I can just picture the hand-wringing arguments between the faction that wants to save Dear Old Earth from being cooked, and the faction that wants to let nature take its course because That's What Goddess Intended. I'm sure there will be a lot of really good folk songs comin' outta this one...
This, I have to say, is a novel concept; paying a middle man when there (technically) isn't one.
Nothing novel about it. See, for example, real estate agents/brokers. You have a house I want, I have some money you want, but somehow we have to find each other and manage all the legal angles and so forth...so we both end up paying a middleman to help the process along. There are countless other examples.
Not really. Slashdot is mostly about links out to the "net at large" (whatever and wherever that is). The "walled garden" sites contain few links to pages not contained within the same site, or sites operated by those with whom they have a business relationship.
It's quite likely that more and more users will be using "walled garden" versions of the net, but this doesn't bother me personally. In much the same way, Universal operates their "CityWalk" attraction just a few miles from the real places in Los Angeles which it simulates. The fact that millions of tourists pay to enter a dumbed-down, commercialized version of the nearby city doesn't make the city go away, nor does it stop me from enjoying the real thing and shunning CityWalk.
If anything, the rise of "walled gardens" may be a good thing for the "real" (that is, geek dominated) net. After all, it keeps 'em off poor besieged Usenet.
Re:MOOSE, Paracone, et al.
on
Space Diving
·
· Score: 1
And let's not forget the space diving scene that Voyager's Torres does. Hopping out of a shuttlecraft and doing reentry wearing a spacesuit covered with heat tiles.
Well, if we're going to pull fictional stuff in, it's tough to beat the end of the movie Dark Star, with the astronaut surfing into the atmosphere on a hunk of debris from his recently detonated ship.
Maybe in 5 years time we will all receive daily email updates from the government on what is and is not illegal now.
That's the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic prediction is that the "updates" will arrive in the form of midnight visits from the secret police. You know you've broken the law when they drag you off to the Ministry of Love.
Exactly. There is virtually no consistency between companies on this score. Also, there has been a great deal of title inflation over the last half year or so, as companies which can no longer entice people with stock options or sheer dot-com glitz use titles to attract or hold good people. I've seen companies with a CIO, a CTO, a VP of Technology, a Chief Architect, several Senior Software Engineers -- and nothing below that. We actually joke about this where I work; I'm the Lord High Pope and Emperor of Technology, for example.:)
If things were more reasonable, I'd see the CIO role being more about MIS and infrastructure, and the CTO role being product- or service-focused. The CIO picks payroll systems and buys file servers, while the CTO does the vision thing with product roadmaps and architecture, including tech selection, partnerships, and so forth.
Howzabout we break Mir into nice small pieces, safe for de-orbiting, by smashing Iridium satellites into it? Both Motorola and the Russian space program could make some money filming the fireworks, perhaps from a shuttle parked a safe distance away. Maybe stuff Mir full of brighly colored plastic beads first, so they can spray out like from a broken pinata when one of the satellites finally cracks the hull open.
Just a thought...
Re:Peer-to-Peer will never make it
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Thats right, you heard me. The simple fact is that Peer-to-peer file sharing is a doomed concept, because it relies on the altruism of the average human being. I don't know about you, but I don't upload files on Gnutella : I'm a leech. That's human nature, and thats why Gnutella does and always will suck.
I'm not sure I understand why you would choose not to share your files. If your setup is similar to most I'm familiar with, 95% of the time your outbound data connection is effectively idle. If you're taking advantage of other people's shared files, and can share your own using a resource which is massively underutilized, what's the downside for you?
By the way, this is not a flame or even an ethical challenge. I know there must be something I'm missing here, as there are a lot of "leeches" out there. I simply want to understand why.
We can always hope. The electoral college is especially silly given that most states now legislate that electors vote based on how the state's populace votes. As such, it's mostly a tool to simply hide anyone but the two major parties.
Cynicism aside, there was actually a good design behind the EC. First, and more obviously, 18th-century communication speeds and information processing technology made a direct popular election utterly impractical. Decomposing the problem into an election of electors followed by an election of the president made the process manageable.
More importantly, though, the EC resulted from the same compromise between Federalists and Anti-Federalists which gave us our bicameral legislature. The argument here was between those advocating that the USA should be a loose federation of sovereign states, with the states' rights carefully protected, and those in favor of a stronger central government, a single nation with states as administrative units.
The Federalists wanted a legislative system in which each state had an equal say at the national level; this led to our Senate. The Anti-Federalists wanted representation proportional to population, without regard to states, and the House of Representatives was the result.
Given that each state's electors are the sum of their senators and representatives, it's easy to see that this same compromise is at work. Less populous states get a disproportionate influence by design.
Whether we should change this design now is, of course, a separate question.
...and fuel cells that suck up 100kWh every *day*.
Why do people always quote power figures like this, instead of saying the roughly equivalent "suck up 4 kW"? This is roughly equivalent to my saying that I live 16 mph-days from San Francisco, rather than 400 miles.
Re:Getting Past the Censorware with Long Ip's
on
Mandated Mediocrity
·
· Score: 1
Obtain the IP address of the server you are attempting to connect to (through networksolutions whois if you wish). Then, take the individual octets and convert them to their binary equivalent (make sure to pad them with leading zeros to get the full 8 digits). Next string the binary numbers together and convert that (I suggest scientific calculator) to base 10 (decimal). Then you can just take that number, and go to http://thatnumber.
Far, far easier to skip that annoying binary step. Just number the subfields from the right as 0, 1, 2, 3, multiply each by 256^N, and add them up. This perl code shows how trivial this is:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# decip - convert dotted-quad ip to decimal number
# Useage: decip
# Outputs decimal equivalents, one per line
# Craig Berry (20001024)
(Funniest bit of all: we're all into server and box security. We don't want anyone touching our files or seeing what silly little sites we've been to. But we leave our physical goods out in the open for others to scavenge?:) Talk about mixed up principles).
Think of it as "Open Source Matter" and it will seem less mixed up. Free-in-the-junk-sense.
That's either going to be the next big slang expression ("Spring loaded fecal launcher in a bucket, Dave, the damn transformer is on fire!") or the ultimate RonCo product ("Operators are standing by. At a respectful distance.").
That's why, for this to work well, you'll need to arrange for the distributed app code to run in a standard secure 'sandbox'. Doing it in a Java JVM would work, for example. A JVM can easily be set up to limit access to (and hence potential damage to) local system components.
...but I do wonder with these pay schemes if the payment will actually be enough to cover the cost of electricity.
The thing is, any revenue from idle time beats what you get if you just let the cpu burn cycles. Hopefully, if this gets to be a successful business model, the price will get bid up; but a box generating a buck a month off idle time is still (a little bit) more profitable than one that isn't.
All we need is a court ruling saying that because the trading is non-commercial it is non-infringing distribution. That way we can have a trust model and people could become famous for having millions of really good mp3s.
<mode william-gibson> ...Only to disappear mysteriously in the dead of night when the RIAA sends its corporate ninja goons after the most famous users. </mode>
If things like this proliferate, I predict that the Napster community will move to a "popularity/trust" model. Sort of like Ebay, where you leave positive and negative feedback.
This would definitely be a good solution. Unfortunately, it works directly against the other trends in this area, anonymity of users and decentralization of the distributed application. A "trust registry" implies a central database of users and their trust levels, and authentication of access by these users.
This gets us right back into the Napster model, in which the RIAA (or whomever) has a single entity to sue to shut the whole thing down, or a list of users to subpoena to go after individuals.
Just about all of us have spent hours debugging Perl code which did this to us, because we misspelled a variable name. Automatic variable initialization does not a productive language make.
To be fair, this is why nearly all experienced Perl coders use -w and 'use strict', thereby causing the compiler to enforce variable declarations and warn about use of uninitialized variables.
This "unsafe" code feature is in fact [the] "safe" feature...
I think "Orwell" would make a catchy language name.
Oh, and is anybody else reminded of the barbershop-quartet episode of The Simpsons? "We need a name that's clever the first time you hear it, but less clever every time you hear it after that." "How about the B-Sharps?"
This is just a (successful) publicity stunt by SightSound. They've been offering downloadable movie content protected by MS DRM on their website for more than a year. Getting it through Gnutella is less reliable and (as many others have pointed out) much riskier than going to the source.
Making source code available has absolutely no impact on ownership of that code (or binaries derived from it). This discussion comes up in the Perl community all the time, as the only practical way to distribute Perl is as source code. The answer to the FAQ "But how do I protect my intellectual property?" boils down to "Hire a lawyer."
Consider three examples:
In order to obtain a patent, giving exclusive rights to an invention, you must file a complete and detailed explanation of your invention, which becomes a matter of public record as soon as the patent is granted.
No one would argue that the text of a book cannot be copyrighted, yet clearly books are distributed as "open source".
MP3 files are in some senses "source code" -- they allow modification, copying, redistribution, and so forth -- and we're all seeing that copyright holders can and do vigorously sue those who violate their EULAs.
So, in short, distributing source doesn't matter at all on a legal level in protecting your intellectual property rights. The arguments for source hiding all stem from nonlegal arguments -- for example, small players may not be able to afford to pursue violators, or there may be fear of abuse in countries without strong IP rights enforcement.
It seems odd to me that a built-in bounty provision would be attached to the crime of spamming. We don't offer automatic bounties for turning in murderers, for example, though they're also hard to catch. What line of reasoning led these legislators to conclude that a mandated bounty on spammers was warranted? Or does that question contain a fatal hidden assumption?:)
Look, I'm as aware as anyone of the technical issues that make it hard to protect content these days. But does the ease with which theft can occur make it morally justified, much less legally? Why are Metallica being cast as the "bad guys" in this situation?
If someone took your wallet or your car, you would use every available means both to recover your property and to punish the culprit. If nearly a third of a million Napster users are robbing Metallica (which these users are doing, and I don't think anyone reasonable disputes that Metallica and their label have the right to decide how their property is used), why is it wrong for Metallica to go after the culprits?
Everyone trading illegal MP3s knows they are breaking the law. Napster warns you about this in their signup process, and each time you log in. The users named may be surprised to learn that their anonymity was thinner than they'd expected; burglars get pretty bummed when they're identified, too. So what?
Yes, we all know that new forms of music (and general media) distribution will replace what we have now, and quickly. The current situation resembles a Walmart with no walls and no security. But the people shoplifting from it are still shoplifters, and know they are.
You can disagree with the wisdom of how property is being used, but you can't just swipe it and justify the theft based on that disagreement.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just picture the hand-wringing arguments between the faction that wants to save Dear Old Earth from being cooked, and the faction that wants to let nature take its course because That's What Goddess Intended. I'm sure there will be a lot of really good folk songs comin' outta this one...
Nothing novel about it. See, for example, real estate agents/brokers. You have a house I want, I have some money you want, but somehow we have to find each other and manage all the legal angles and so forth...so we both end up paying a middleman to help the process along. There are countless other examples.
Not really. Slashdot is mostly about links out to the "net at large" (whatever and wherever that is). The "walled garden" sites contain few links to pages not contained within the same site, or sites operated by those with whom they have a business relationship.
It's quite likely that more and more users will be using "walled garden" versions of the net, but this doesn't bother me personally. In much the same way, Universal operates their "CityWalk" attraction just a few miles from the real places in Los Angeles which it simulates. The fact that millions of tourists pay to enter a dumbed-down, commercialized version of the nearby city doesn't make the city go away, nor does it stop me from enjoying the real thing and shunning CityWalk.
If anything, the rise of "walled gardens" may be a good thing for the "real" (that is, geek dominated) net. After all, it keeps 'em off poor besieged Usenet.
Well, if we're going to pull fictional stuff in, it's tough to beat the end of the movie Dark Star, with the astronaut surfing into the atmosphere on a hunk of debris from his recently detonated ship.
That's the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic prediction is that the "updates" will arrive in the form of midnight visits from the secret police. You know you've broken the law when they drag you off to the Ministry of Love.
Exactly. There is virtually no consistency between companies on this score. Also, there has been a great deal of title inflation over the last half year or so, as companies which can no longer entice people with stock options or sheer dot-com glitz use titles to attract or hold good people. I've seen companies with a CIO, a CTO, a VP of Technology, a Chief Architect, several Senior Software Engineers -- and nothing below that. We actually joke about this where I work; I'm the Lord High Pope and Emperor of Technology, for example. :)
If things were more reasonable, I'd see the CIO role being more about MIS and infrastructure, and the CTO role being product- or service-focused. The CIO picks payroll systems and buys file servers, while the CTO does the vision thing with product roadmaps and architecture, including tech selection, partnerships, and so forth.
Adjacent Slashdot stories today:
Howzabout we break Mir into nice small pieces, safe for de-orbiting, by smashing Iridium satellites into it? Both Motorola and the Russian space program could make some money filming the fireworks, perhaps from a shuttle parked a safe distance away. Maybe stuff Mir full of brighly colored plastic beads first, so they can spray out like from a broken pinata when one of the satellites finally cracks the hull open.
Just a thought...
I'm not sure I understand why you would choose not to share your files. If your setup is similar to most I'm familiar with, 95% of the time your outbound data connection is effectively idle. If you're taking advantage of other people's shared files, and can share your own using a resource which is massively underutilized, what's the downside for you?
By the way, this is not a flame or even an ethical challenge. I know there must be something I'm missing here, as there are a lot of "leeches" out there. I simply want to understand why.
Cynicism aside, there was actually a good design behind the EC. First, and more obviously, 18th-century communication speeds and information processing technology made a direct popular election utterly impractical. Decomposing the problem into an election of electors followed by an election of the president made the process manageable.
More importantly, though, the EC resulted from the same compromise between Federalists and Anti-Federalists which gave us our bicameral legislature. The argument here was between those advocating that the USA should be a loose federation of sovereign states, with the states' rights carefully protected, and those in favor of a stronger central government, a single nation with states as administrative units.
The Federalists wanted a legislative system in which each state had an equal say at the national level; this led to our Senate. The Anti-Federalists wanted representation proportional to population, without regard to states, and the House of Representatives was the result.
Given that each state's electors are the sum of their senators and representatives, it's easy to see that this same compromise is at work. Less populous states get a disproportionate influence by design.
Whether we should change this design now is, of course, a separate question.
Why do people always quote power figures like this, instead of saying the roughly equivalent "suck up 4 kW"? This is roughly equivalent to my saying that I live 16 mph-days from San Francisco, rather than 400 miles.
Far, far easier to skip that annoying binary step. Just number the subfields from the right as 0, 1, 2, 3, multiply each by 256^N, and add them up. This perl code shows how trivial this is:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
/\./;
# decip - convert dotted-quad ip to decimal number
# Useage: decip
# Outputs decimal equivalents, one per line
# Craig Berry (20001024)
use strict;
foreach (@ARGV) {
my $dec = 0;
$dec = 256 * $dec + $_ foreach split
print "$dec\n";
}
Of course, any smart blocker would use reverse lookup to reduce addresses to canonical form before making blocking decisions. Do any do that?
Think of it as "Open Source Matter" and it will seem less mixed up. Free-in-the-junk-sense.
That's either going to be the next big slang expression ("Spring loaded fecal launcher in a bucket, Dave, the damn transformer is on fire!") or the ultimate RonCo product ("Operators are standing by. At a respectful distance.").
That's why, for this to work well, you'll need to arrange for the distributed app code to run in a standard secure 'sandbox'. Doing it in a Java JVM would work, for example. A JVM can easily be set up to limit access to (and hence potential damage to) local system components.
The thing is, any revenue from idle time beats what you get if you just let the cpu burn cycles. Hopefully, if this gets to be a successful business model, the price will get bid up; but a box generating a buck a month off idle time is still (a little bit) more profitable than one that isn't.
</mode>
This would definitely be a good solution. Unfortunately, it works directly against the other trends in this area, anonymity of users and decentralization of the distributed application. A "trust registry" implies a central database of users and their trust levels, and authentication of access by these users.
This gets us right back into the Napster model, in which the RIAA (or whomever) has a single entity to sue to shut the whole thing down, or a list of users to subpoena to go after individuals.
The "doctor-creator" was Frankenstein. The monster was simply "the monster", or "Frankenstein's monster".
Arctic, actually. I find it prudent to keep better track of the last known location of a monster.
To be fair, this is why nearly all experienced Perl coders use -w and 'use strict', thereby causing the compiler to enforce variable declarations and warn about use of uninitialized variables.
From clangref.doc, page 15:
I think "Orwell" would make a catchy language name.
Oh, and is anybody else reminded of the barbershop-quartet episode of The Simpsons? "We need a name that's clever the first time you hear it, but less clever every time you hear it after that." "How about the B-Sharps?"
This is just a (successful) publicity stunt by SightSound. They've been offering downloadable movie content protected by MS DRM on their website for more than a year. Getting it through Gnutella is less reliable and (as many others have pointed out) much riskier than going to the source.
Making source code available has absolutely no impact on ownership of that code (or binaries derived from it). This discussion comes up in the Perl community all the time, as the only practical way to distribute Perl is as source code. The answer to the FAQ "But how do I protect my intellectual property?" boils down to "Hire a lawyer."
Consider three examples:
So, in short, distributing source doesn't matter at all on a legal level in protecting your intellectual property rights. The arguments for source hiding all stem from nonlegal arguments -- for example, small players may not be able to afford to pursue violators, or there may be fear of abuse in countries without strong IP rights enforcement.
It seems odd to me that a built-in bounty provision would be attached to the crime of spamming. We don't offer automatic bounties for turning in murderers, for example, though they're also hard to catch. What line of reasoning led these legislators to conclude that a mandated bounty on spammers was warranted? Or does that question contain a fatal hidden assumption? :)
Look, I'm as aware as anyone of the technical issues that make it hard to protect content these days. But does the ease with which theft can occur make it morally justified, much less legally? Why are Metallica being cast as the "bad guys" in this situation?
If someone took your wallet or your car, you would use every available means both to recover your property and to punish the culprit. If nearly a third of a million Napster users are robbing Metallica (which these users are doing, and I don't think anyone reasonable disputes that Metallica and their label have the right to decide how their property is used), why is it wrong for Metallica to go after the culprits?
Everyone trading illegal MP3s knows they are breaking the law. Napster warns you about this in their signup process, and each time you log in. The users named may be surprised to learn that their anonymity was thinner than they'd expected; burglars get pretty bummed when they're identified, too. So what?
Yes, we all know that new forms of music (and general media) distribution will replace what we have now, and quickly. The current situation resembles a Walmart with no walls and no security. But the people shoplifting from it are still shoplifters, and know they are.
You can disagree with the wisdom of how property is being used, but you can't just swipe it and justify the theft based on that disagreement.