Wi-Fi piggy-backing is kind of analogous to riding freight trains.
A rail line needs to protect themselves against being held responsible for the hobo population, so they hire screws to kick the bums off the trains. Likewise, most people are advised to encrypt their Wi-Fi signal for the same reason. However, beyond that, most people don't view either type of trespass as a particularly serious crime. Odds are, the user of this WarDrive data is just some warez kid who is using your broadband to swap DivX files or something. Someday they will turn 18, and the fear of a permanent criminal record will disuade them from continuing. (At least that's what happened with all the hacker kids I grew up with.)
Well, obviously. My point (actually, it was more of a smart-assed joke than a point) was that they utterly failed to reach the objective of world-wide participation, at least this time.
Who knows, though... maybe it will build up steam. Personally, I don't really see why one would need an "event" like this. It seems that WarDriving would be a pastime that would be better supported by an ongoing blog or slashcode site, where people could submit time-stamped maps of wireless nodes.
With the World Series it's different, because when Major League Baseball first introduced the World Series, nobody outside of the US had professional baseball teams, so the winner of the game between the American League and the National League was the legitimate world champion.
Now that baseball is played all over Central America and Japan, calling it the World Series sounds a little arrogant, perhaps, but it remains called that because of tradition.
It's still not entirely incorrect, because most of the very best Latino and Japanese baseball players come to America or Canada to make the big money and play against the best competition, so the winner of the "World Series" on any given year probably is, in fact, the world's best baseball team.
That is what sets every career apart; the desire to learn that career.
If that was true, I would be an NBA center, getting paid millions to post up against Shaq for the Timberwolves. I guess I didn't want to be tall and athletic badly enough.
Actually, Prince is making more money off his music now than he ever did during the peak of his years with Warner.
He sells to far fewer people, but he keeps more of what he makes.
Most of his money from his "Purple Rain" days went into Paisley Park studios, which turned out to be an unprofitable venture. (It's a kick-ass studio, but one of many in the Minneapolis area. Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis have their own operation just an hour or so away.)
The fabulous wealth he currently enjoys was made outside the studio system. He's not "Top 20" for two reasons:
1. He gets zero airplay now that he doesn't have a pimp... er... label.
2. Nearly all of his sales are sold on-line by the NPG site, so Billboard doesn't even track most of the sales he gets.
If he wanted to become a mega-star, by your definition, again, it would probably only take one phone call to Sony or Geffin. He feels that he's better off where he's at, and he's trying to point out that many other musicians would be, too.
Actually, a press agent (either working for WB, or one of Prince's people who didn't know better, I dont' recall which) told reporters to call him "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" when asked "How do we pronounce that thing!? And what do we call him when printing in formats that can't use symbols?"
IIRC, the Minneapolis Star Tribune used that weird symbol for his name fairly consistantly (even though it fucked up their printing process a little). The St. Paul Pioneer press with with the "TAFKAP" option. Both papers did call him "the Artist" on occation, but only in the context of an article where the meaning would be obvious.
The thing was, Warner held the rights to the name "Prince" for the duration of his contract (even though he went by that name before he even began his career at WB). By changing it to a symbol with no pronounciation, his fans would still call him "Prince", even though he never, ever directly told them to in any media events. Notice how the first album relased with that symbol-name had, as its first single, a song where he shouts, over and over, "my name is Prince". That's all he ever wanted to be called.
And now you probably know more about TAFKATAFKAP (as I like to call him), than you ever cared to.
Check the track list from "Purple Rain". (Example, "I Would Die 4 U". He's always done that shit.
Come to think of it, a Princelizer would be a fun Perl hack. Kind of like the Sweedish Chef apps, but converts text into Prince's goofball way of using single-character phonetic replacements of sylables until u want 2 beat him 2 death with his own 4skin, and then party like it's 1999.
Why? Food's legal...they haven't slimmed down those requirements... There is no reason for them to accept people that smoke. Give me one good one.
I didn't say they should change the regulation if pot were legalized, I merely speculated that they probably would, the main reason being political expediancy. They don't currently ask you if you consumed hard liquer 15 times in your life, and alchohol approximately as bad for you as pot.
[bracing for flames from the NORML crowd... who can't come up with a acronym that spells a word correctly but think they "know", better than anybody else, that pot is far safer than booze...]
First, we have the right not to incriminate ourselves. War, or not, asking someone to snitch on themselves is self-incrimination. The fact the FBI is doing it makes it all the worse.
Second, we have the statute of limitations. After a period of time, it isn't a crime anymore.
Third, we supposedly have the presumption of innocence in this country.
The rights you mention apply to a crime you are being arrested for, but have nothing to do with security clearance screening.
If, during the screening, you say "I smoked a fat bag of crack in 1982," they can not convict you for drug posession, because of all three reasons you cite (self-incrimination, statute of limitation, presumption of innocence), but they can choose not to hire you.
That is as it should be. You do not have an inalianable right to an FBI career.
On a side note a friend of mine just got his secret clearence. He is mid 30s now, but did experiment some with X and pot when he was in his early 20s. He was truthful about it and got his clearance without and problems.
Interesting. It makes you wonder if the drug questions are just a way of screening for people that will lie to them about nickle & dime stuff like that. I could see why they want to eliminate such people.
It was a "Professor Frink" quote from a Simpsons Halloween special. Don't worry, it looks like a moderator missed the pop-culture reference as well, and modded me down as flame-bait... so you are in good company.
No, that would make you a "former Be user, who liked it a lot". The Be bigots would see you as somewhat of a traitor, or at least Part Of The Problem.
For the record, I also thought Pe/Pepper had a lot of promise to it. It's kind of too bad he's decided to kill it without allowing the Open Source community pick at the remains. Not that he owes anything to Open Source folks, but all the customers who he had over the years would at least have somewhere to turn now.
I'm also willing to discuss legalizing pot on a rational basis with anybody, but if you take the FBI exam and tell them you have toked 15 times, you are effectively telling them you deliberately violated the law 15 times. Not to mention the fact that to use any illegal substance that often, you would probably have been a customer of a dealer at one time or another, which associates you with some genuine low-life people. (That's probably the one factor that kept me away from narcotics as a teen: the dirt-bag thugs one must deal with to get them.)
We pot legal, I would imagine the FBI would relax that requirement. But it's not, so they haven't.
While I feel bad for you and anybody else who would want to help that gets eliminated for various recreational substance use (or, as the headline implies, for obesity), I'm personally glad that the FBI is still tough for Joe Average to get into, even if he does grok relational databases.
Contraray to what we all like our PHB to believe, most technical skills are not hard to learn. Modern development and administration tools make most of the work fairly easy to do, once you acquire the needed knowledge of the systems. Even a total moron (who has an advanced degree in astrophysics, wa-hey!) can run an app in debug mode until he gets it working. What sets us geeks apart (or has so far, anyway) is the desire to learn this shit.
If the FBI recruits a good person, who won't have an acid flashback or a massive stroke two weeks after getting hired, and won't sell everything he knows to foreign governments in exchange for a box of Cheez-Its, they can train him in on what he doesn't know later.
Besides, in the current market, you can afford to weed out the overweight, the hippies, the criminals, the people who don't clean under their fingernails, and anybody who uses the wrong conditioner for their ph balance, and still have lots of solid candidates to interview.
Same here. Maybe the first/. question should be "who the hell are you? The story about this interview says that you have been famous since the 60's, but I'll be damned if I ever heard your name mentioned before."
No surprise there. He's an old Be bigot, and Apple's decision to buy NeXT instead of Be is probably the #1 reason why his favorite operating system is dead and gone. Nobody hates OS X with greater blind passion than a hard-core Be fan.
Whatever Avi Tevanian and/or Steve Jobs does over the next 10 years, for any company, I guarantee that this guy will hate it.
If you asked an Amiga or Atari user what he thought about Macintosh System 7 back in 1987 or so, the shrill of his whines would have been at about the same pitch.
Oddly enough, when an unpopular OS dies, the former users never seem to blame the most popular OS for killing it (Windows), but instead lay the corpse at the feet of the #2 player (Apple). Probably because these also-ran companies (Commodore, Atari, Be), having failed to get traction with general users, tried to shoulder their way into niche markets that Apple is known for (media, music production, publishing, etc.) and rapidly went out of business in the attempt. Just a theory, anyway.
I hope Maarten rethinks this decision in the future and starts development on it again, but until then, thanks Maarten!
He could at least be a nice guy about it and release his old code as abandonware. A lot of us did go beyond simply rooting for his product and actually bought it. (And a lot more would have, if he had refined it a little more).
From the tone of the interview, it sounds like he just wants to take his ball and go home.
The whole moderation thing is pointless anyway, because poisoning will not work. From the article:
Flooding a network with spoofed files would drive users to more reliable music sources -- like the labels' own online sites.
This statement is obviously false. Nobody will move to the labels' own online sites, because the label sites don't provide what they are looking for: lots of music in vanilla MP3 files with no sharing restrictions, license headaches, or some kind of goofy-assed "copy once" encryption scheme.
Users who become frustrated with crapflooders on their favorite P2P network will simply move on to whatever the next emerging P2P network is, and those who want use poison tactics will play a losing game of whack-a-mole indefinately.
Whyinthehell would he want to go to it? The only solution they came up with, for every problem they discussed, was "the US should give the Third World even more money."
Anybody could have seen that coming. Were I president of the US, I would have skipped it as well.
Actually, it's a monster, not a dinosaur. Dinosaurs don't breathe fire.
Re:Correction: Betamax was slightly less crappy
on
Sony Kills Betamax
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· Score: 1
I know Hi-Fi refers to the audio. It stripes the audio across the whole tape width, rather than use a band along the side. My point was that, about the same time that HiFi VHS was coming out, the quality of the players had improved to the point that Beta was no longer all that much better.
Correction: Betamax was slightly less crappy
on
Sony Kills Betamax
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Um, no.
Beta was slightly better.
Yes, it ran the tape over the head at a higher speed (good for fidelity with magnetic tape), but was narrower than VHS (bad for fidelity with magnetic tape). By the time "Hi-Fi VHS" arrived in the late 80's, the gap in quality was pretty much already closed.
No matter which type of tape you used, you still had the problems of the incoming signal quality, and those were the days before component video and S-video were common, so you were mushing the video and audio signal into an RF converter to send a coaxial cable to your TV antenna input on channel 3 or 4.
You can talk all you like about how nice a fast-forward looked on Beta tape, but who gives a crap how good the commercials look as you zip over them? I remember when my family bought their first VCR. We went with VHS, not becuase of popularity (rentals wouldn't catch on for a couple years, so what the neighbors used was a non-factor), but because Beta cost more, both for players and for tapes, and the tapes had shorter running times. A few years later, a friend of mine bought a Harmon Kardon "HiFi VHS" machine that looked and sounded every bit as good as my other friend's Sony Beta machine. Even Sony finally gave in and started making VHS machines in the end... and they were (and still are) some of the best consumer VCR's on the market.
Now it looks like PVR's like TiVo, and HDTV's wider screen (which most DVD's support but VHS does not) are causing VHS to die out, but it will probably cling to life for another 15 years, just like Beta did, because obsolete != useless. If it still works, and you can't afford the shiny new stuff, you will probably still use it.
This just in, most of those who insist on graphics with high refresh rates and resolutions are running the most popular type of software that utilizes such technology.
In a related story, most people who buy ink-jet printers use them to create hard copies of their electronic documents.
Is this a new method of trolling? You pretend not to get an obvious joke, write a pedantic and angry response, and hope to get people to post replies explaining the joke that you "missed" to you?
Or are you actually that irony deficient?
(Oooo... check me out, I coined a new pun: irony deficient. I think I'll keep using that one.)
I'll feed the troll, just this once: The parent post was obviously joking.
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A rail line needs to protect themselves against being held responsible for the hobo population, so they hire screws to kick the bums off the trains. Likewise, most people are advised to encrypt their Wi-Fi signal for the same reason. However, beyond that, most people don't view either type of trespass as a particularly serious crime. Odds are, the user of this WarDrive data is just some warez kid who is using your broadband to swap DivX files or something. Someday they will turn 18, and the fear of a permanent criminal record will disuade them from continuing. (At least that's what happened with all the hacker kids I grew up with.)
Who knows, though... maybe it will build up steam. Personally, I don't really see why one would need an "event" like this. It seems that WarDriving would be a pastime that would be better supported by an ongoing blog or slashcode site, where people could submit time-stamped maps of wireless nodes.
Now that baseball is played all over Central America and Japan, calling it the World Series sounds a little arrogant, perhaps, but it remains called that because of tradition.
It's still not entirely incorrect, because most of the very best Latino and Japanese baseball players come to America or Canada to make the big money and play against the best competition, so the winner of the "World Series" on any given year probably is, in fact, the world's best baseball team.
If by "worldwide" they mean "a few counties in California, Canada, and bits of the midwest," then the project was an amazing success. :)
If that was true, I would be an NBA center, getting paid millions to post up against Shaq for the Timberwolves. I guess I didn't want to be tall and athletic badly enough.
He sells to far fewer people, but he keeps more of what he makes.
Most of his money from his "Purple Rain" days went into Paisley Park studios, which turned out to be an unprofitable venture. (It's a kick-ass studio, but one of many in the Minneapolis area. Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis have their own operation just an hour or so away.)
The fabulous wealth he currently enjoys was made outside the studio system. He's not "Top 20" for two reasons:
1. He gets zero airplay now that he doesn't have a pimp... er... label.
2. Nearly all of his sales are sold on-line by the NPG site, so Billboard doesn't even track most of the sales he gets.
If he wanted to become a mega-star, by your definition, again, it would probably only take one phone call to Sony or Geffin. He feels that he's better off where he's at, and he's trying to point out that many other musicians would be, too.
IIRC, the Minneapolis Star Tribune used that weird symbol for his name fairly consistantly (even though it fucked up their printing process a little). The St. Paul Pioneer press with with the "TAFKAP" option. Both papers did call him "the Artist" on occation, but only in the context of an article where the meaning would be obvious.
The thing was, Warner held the rights to the name "Prince" for the duration of his contract (even though he went by that name before he even began his career at WB). By changing it to a symbol with no pronounciation, his fans would still call him "Prince", even though he never, ever directly told them to in any media events. Notice how the first album relased with that symbol-name had, as its first single, a song where he shouts, over and over, "my name is Prince". That's all he ever wanted to be called.
And now you probably know more about TAFKATAFKAP (as I like to call him), than you ever cared to.
Come to think of it, a Princelizer would be a fun Perl hack. Kind of like the Sweedish Chef apps, but converts text into Prince's goofball way of using single-character phonetic replacements of sylables until u want 2 beat him 2 death with his own 4skin, and then party like it's 1999.
I didn't say they should change the regulation if pot were legalized, I merely speculated that they probably would, the main reason being political expediancy. They don't currently ask you if you consumed hard liquer 15 times in your life, and alchohol approximately as bad for you as pot.
[bracing for flames from the NORML crowd... who can't come up with a acronym that spells a word correctly but think they "know", better than anybody else, that pot is far safer than booze...]
First, we have the right not to incriminate ourselves. War, or not, asking someone to snitch on themselves is self-incrimination. The fact the FBI is doing it makes it all the worse.
Second, we have the statute of limitations. After a period of time, it isn't a crime anymore.
Third, we supposedly have the presumption of innocence in this country.
The rights you mention apply to a crime you are being arrested for, but have nothing to do with security clearance screening.
If, during the screening, you say "I smoked a fat bag of crack in 1982," they can not convict you for drug posession, because of all three reasons you cite (self-incrimination, statute of limitation, presumption of innocence), but they can choose not to hire you.
That is as it should be. You do not have an inalianable right to an FBI career.
On a side note a friend of mine just got his secret clearence. He is mid 30s now, but did experiment some with X and pot when he was in his early 20s. He was truthful about it and got his clearance without and problems.
Interesting. It makes you wonder if the drug questions are just a way of screening for people that will lie to them about nickle & dime stuff like that. I could see why they want to eliminate such people.
It was a "Professor Frink" quote from a Simpsons Halloween special. Don't worry, it looks like a moderator missed the pop-culture reference as well, and modded me down as flame-bait... so you are in good company.
For the record, I also thought Pe/Pepper had a lot of promise to it. It's kind of too bad he's decided to kill it without allowing the Open Source community pick at the remains. Not that he owes anything to Open Source folks, but all the customers who he had over the years would at least have somewhere to turn now.
I'm also willing to discuss legalizing pot on a rational basis with anybody, but if you take the FBI exam and tell them you have toked 15 times, you are effectively telling them you deliberately violated the law 15 times. Not to mention the fact that to use any illegal substance that often, you would probably have been a customer of a dealer at one time or another, which associates you with some genuine low-life people. (That's probably the one factor that kept me away from narcotics as a teen: the dirt-bag thugs one must deal with to get them.)
We pot legal, I would imagine the FBI would relax that requirement. But it's not, so they haven't.
Contraray to what we all like our PHB to believe, most technical skills are not hard to learn. Modern development and administration tools make most of the work fairly easy to do, once you acquire the needed knowledge of the systems. Even a total moron (who has an advanced degree in astrophysics, wa-hey!) can run an app in debug mode until he gets it working. What sets us geeks apart (or has so far, anyway) is the desire to learn this shit.
If the FBI recruits a good person, who won't have an acid flashback or a massive stroke two weeks after getting hired, and won't sell everything he knows to foreign governments in exchange for a box of Cheez-Its, they can train him in on what he doesn't know later.
Besides, in the current market, you can afford to weed out the overweight, the hippies, the criminals, the people who don't clean under their fingernails, and anybody who uses the wrong conditioner for their ph balance, and still have lots of solid candidates to interview.
Same here. Maybe the first /. question should be "who the hell are you? The story about this interview says that you have been famous since the 60's, but I'll be damned if I ever heard your name mentioned before."
No surprise there. He's an old Be bigot, and Apple's decision to buy NeXT instead of Be is probably the #1 reason why his favorite operating system is dead and gone. Nobody hates OS X with greater blind passion than a hard-core Be fan.
Whatever Avi Tevanian and/or Steve Jobs does over the next 10 years, for any company, I guarantee that this guy will hate it.
If you asked an Amiga or Atari user what he thought about Macintosh System 7 back in 1987 or so, the shrill of his whines would have been at about the same pitch.
Oddly enough, when an unpopular OS dies, the former users never seem to blame the most popular OS for killing it (Windows), but instead lay the corpse at the feet of the #2 player (Apple). Probably because these also-ran companies (Commodore, Atari, Be), having failed to get traction with general users, tried to shoulder their way into niche markets that Apple is known for (media, music production, publishing, etc.) and rapidly went out of business in the attempt. Just a theory, anyway.
He could at least be a nice guy about it and release his old code as abandonware. A lot of us did go beyond simply rooting for his product and actually bought it. (And a lot more would have, if he had refined it a little more).
From the tone of the interview, it sounds like he just wants to take his ball and go home.
This statement is obviously false. Nobody will move to the labels' own online sites, because the label sites don't provide what they are looking for: lots of music in vanilla MP3 files with no sharing restrictions, license headaches, or some kind of goofy-assed "copy once" encryption scheme.
Users who become frustrated with crapflooders on their favorite P2P network will simply move on to whatever the next emerging P2P network is, and those who want use poison tactics will play a losing game of whack-a-mole indefinately.
Anybody could have seen that coming. Were I president of the US, I would have skipped it as well.
Actually, it's a monster, not a dinosaur. Dinosaurs don't breathe fire.
I know Hi-Fi refers to the audio. It stripes the audio across the whole tape width, rather than use a band along the side. My point was that, about the same time that HiFi VHS was coming out, the quality of the players had improved to the point that Beta was no longer all that much better.
Beta was slightly better.
Yes, it ran the tape over the head at a higher speed (good for fidelity with magnetic tape), but was narrower than VHS (bad for fidelity with magnetic tape). By the time "Hi-Fi VHS" arrived in the late 80's, the gap in quality was pretty much already closed.
No matter which type of tape you used, you still had the problems of the incoming signal quality, and those were the days before component video and S-video were common, so you were mushing the video and audio signal into an RF converter to send a coaxial cable to your TV antenna input on channel 3 or 4.
You can talk all you like about how nice a fast-forward looked on Beta tape, but who gives a crap how good the commercials look as you zip over them? I remember when my family bought their first VCR. We went with VHS, not becuase of popularity (rentals wouldn't catch on for a couple years, so what the neighbors used was a non-factor), but because Beta cost more, both for players and for tapes, and the tapes had shorter running times. A few years later, a friend of mine bought a Harmon Kardon "HiFi VHS" machine that looked and sounded every bit as good as my other friend's Sony Beta machine. Even Sony finally gave in and started making VHS machines in the end... and they were (and still are) some of the best consumer VCR's on the market.
Now it looks like PVR's like TiVo, and HDTV's wider screen (which most DVD's support but VHS does not) are causing VHS to die out, but it will probably cling to life for another 15 years, just like Beta did, because obsolete != useless. If it still works, and you can't afford the shiny new stuff, you will probably still use it.
In a related story, most people who buy ink-jet printers use them to create hard copies of their electronic documents.
Or are you actually that irony deficient?
(Oooo... check me out, I coined a new pun: irony deficient. I think I'll keep using that one.)
I'll feed the troll, just this once: The parent post was obviously joking.