Says Enah (more-or-less): "Yeah, they trying to commit a crime against us, but dammit, why are you so angry at them?"
Now you're just trolling.
Says Enah (for real): "It's not like they fired the first shot."
Are you kidding? They've fired the only shot... this entire slashdot thread is showboating by most participants, me included. (I haven't taken any direct action. I in fact do not have a CueCat and do not want one.) DC is the one actually pulling out the lawyers.
Says Enah: "a community of people have completely bypassed their controls over their product"
Your entire argument is based on assuming the validity of those controls, which is absurd on at least three levels, one of which is the point directly in contention. Those controls are illegal according to the laws of the Postal Service. Those controls have been added after the transaction occurred. Those controls (attempt to) use a novel and hellaciously dangerous (and most likely illegal!) way of binding you to a contract, specifically, "You are playing with our gift. Here's the contract you are now bound with." Last and least, those controls are utterly unethical.
To hell with their "controls". They do not have any basis whatsoever to impose those controls. You can't obligate me by giving a free gift. It would be horrible if you could.
(ps... the true reason this is a real issue is the bit about trying to tie EULAs into hardware usage, a supremely dangerous development if allowed to continue.)
but imagine Amazon finding some loophole in some law that enables them to ruin other people's businesses, would you agree with Amazon?
Hello? One-click patent, anybody? Companies do find crappy ways of ruining other businesses, and we do despise them. We are merely engaging in self-defense against a company doing unethical things.
Why is it always that "we" are right and "them companies" are wrong when it comes to finding smart ways to do business or break other people's businesses.
You're completely missing the point. The point is not to destroy Digital Convergance, the point is that their attempt to bind us in a legal contract (the EULA) in bold violation of postal regulation is reprehensible. Nor is this a 'clever' way of using the law; this is exactly what that postal regulation is trying to prevent: Mail fraud!
If they hadn't tried to screw people, maybe people wouldn't be upset. But it's not just illegal to send unsolicited gifts and then trying to tie conditions to use, it's unethical too, and that pisses us off. It's good to see a lack of complacency.
In theory, there's no reason to worry about all this content control stuff, because in theory the companies shouldn't abuse it when they have it, like trying to make us pay for each time we play something and strictly forbidding the transfer of the music to other devices, let alone people. In theory, we can still have fair use and lending right.
Unfortunately, it is abundantly clear that the music companies cannot be trusted in that way, at least right now. (Maybe we can train them.)
You're right, the technology isn't evil, but it grants power to evil people.
Maybe we don't need all of these fancy-schmancy gadgets because we've got an outstanding computer network and great computers that render those gadgets obsolete before they even get here.
Why would I want a web-browsing cell-phone? I have a web-browser at work, free local phone calls for my ISP at home, cheap good computers, and I actually have a cable modem at home. The amount of time I'd actually want to use a thing with an vanishingly tiny screen to browse the web or use e-mail is quite small.
Maybe we don't have them because neither need nor want them. Goodness knows there's nothing that special about the technology... they don't have some sooper-secret chip-making process that produces 100 GHz Pentium Pros... then I would be worried. The power of desktop computers lies with their generality.
You have an interesting point, but it's backwards.
In the end, it comes down to "What information can the advertiser extract from the HTTP request to identify me?" This is why things like Junkbuster obfuscate as much of the request as technically possible, including User-Agent.
When it boils down to it, we don't have to send them anything more then "send me this page". The only other identifiers we must leave behind are the IP address we are recieving at, obfuscatable with a proxy server.
At this point, the only choice the advertisers will have is to either grant us service, or deny us service, despite the inability to tell who are. If we feed them nothing, they can't pull the information out of the air.
Denying us service is not likely, either; advertising knowlege is nothing compared to actual profit obtained from a purchased item.
We don't have to put up with this. When Mozilla comes out, there's a few patches I want to make (like completely blocking the "onclose" event from firing)... maybe a few other hackers making a few other security patches can nail down that browser well enough for actual use. (Block 3rd party cookies, strip out some useless HTTP header information, and put some sandbox-style warnings into other parts of Javascript (like form submission) and you're a lot of the way there... it'd mostly be a matter of selectively removing features, which is usually not so hard:-) )
Check your internet connection. This edit page opened in about 1 second. I can't tell you in advance how long it'll take to post, but I'll reply to myself if it's over a minute:-)
I have contacted the RIAA and the MPAA, and have pointed them at this post, which contains so-called "bit stripped" versions of every movie and every song ever produced and that will ever be produced.
If Napster's damage can be measured in the trillions in a lawsuit, just imagine what you've opened yourself up to.
"Exadollars, and soon, petadollars. One thousand billion trillion dollars. How many lawsuits per second can your software handle?" with apologies to IBM
please forgive duplication if it occurs, I'm having trouble getting through
My answer is that technology can always fail. Somebody might hack my computer and get my key, or actually successfully guess it at some point (it's not impossible, after all) by some new algorithmic development.
While the tech can certainly help us out, we'll always need to be able to fall back on human laws for human resolutions to our human problems.
Do you like the statement that they own your messages and can do as they please with them?
As for opting out, well, I'm not opting out of hundreds of messages one by one. That's not an opt-out policy, that just an excuse of an opt-out policy.
This is a violation of the integrity of the poster's message. That Deja.com is a free service doesn't matter. That the change seems minor doesn't matter. It is not for Deja.com to decide what is minor and what is not... - nor is it up to you. I don't trust them and I don't trust you to make those decisions. Leave my message content alone.
Sure, today they're only adding links, but on the basis of all the arguments saying Deja.com is doing an OK thing, what's to stop them from doing more?
Deja.com has moved from being an internet service, archiving Usenet posts, to an Internet parasite, illegally modifying other people's post to further their own economic well being. Yes, links are a form of communication! What else are they? By adding in the links they are changing the message of the poster, and that is not just illegal but immoral and unethical.
This is a major violation of the free speech rights of Usenet posters. What good is free speech if just any old person can change what you said before it arrives to a listener? This is a form of censorship, and it doesn't matter if it's a "little" or a "lot"... it's wrong and should be fought.
There are no excuses sufficient to justify this without asking permission from every single poster of the message. Yes, that burden is impossible; that's why they shouldn't be doing this.
I wouldn't worry too much about people digging through your ancestry and finding dirt. We've all got filthy ancestors. You just have to look hard enough. All of us have ancestors practicing genocide, incest, murder, war, repression, slavery, any thing you care to name. Those who claim otherwise are ignorant or actively lying.
This is, BTW, why I never buy that people should be made to pay for the sins of their ancestors. There's not a person alive who could afford to pay for their own ancestors crimes.
Not terribly convincing. For example, the "original" metabolic pathway may have been more complicated.
That doesn't help you; in fact it hurts you immensely. Now these even more complicated things need to spring into existance spontaneously, and then find a pathway back to a simpler configuration.
You're better off jumping straight to the correct answer. Probabilities get exponentially worse the more things you need to get correct at once, and by jumping straight there you are following a 'shorter' pathway.
Anyway, take a look at Tierra, for example.
Tierra isn't even close to the complexity of real life, by multiple factors of magnitude. If it was as easy in real life as it is to randomly create a viable Tierra entity, we'd be able to throw chems together in the laboratory and see life emerge without too much effort... and we don't. All we get are random amino acids (and I mean "random" in the mathematical sense, not the colloquial sense). Tierra is unutterably simplistic compared to the real world. After all, it can run on your computer... meanwhile, simulating the first millisecond of a nucleor explosion takes three months on a machine that wouldn't even notice your computer if it was added to it.
I don't think you've read the original argument (call it the Slashdot argument syndrome). While you may or may not find Behe convincing, the summary you are responding to is not enough to make a decision.
Personally, I find Behe's arguments extremely compelling, especially in light of the fact that I have never seen a rebuttal that even addresses the issues he raises, let along begin to counter them; the rebuttals generally take the form of "I declare Behe to be stupid, therefore his arguments are wrong." which is a stunningly effective rhetorical device, but not convincing scientifically. (Seriously, I've seen several, even from those who are normally more sensible then that.)
The strangest part of all is that his argument are disprovable in the scientific sense (hypothetically, evidence can be produced that would disprove his ideas, though by the very nature of the theory, it would take a huge amount of this evidence, as the points he raises cut across damn near every process that ever occurs in any organism anywhere, and most ever combination of those processes as well), far more so then most arguments of this kind. As a result of the disprovability of his arguments, Behe doesn't deserve to be 'lumped' in with the 'rest' of the people arguing against evolution.
(BTW, a better, though imperfect and still too short, summary of Behe's argument is "There exists no pathway by which a lot of critically importent molecular structures could have arisen gradually." Several simple concrete examples are given, and by their very nature one does not need to be a biochemist to see that the only things stopping him from producing hundreds of examples was time, space, and reader interest. To disprove this as a theory (as it obviously cannot be "proven" in a positive manner), one must generate example pathways that these complicated structures can follow to get where they are. It is not sufficient to handwave, which, as I said before, is all I've ever seen anyone do in response to Behe. Pointers to someone providing said legitimate pathways (i.e., solid evidence rather then personal attacks) would be appreciated.
One might simplify even further and boil his argument down as "Give an example of a biochemical structure, such as a flaggela, evolving in steps. You can't." Again, this is oversimplified and intended for informational purposes only... attacking this statement doesn't gain you anything. Read his book. Attack that... there's actual meat there. This is just the skeleton of the skeleton.)
I do agree with you... however, would the phrase within which no human-readable Source has ever existed be better? It's much the same problem, and source code exists merely as a meeting of the minds between computers and human. There's no meeting point here, no easy answers, no cheat sheet, just pure A, G, C, and T.
I think ESR did miss Lessig's points about laws concerning IP and contracts mattering more then it might seem. While hackers may route around damage to freedom, it'll do no good when there are no safe havens... and we as a species are working towards that goal with all available speed.
While you may never corral those last few hackers, the ones who write FreeNet and change it in the face of all attacks and figure out how to disguise it yet again so it evades the law this week... so what? Freedom for the.01% is not freedom at all.
I agree with Lessig; it's dangerous to assume hackers uber alle. Barring a large scale move out into space, the policians still have a lot of power here. There's no natural law of the universe that the they can't destroy all the routers of the world, confiscate computers, and kill the ringleaders of any resistance movement. You think they need us? Those who would fight freedom this hard would have no problem moving the world back to feudalism, as long as they are in power.
Do not underestimate your enemies. They like it when you do that.
I assumed you wanted real DVD quality. If you just want ~VHS quality, then yeah, real-time with dedicated hardware isn't a problem. But it won't match a real DVD movie's quality.
Sorry, no. It's that it takes what is today a supercomputer to encode DVD video and audio in realtime. Even the audio alone would really be cutting it close on today's top-end personal computers. And nothing can write quickly enough if you don't heavily compress it, so that's not an option either.
The Unofficial Infocom Home page - along with information, walkthroughs, and even the Invisiclues for most every infocom games, you can also download Zorks 0 - 4 completely legally
If you dig your way through that page, you'll eventually find the "where to get Infocom games" page... most every link is dead and you'll get disappointed real fast, but there is ONE EXCEPTION, and its the JACKPOT: Joey Jim's Superstore Infocom Classics Masterpieces Collection Online Download for $17 (american). It's the every-game-except-HHGTTG-and-Shogun, and you can find HHGTTG online as mentioned elsewhere. It has the manuals and the maps. Since you can't seem to get the physical version anywhere anymore, this place is the only place I know to get the goods.
Darn near all of them work on the Palm Pilot, just look for the.dat files and convert them with the include z2pdb converter.
Your law allows the making of copies or adaptations, not use. Read more closely.
You can make personal copies to your heart's content of that copy of software, but you are still not allowed to use the software legally unless the copyright owner extends permission to you, which they do as part of the contracts that we call "licenses".
Nope.... licensing is more pernicious then that
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 2
Your acceptance of the contract, under the current scheme of things, is supposedly the sole reason you are allowed to use the software. That it happens to get accidentally installed on your hard drive without a license does not clear you to use it; indeed, if you do, that's piracy under the law. Acceptance of contract (bidirectionally implies) ability to use product. You can't have one without the other... and that's the whole problem.
I think you meant it as a joke, but I've seen the replies take it seriously.
Gameline was a service offered by Control Video Corporation that admitted the downloading of games to the the 2600 over regular phone lines. The Gameline used a variable 800-2000 baud modem, according to Kevin Horton's Gameline Page. The Gameline Master Module originally sold for $49.95 and there was a one-time membership fee of $15. Charges were about $.10 a game or $1 for up to an hour of play. Contest games were $1 and there was a $.50 charge to enter a score. On your birthday, not only were you given free play for a day, but you also received a Happy Birthday screen, complete with cake, candles and music. Atari 2600 trumps... well... anything else you can throw at it. It's the oldest, man!
Slashdot Mirror
Now you're just trolling.
Says Enah (for real): "It's not like they fired the first shot."
Are you kidding? They've fired the only shot... this entire slashdot thread is showboating by most participants, me included. (I haven't taken any direct action. I in fact do not have a CueCat and do not want one.) DC is the one actually pulling out the lawyers.
Says Enah: "a community of people have completely bypassed their controls over their product"
Your entire argument is based on assuming the validity of those controls, which is absurd on at least three levels, one of which is the point directly in contention. Those controls are illegal according to the laws of the Postal Service. Those controls have been added after the transaction occurred. Those controls (attempt to) use a novel and hellaciously dangerous (and most likely illegal!) way of binding you to a contract, specifically, "You are playing with our gift. Here's the contract you are now bound with." Last and least, those controls are utterly unethical.
To hell with their "controls". They do not have any basis whatsoever to impose those controls. You can't obligate me by giving a free gift. It would be horrible if you could.
(ps... the true reason this is a real issue is the bit about trying to tie EULAs into hardware usage, a supremely dangerous development if allowed to continue.)
Hello? One-click patent, anybody? Companies do find crappy ways of ruining other businesses, and we do despise them. We are merely engaging in self-defense against a company doing unethical things.
Why is it always that "we" are right and "them companies" are wrong when it comes to finding smart ways to do business or break other people's businesses.
You're completely missing the point. The point is not to destroy Digital Convergance, the point is that their attempt to bind us in a legal contract (the EULA) in bold violation of postal regulation is reprehensible. Nor is this a 'clever' way of using the law; this is exactly what that postal regulation is trying to prevent: Mail fraud!
If they hadn't tried to screw people, maybe people wouldn't be upset. But it's not just illegal to send unsolicited gifts and then trying to tie conditions to use, it's unethical too, and that pisses us off. It's good to see a lack of complacency.
In theory, there's no reason to worry about all this content control stuff, because in theory the companies shouldn't abuse it when they have it, like trying to make us pay for each time we play something and strictly forbidding the transfer of the music to other devices, let alone people. In theory, we can still have fair use and lending right.
Unfortunately, it is abundantly clear that the music companies cannot be trusted in that way, at least right now. (Maybe we can train them.)
You're right, the technology isn't evil, but it grants power to evil people.
Why would I want a web-browsing cell-phone? I have a web-browser at work, free local phone calls for my ISP at home, cheap good computers, and I actually have a cable modem at home. The amount of time I'd actually want to use a thing with an vanishingly tiny screen to browse the web or use e-mail is quite small.
Maybe we don't have them because neither need nor want them. Goodness knows there's nothing that special about the technology... they don't have some sooper-secret chip-making process that produces 100 GHz Pentium Pros... then I would be worried. The power of desktop computers lies with their generality.
I suppose it should be user configurable whether it grants +1 or -1....
In the end, it comes down to "What information can the advertiser extract from the HTTP request to identify me?" This is why things like Junkbuster obfuscate as much of the request as technically possible, including User-Agent.
When it boils down to it, we don't have to send them anything more then "send me this page". The only other identifiers we must leave behind are the IP address we are recieving at, obfuscatable with a proxy server.
At this point, the only choice the advertisers will have is to either grant us service, or deny us service, despite the inability to tell who are. If we feed them nothing, they can't pull the information out of the air.
Denying us service is not likely, either; advertising knowlege is nothing compared to actual profit obtained from a purchased item.
We don't have to put up with this. When Mozilla comes out, there's a few patches I want to make (like completely blocking the "onclose" event from firing)... maybe a few other hackers making a few other security patches can nail down that browser well enough for actual use. (Block 3rd party cookies, strip out some useless HTTP header information, and put some sandbox-style warnings into other parts of Javascript (like form submission) and you're a lot of the way there... it'd mostly be a matter of selectively removing features, which is usually not so hard :-) )
Check your internet connection. This edit page opened in about 1 second. I can't tell you in advance how long it'll take to post, but I'll reply to myself if it's over a minute :-)
If Napster's damage can be measured in the trillions in a lawsuit, just imagine what you've opened yourself up to.
"Exadollars, and soon, petadollars. One thousand billion trillion dollars. How many lawsuits per second can your software handle?" with apologies to IBM
please forgive duplication if it occurs, I'm having trouble getting through
My answer is that technology can always fail. Somebody might hack my computer and get my key, or actually successfully guess it at some point (it's not impossible, after all) by some new algorithmic development.
While the tech can certainly help us out, we'll always need to be able to fall back on human laws for human resolutions to our human problems.
Do you like the statement that they own your messages and can do as they please with them?
As for opting out, well, I'm not opting out of hundreds of messages one by one. That's not an opt-out policy, that just an excuse of an opt-out policy.
Sure, today they're only adding links, but on the basis of all the arguments saying Deja.com is doing an OK thing, what's to stop them from doing more?
Deja.com has moved from being an internet service, archiving Usenet posts, to an Internet parasite, illegally modifying other people's post to further their own economic well being. Yes, links are a form of communication! What else are they? By adding in the links they are changing the message of the poster, and that is not just illegal but immoral and unethical.
This is a major violation of the free speech rights of Usenet posters. What good is free speech if just any old person can change what you said before it arrives to a listener? This is a form of censorship, and it doesn't matter if it's a "little" or a "lot"... it's wrong and should be fought.
There are no excuses sufficient to justify this without asking permission from every single poster of the message. Yes, that burden is impossible; that's why they shouldn't be doing this.
Hey FOX, let's have them back on the DVD! Wow, 45 minutes is like a full third of the movie.
(Now that word I like!)
This is, BTW, why I never buy that people should be made to pay for the sins of their ancestors. There's not a person alive who could afford to pay for their own ancestors crimes.
That doesn't help you; in fact it hurts you immensely. Now these even more complicated things need to spring into existance spontaneously, and then find a pathway back to a simpler configuration.
You're better off jumping straight to the correct answer. Probabilities get exponentially worse the more things you need to get correct at once, and by jumping straight there you are following a 'shorter' pathway.
Anyway, take a look at Tierra, for example.
Tierra isn't even close to the complexity of real life, by multiple factors of magnitude. If it was as easy in real life as it is to randomly create a viable Tierra entity, we'd be able to throw chems together in the laboratory and see life emerge without too much effort... and we don't. All we get are random amino acids (and I mean "random" in the mathematical sense, not the colloquial sense). Tierra is unutterably simplistic compared to the real world. After all, it can run on your computer... meanwhile, simulating the first millisecond of a nucleor explosion takes three months on a machine that wouldn't even notice your computer if it was added to it.
I don't think you've read the original argument (call it the Slashdot argument syndrome). While you may or may not find Behe convincing, the summary you are responding to is not enough to make a decision.
Personally, I find Behe's arguments extremely compelling, especially in light of the fact that I have never seen a rebuttal that even addresses the issues he raises, let along begin to counter them; the rebuttals generally take the form of "I declare Behe to be stupid, therefore his arguments are wrong." which is a stunningly effective rhetorical device, but not convincing scientifically. (Seriously, I've seen several, even from those who are normally more sensible then that.)
The strangest part of all is that his argument are disprovable in the scientific sense (hypothetically, evidence can be produced that would disprove his ideas, though by the very nature of the theory, it would take a huge amount of this evidence, as the points he raises cut across damn near every process that ever occurs in any organism anywhere, and most ever combination of those processes as well), far more so then most arguments of this kind. As a result of the disprovability of his arguments, Behe doesn't deserve to be 'lumped' in with the 'rest' of the people arguing against evolution.
(BTW, a better, though imperfect and still too short, summary of Behe's argument is "There exists no pathway by which a lot of critically importent molecular structures could have arisen gradually." Several simple concrete examples are given, and by their very nature one does not need to be a biochemist to see that the only things stopping him from producing hundreds of examples was time, space, and reader interest. To disprove this as a theory (as it obviously cannot be "proven" in a positive manner), one must generate example pathways that these complicated structures can follow to get where they are. It is not sufficient to handwave, which, as I said before, is all I've ever seen anyone do in response to Behe. Pointers to someone providing said legitimate pathways (i.e., solid evidence rather then personal attacks) would be appreciated.
One might simplify even further and boil his argument down as "Give an example of a biochemical structure, such as a flaggela, evolving in steps. You can't." Again, this is oversimplified and intended for informational purposes only... attacking this statement doesn't gain you anything. Read his book. Attack that... there's actual meat there. This is just the skeleton of the skeleton.)
I do agree with you... however, would the phrase within which no human-readable Source has ever existed be better? It's much the same problem, and source code exists merely as a meeting of the minds between computers and human. There's no meeting point here, no easy answers, no cheat sheet, just pure A, G, C, and T.
While you may never corral those last few hackers, the ones who write FreeNet and change it in the face of all attacks and figure out how to disguise it yet again so it evades the law this week... so what? Freedom for the .01% is not freedom at all.
I agree with Lessig; it's dangerous to assume hackers uber alle. Barring a large scale move out into space, the policians still have a lot of power here. There's no natural law of the universe that the they can't destroy all the routers of the world, confiscate computers, and kill the ringleaders of any resistance movement. You think they need us? Those who would fight freedom this hard would have no problem moving the world back to feudalism, as long as they are in power.
Do not underestimate your enemies. They like it when you do that.
I suppose then the moderaters would over-use it because they don't seem to read the links either...
I assumed you wanted real DVD quality. If you just want ~VHS quality, then yeah, real-time with dedicated hardware isn't a problem. But it won't match a real DVD movie's quality.
Sorry, no. It's that it takes what is today a supercomputer to encode DVD video and audio in realtime. Even the audio alone would really be cutting it close on today's top-end personal computers. And nothing can write quickly enough if you don't heavily compress it, so that's not an option either.
FYI, z2pdb is in the PilotFrotz package, not the package you can buy.
Darn near all of them work on the Palm Pilot, just look for the
You can make personal copies to your heart's content of that copy of software, but you are still not allowed to use the software legally unless the copyright owner extends permission to you, which they do as part of the contracts that we call "licenses".
I think you meant it as a joke, but I've seen the replies take it seriously.
Try this one for size:
Gameline was a service offered by Control Video Corporation that admitted the downloading of games to the the 2600 over regular phone lines. The Gameline used a variable 800-2000 baud modem, according to Kevin Horton's Gameline Page. The Gameline Master Module originally sold for $49.95 and there was a one-time membership fee of $15. Charges were about $.10 a game or $1 for up to an hour of play. Contest games were $1 and there was a $.50 charge to enter a score. On your birthday, not only were you given free play for a day, but you also received a Happy Birthday screen, complete with cake, candles and music. Atari 2600 trumps... well... anything else you can throw at it. It's the oldest, man!