is create the "invisible alternate internet". This is the internet where all the "good stuff" is. It would be based on an alternate set of DNS root zones with distinctive new top level domains that "they" don't have access to. Eventually more and more of their customers will want access to "the other internet". But they (the evil ISPs) won't be able to provide it because those alternate DNS root zones will have the evil domain names blotted out with strange addresses like 0.6.6.6.
Oh wait, there already is an alternate internet. Sorry, I cannot disclose the location.
I don't know any of the technology of ZFS, so I can only guess.
For a boot loader like LILO, it will need to create a list of exact hardware datablocks to read the kernel in from. ZFS might move those blocks around after the "lilo" command built the block map. Then it can't load the kernel.
For a boot loader like GRUB, it will need to have a read-only subset of the filesystem inside so it can find the kernel image file. That might be doable, but it hasn't been done, yet.
So create a small boot partition on the first few megabytes of the drive, and make another partition for the rest and let it be a part of the ZFS pool (if ZFS can accept a partition, and not just a whole disk).
A better option would be to get a computer that has legacy IDE support with bootability, in addition to the main SATA or SCSI support for major hard drives. Then add a Compact Flash adapter to the IDE port and use a small Compact Flash module to load the kernel from using your favorite boot loader. Or just use an all-SATA mainboard with a different Compact Flash adapter for SATA. A tiny CF memory module with 16MB or so would be enough to load a nice sized kernel. Or go with a 16GB one and have a copy of/opt and/usr on there as well (structured to work when mounted read-only).
There will always be an analog hole. There are only two things they can do about that. One is to degrade the analog quality. But this also degrades the user experience. That ultimately can't work. They can certainly go as far as making sure no analog connections exist between the playback source and the display. But to see it, you have to have a display. And that's a hole right there. The other thing they can do is restrict the ability to capture from the analog hole. But this ends up crippling devices that inherintly have to be analog, such as a camera. Watermarks are their best bet, but these have to be very subtle to avoid destroying the user experience. And the more subtle they are, the harder it is to make technology that can detect it in a variety of cases, and fit into a cheap consumer digital video camera made in China.
The real cause of the problem is not that content comes to us digitally. That's actually an advantage for the content providers. It's the fact that once a copy has leaked into the pirate world, stripped of its DRM encumbrance, there is no further loss of quality as there once was when everything was in analog.
Back when everything was analog, people put up with horrible quality just to get a movie cheap, or see one before they were otherwise allowed to for some reason. The fact that even today people try to sneak cameras into theaters to copy a major motion picture shows just how low a quality a lot people are willing to accept. Sure, some people today want their pirated copy to be perfect original digital reproduction. But the mass level of piracy will be quite happy with just the one generation of analog lossage that we have today.
The focus on stopping piracy needs to be at the distribution, not at the original capture. It only takes one leak and it's all over the internet. DRM would have to be 100% perfect to make a dent in piracy. It simply cannot do that. It won't work.
What DRM will do, however, is stop casual copying. It can prevent someone from making a copy for a neighbor. Now the neighbor will have to go to the internet to get a "real pirate copy". It will also cause people to have to buy more copies than they wanted, to be able to play on a variety of devices, of the most intrusive of DRM comes into being. But that is what the content producers are really wanting in the end, which would drive up sales because of this deprivation of fair use. That is ultimately what DRM can work for, and is what the content producers want.
DRM will also cripple many ways people can even play or watch the content they legally buy (or would legally buy if they knew they could play it). The number of such people affected is still small, and may well remain small (e.g. die hard BSD/Linux users). Because these people are affected, some of them will (and most of the rest will support) find ways to crack the DRM directly. So basically, DRM itself creates motives to crack DRM even among those willing to pay for everything they have (e.g. are not tha freeloader minority). So DRM will always be under attack. And big corporations have continually shown they are unable to make perfect technology, especially that involving encryption.
DRM will fail. But the prospect is that it could take as much as 20 years for big corporate executives to realize this. They are slow learners (as the internet itself has shown on a massive scale).
And in other news... AT&T has leaked information about their plans to buy the US interstate roadway system. "Not only will we be able to charge high tolls for all traffic when they enter and when they exit, but we'll also be able to charge all the cities for access ramp rights. That way we can get overpaid many times for the same thing, just like we do in the telecommunications sector. Highway neutrality is over."
BSD certainly has less community support than the more popular Linux. And it has fewer features, such as drivers. But in the embedded space, this difference is less. Quite many embedded devices do use BSD. Having originally chosen Linux doesn't mean Linux was the only choice that could work.
The big issue, actually, will be glibc. Future versions of it likely will be GPLv3, making it something unusable with DRM. Whether other libraries, such as uClibc, will follow to GPLv3 is unknown. But if all these choices go away, the BSD option is still there. You get a BSD kernel with the BSD libc.
Going with BSD would definitely have some cost to retro fit everything. And possibly, some code will need to be hacked that didn't need to be hacked in Linux. But BSD is most certainly a viable choice.
By Thursday, Sentinel, the company that built the database for MySpace has acknowledged the error. Sentinel CEO John Cardillo told ABC News that the system functioned properly, because an actual sex offender existed with the same name, and a date of birth two years and two days apart from Davis'.
Excuse me... that is not functioning properly at all. That is a major malfunction, caused either by a bad design or an error in programming. Merely having the same name absolutely cannot be used for this kind of matching, even if the birthdates matched exactly (which they did not).
That is on top of MySpace's utter failure to actually do any real investigation when they were informed that an error had taken place. So they compounded the error with a lie, and can no longer just blame it all on Sentinel.
I have always wondered what would happen if two sex offenders tried picking each other up. It just might be a priceless moment when they they realize that neither one of them is 16.
NBC has been running some silly TV shows where they confront people who apparently were trying meet someone underage for sex, then have them arrested. Maybe it would be more funny (and get more audience) to turn it into a reality show and see what happens when they find out the 15 y/o girl turns out to be a 45 y/o woman who hates pedos. Do it on a Caribbean island and maybe CBS would carry it.
There is one feature that Linux does NOT have, that many teenagers want, which they can get by using Windows. That feature is tha bility to boast truthfully they they have pirated their OS, to their friends.
My goals do NOT include getting other people to use Linux. I don't GaFF what OS they use. But I do have goals that could be met if they were to use Linux. One of those is better driver support from hardware manufacturers (or at least to stop creating all new hardware interfaces so often). Another is for them to stop letting spammers spew spam through their computers. There might be some other benefits for me if they did use Linux, like more applications (even commercial ones only available in binary). But if those wants of mine can be met by some others means than having more Linux users, that's fine by me.
Slashdot Mirror
Having one person or business try to get all this data would be hard. It would cost money and would not be free without the risk of abuse. However, there is a way we can do that. The operative word is "we". What it takes is for the right people in each TV market area to convince the stations in that market (that they can communicate directly with or even visit) to provide them their listings (free, with no restrictions). As soon as one is convinced, more will follow. They might need to be converted to a common XML/RSS format. Then we merge them together at a few central points, and redistribute. If those stations can be convinced to do so in an RSS feed, that could make it easy. But what we should do is work with them to make it easy for them.
Then we'll need other approaches to get the national cable/satellite listings. This might get harder.
And keep in mind there will be resistance from those who make revenues from listings.
The "security" problem is that when running Windows Vista under virtualization, the user could access certain things Microsoft or the Mafi*aa doesn't want them to be able to access. If Vista runs under VMware under Linux, someone might be able to trap bit-perfect audio and maybe even video inside the Linux kernel, and save it to a file. People would be able to readily see what Windows is actually doing, too. It's not your security they are concerned with; it's their own "security".
Banks sell your info. Read the privacy policy. Read the weasel words they stick in, usually near the end, where they say they do go ahead and provide information where permitted by law. Sounds like they are restricted, but selling your information to marketing and credit businesses is permitted by law and they are basically saying they will do it. And most do it, even when you ask them not to. Then if you threaten to close the account if they don't stop, they will let you close the account because they are probably losing money on you, anyway.
But does it have the most important feature for me, which is a permanently unlocked version that can be used with any phone provider, without sticking me on some plan (I just want month to month, even pre-paid).
And of course it needs to be durable (drop it from head height every day w/o damage, except for scuffing on the case), last for at least 3 years, and have a reasonable charge time.
wel i'mm givvig ttthis grettt idea aa ttry tooo se oww welll ittt wokss... sinc ii cantt ussse itt untttil aaftr it driess i hav t us aan oldd keyybarddd for nnow.
And which OS could that possibly be? I know of no OS that has never crashed.
Now if the ISS started sending out flare messages advertising some sex enhancement drug, then, yeah, I could narrow it down to a particular OS.
You better bring a lot of that sense with you. There's a huge vacuum of it there, especially between the ears. Trouble is, I think it will just leak back out the same way the first bunch of sense did.
This is another net neutrality issue. It's double billing to get an advantage. It just happens to be email messages in this case, and packets in other cases.
What are you getting for the 1/4 cent per email, assuming your email is not spam? An assurance that Goodmail will not misclassify it as spam?
What are you getting for the 1/4 cent per email, assuming your email is spam? A new spamming partner?
... a car that runs on solar power, given that the intent of the tax is to pay for roads (maintenance, new construction, etc)?
I can set up Sendmail properly and securely. I've done so before, and I could again, if I wanted to burden myself with such a monumental task. By comparison, Postfix can be set up properly and securely more quickly, and with less pain.
Given the dilution of system administration jobs, in large part due to businesses wanting to pay admins less, there will be a lot of people in such jobs that fall into the "gap" between "cannot configure sendmail properly and securely" and "can configure postfix properly and securely". It might not be a huge gap, but there is one.
GPL3 License: Use our code, give back your code, and make sure I can still use it on the hardware you distributed it on even if I recompile it from source myself.
... if they would just drop the stupid login requirement for reading articles. I can understand needing it to post a comment. But it should be entirely voluntary for reading. Maybe their reporter should be doing a story on this silliness that seems to be rampant among a lot of major newspapers.
This is easy to do. Most mail server software lets you block by domain name of the SMTP client host and/or the host part of the sender email address. If you don't have this option, but can refuse email from SMTP client hosts without valid reverse DNS, you can force the reverse DNS to be bad by adding empty zones for their domain to your DNS server that your mail server uses.
They cannot be educated. They would never notice, anyway. Their customers may notice. A few might even quit. But they (the corporate executives) won't notice.
What we do is create the "invisible alternate internet". This is the internet where all the "good stuff" is. It would be based on an alternate set of DNS root zones with distinctive new top level domains that "they" don't have access to. Eventually more and more of their customers will want access to "the other internet". But they (the evil ISPs) won't be able to provide it because those alternate DNS root zones will have the evil domain names blotted out with strange addresses like 0.6.6.6.
Oh wait, there already is an alternate internet. Sorry, I cannot disclose the location.
Or have I accidentally agreed to some EULA that restricts me to only using arbitration for settling my complaint about too many duplicate articles?
I don't know any of the technology of ZFS, so I can only guess.
For a boot loader like LILO, it will need to create a list of exact hardware datablocks to read the kernel in from. ZFS might move those blocks around after the "lilo" command built the block map. Then it can't load the kernel.
For a boot loader like GRUB, it will need to have a read-only subset of the filesystem inside so it can find the kernel image file. That might be doable, but it hasn't been done, yet.
So create a small boot partition on the first few megabytes of the drive, and make another partition for the rest and let it be a part of the ZFS pool (if ZFS can accept a partition, and not just a whole disk).
A better option would be to get a computer that has legacy IDE support with bootability, in addition to the main SATA or SCSI support for major hard drives. Then add a Compact Flash adapter to the IDE port and use a small Compact Flash module to load the kernel from using your favorite boot loader. Or just use an all-SATA mainboard with a different Compact Flash adapter for SATA. A tiny CF memory module with 16MB or so would be enough to load a nice sized kernel. Or go with a 16GB one and have a copy of /opt and /usr on there as well (structured to work when mounted read-only).
There will always be an analog hole. There are only two things they can do about that. One is to degrade the analog quality. But this also degrades the user experience. That ultimately can't work. They can certainly go as far as making sure no analog connections exist between the playback source and the display. But to see it, you have to have a display. And that's a hole right there. The other thing they can do is restrict the ability to capture from the analog hole. But this ends up crippling devices that inherintly have to be analog, such as a camera. Watermarks are their best bet, but these have to be very subtle to avoid destroying the user experience. And the more subtle they are, the harder it is to make technology that can detect it in a variety of cases, and fit into a cheap consumer digital video camera made in China.
The real cause of the problem is not that content comes to us digitally. That's actually an advantage for the content providers. It's the fact that once a copy has leaked into the pirate world, stripped of its DRM encumbrance, there is no further loss of quality as there once was when everything was in analog.
Back when everything was analog, people put up with horrible quality just to get a movie cheap, or see one before they were otherwise allowed to for some reason. The fact that even today people try to sneak cameras into theaters to copy a major motion picture shows just how low a quality a lot people are willing to accept. Sure, some people today want their pirated copy to be perfect original digital reproduction. But the mass level of piracy will be quite happy with just the one generation of analog lossage that we have today.
The focus on stopping piracy needs to be at the distribution, not at the original capture. It only takes one leak and it's all over the internet. DRM would have to be 100% perfect to make a dent in piracy. It simply cannot do that. It won't work.
What DRM will do, however, is stop casual copying. It can prevent someone from making a copy for a neighbor. Now the neighbor will have to go to the internet to get a "real pirate copy". It will also cause people to have to buy more copies than they wanted, to be able to play on a variety of devices, of the most intrusive of DRM comes into being. But that is what the content producers are really wanting in the end, which would drive up sales because of this deprivation of fair use. That is ultimately what DRM can work for, and is what the content producers want.
DRM will also cripple many ways people can even play or watch the content they legally buy (or would legally buy if they knew they could play it). The number of such people affected is still small, and may well remain small (e.g. die hard BSD/Linux users). Because these people are affected, some of them will (and most of the rest will support) find ways to crack the DRM directly. So basically, DRM itself creates motives to crack DRM even among those willing to pay for everything they have (e.g. are not tha freeloader minority). So DRM will always be under attack. And big corporations have continually shown they are unable to make perfect technology, especially that involving encryption.
DRM will fail. But the prospect is that it could take as much as 20 years for big corporate executives to realize this. They are slow learners (as the internet itself has shown on a massive scale).
And in other news ... AT&T has leaked information about their plans to buy the US interstate roadway system. "Not only will we be able to charge high tolls for all traffic when they enter and when they exit, but we'll also be able to charge all the cities for access ramp rights. That way we can get overpaid many times for the same thing, just like we do in the telecommunications sector. Highway neutrality is over."
I hope no one needs to call me on my landline for the next ... oh ... 15 years.
BSD certainly has less community support than the more popular Linux. And it has fewer features, such as drivers. But in the embedded space, this difference is less. Quite many embedded devices do use BSD. Having originally chosen Linux doesn't mean Linux was the only choice that could work.
The big issue, actually, will be glibc. Future versions of it likely will be GPLv3, making it something unusable with DRM. Whether other libraries, such as uClibc, will follow to GPLv3 is unknown. But if all these choices go away, the BSD option is still there. You get a BSD kernel with the BSD libc.
Going with BSD would definitely have some cost to retro fit everything. And possibly, some code will need to be hacked that didn't need to be hacked in Linux. But BSD is most certainly a viable choice.
Yikes, that's over 65 amps! Well, OK, it's less than 1 amp per core.
Excuse me ... that is not functioning properly at all. That is a major malfunction, caused either by a bad design or an error in programming. Merely having the same name absolutely cannot be used for this kind of matching, even if the birthdates matched exactly (which they did not).
That is on top of MySpace's utter failure to actually do any real investigation when they were informed that an error had taken place. So they compounded the error with a lie, and can no longer just blame it all on Sentinel.
NBC has been running some silly TV shows where they confront people who apparently were trying meet someone underage for sex, then have them arrested. Maybe it would be more funny (and get more audience) to turn it into a reality show and see what happens when they find out the 15 y/o girl turns out to be a 45 y/o woman who hates pedos. Do it on a Caribbean island and maybe CBS would carry it.
No. But having one removed does.
There is one feature that Linux does NOT have, that many teenagers want, which they can get by using Windows. That feature is tha bility to boast truthfully they they have pirated their OS, to their friends.
My goals do NOT include getting other people to use Linux. I don't GaFF what OS they use. But I do have goals that could be met if they were to use Linux. One of those is better driver support from hardware manufacturers (or at least to stop creating all new hardware interfaces so often). Another is for them to stop letting spammers spew spam through their computers. There might be some other benefits for me if they did use Linux, like more applications (even commercial ones only available in binary). But if those wants of mine can be met by some others means than having more Linux users, that's fine by me.