As to your second question, I'm not really sure what you are asking, but I'll try to respond anyway - just because it's easy to vandalize our articles doesn't make it any less wrong to do it. To make an analogy - let's say you put your coat down on a chair and go to the bathroom, and while you are away someone steals it. Even though you made it easy for them, is it any less wrong for them to have stolen it?
I've heard this argument from wiki-heads before, and it's as much fluff now as it was then. But the more common analogy I hear is just because I don't lock my front door and leave it wide open doesn't make it okay for someone to come in and trash my place.
Both the locking and coat on a chair analogies are valid and, in fact, true. But at the same time, if you come up to me and tell me that you left your door wide open and your place got trashed, I'd say "well, next time you won't be so freakin' stupid, will you?"
Yes, it's wrong for somebody to do. But it's also the case that you deserve some of the blame for being so stupid as to not account for human nature. You can expect people to all be good and nice and so forth, but if you honestly think that is in fact true, then you are naive, gullible, and more than a little bit stupid. And no, I don't feel any pity for stupid people. Stop being so stupid and then I'll agree with you that people suck for doing the things they do.
Well, if I was running a pirated version of Windows, and found out I couldn't secure my system because it was a pirated version, it would encourage me to actually buy a copy.
Are you nuts? A copy of windows runs around $200.
No, what someone will do is go find a fix for their Windows that will allow them to install the update. Or they'll more likely say "fuck it, I don't need the update", and forget about it.
If someone is pirating Windows and the alternative is to pay $200 or so, then you can bet your ass that paying for it is simply not an option. $200? Hell, that's food for a month for many people.
The fact is, employers hire someone to do a specific task. Whether they should do this or not is up for debate, but its what they do.
Depends on how you define "employer". If you're talking about most any kind of corporation, then who exactly is your "employer"? The company? Your boss? His boss? It's not as simple as that.
In most medium to large companies, employment works like this: Position is available to be filled. Requirements are drawn up, probably by the immediate boss of that position. Requirements go up the chain a bit, sometimes, but more usually they go directly to HR. HR tries to find people in-house that fit, or they go out looking for people, or they pass it on to headhunters, or all three. Whatever.
The point being that the person actually out looking for someone to fill the position isn't the one who needs the position filled in the first place. There's a gap there, and that gap tends to break the position down into specific tasks and keywords and such things.
The person who actually needs someone to fill the position needs a very general kind of person, say. Somebody who knows C and Linux, somebody who can use an Oracle database, and is a good coder/reader, learns quickly, etc. They need a general developer to develop things, in other words.
But in creating a document for the HR person to go find somebody, this tends to get damped down into easily explainable parts like "C Experience" or "Unix experience" or "Oracle experience" or "CS Degree". Just the obvious stuff that is needed *right now* makes it onto the sheet. What they really need is not "somebody who knows C and Oracle databases", what they need is "a developer who can get the job done, and who has some experience at the sort of crap we're doing so we won't have a hard time training the guy".
But yes, you do need knowledge of specifics, but not specific knowledge of those specifics, if you get my meaning. It's more important to understand databases than it is to know any particular database system. Yes, this well rounded person has a disadvantage, which is why someone can do "creative resume writing" and get away with it.
I've used Oracle. I've used MySQL. Not extensively on either one, but hey, how hard is it to connect to a port and shoot some SQL at it? If you know relational databases and you know SQL, then you can pick up the fundamentals of Oracle or MySQL or SQLServer or whatever in a very short period of time.
I've programmed in Java before.. Only small applications and applets, but hey, all programming languages are pretty much the same, really. If you can do C++ well, then hey, you can pick up Java and whatever IDE they're using there real quick. It's more important to know OOP than to know Java in specific detail.
My personal experience was Algebra II (basically complex algebra with some beginning trig thrown in) at 13 (7th grade), Geometry at 14, Trig at 15, Pre-calc (which is just advanced trig and an introduction to the infinity and limit and summation concepts, really) at 16, and Calculus at 17 (with "Advanced Calculus" at 18, which was basically the first half of Calc II, taken really slowly). Note that I also went to what are listed as some of the worst school systems in the country too.
It's quite possible, and somewhat easy in fact, to get a good education in American public schools, it's just that most people don't.
A friend of mine once told me that, in his opinion, the public schools in America offered a better overall education than did the private schools. However, at the private schools, you are required to learn the material, and it is not possible to just "skate by", whereas in the public schools you have an opportunity at a better education, but you have to want to learn in order to get it. For the most part, I agree with his assessment. I've never been to a private school, though, so I don't have the ability to judge for myself on that side of his argument.
Most colleges I've seen offer Algebra and Trig remedial type classes on a not-for-credit basis, for those who didn't learn it in High School.
From the article: If you have the chance to take calculus in high school, I may surprise you with my advice. I would not automatically jump at the opportunity for a couple reasons. Please forgive me as I climb onto my soapbox, but keep in mind that I am a math teacher and I know a lot of this from experience.
First, high school calculus teachers tend to be the teachers in the math department the longest. The problem with this is that while these teachers are more experienced, they have been away from calculus longer than the other math teachers in most cases. Besides that, these teachers are often near retirement and may not be as motivated as younger teachers.
Second, calculus is the upper-crust of high school math. In college, it's one of the lowest math classes offered. This results in a completely different teacher mentality. A college calculus teacher will be used to working with struggling students because for many of them, that is the toughest class they will ever have to take. But high school calculus teachers will be more used to working with the top students in the school. If you aren't especially gifted in math, you may find that you don't get what you need from these teachers.
Here's the problem with those ideas:
1) In Calc I in HS, you're looking at a class of 30 people. 50, max. In Calc I in college, you'll likely be in a class with something on the order of 100-200 people. See, *everybody* takes Calc I their first year, not just the comp. sci's. All engineering majors, all the math geeks.. Hell, even English majors probably have basic math as a requirement... So most of the time, it's a big class, usually a seminar type of deal. If you're having a hard time with it in there, then you'll also likely need to take another not-for-credit class where they can give individual instruction or take some extra tutoring on the side. Whereas in high school, you've not only got a smaller class, you've got an experienced math teacher, who likely knows his stuff, and you've got a year to learn it as opposed to 1 semester only. Okay, so the HS teacher may be less motivated, but you've got a longer time period, a smaller class, and you're in that class with the top students in the school (who can probably help you out somewhat) instead of in there with everybody in the whole school (who likely need just as much help as you do).
2) Yes, calculus is the upper crust of high school math. It's also a heck of a lot easier than a college level math class. But here's a thought: The high school class doesn't usually count towards your college GPA, while the college level one does. What's so bad about taking it twice? Take the high school calc if you can swing it, then take it again in college. You may still have a hard time in the college calculus, but it'll be somewhat easier because you've got at least some background to it already.
Other than the words "Eric" and "Smith", I see nothing in common between those two people. Even the middle initial is wrong (S vs. A).
Considering the commonness of the name "Eric" and the freakin' cliche commonness of "Smith", I think it's a bit of a leap to instantly assume these are the same person. I'm not saying they are not, but I am saying that I'd personally need a bit more evidence to buy into your theory here...
However, I find an increasing number of these messages never get through. Instead of smooth operations that provide the requested information immediately, I hear from someone 2 weeks after I responded to their trouble ticket and they're irate because I "never responded".
I hear you and understand your dilemma, but what I'm saying is that if you have any actual way out of this dilemma then it's likely that the system is broken. The whole point is to put the user in control of what they get, and to remove control from the sender. The problem with this is that you have clueless users. Okay, I feel your pain, but hey, you're not the first to deal with this problem. My advice is to stop trying to bypass the system and to tell your users, "hey, it was sent, but I can't guarantee WTF happens on your end.. Talk to your ISP." Because catering to the clueless doesn't give them incentive to get a clue.
I want to be able to ensure things get delivered, not because I want to flagrantly disregard all respect for email privacy, but because people are expecting the messages they request to actually arrive.
They can *expect* any damn thing they please. But you send it and have no errors, then your job is done and your legal obligation is fulfilled, AFAICT. You cannot be held responsible beyond that. I'd tell them that the message was sent, and beyond that they are on their own. If they leave, they leave. Some customers simply aren't worth your time to support.
And BTW, if you are offering any kind of your own guarantees on email getting through, then you're a fool to begin with. E-Mail is not a guaranteed system... never has been, never will be.
A coffee shop (or any business, or private party) can't just hook up a cablemodem and resell their bandwidth. Their ISP would have a fucking FIT. It's against their Terms of Service.
Generally, you don't get to resell your cablemodem bandwidth. You might be able to work out a deal with your ISP, but you'll definitely be paying more than $70.
I have yet to see a cablemodem provider that doesn't offer "business class". You're right about the $70 being low, but if the lowest grade of business class service they offer is greater than about $200-$250, I'd be freakin' shocked.
And those Terms of Service do allow reselling, or at least use in a such a way as to allow something like internet for your customers. That's the whole point of getting business class service in the first place.
Low end business class in my area runs around $150, gives you 6mbit down, 1.5 up, and yes, you can resell to your greedy little hearts content.
Nearly every useless blog site has "blog" on the page somewhere. Next time that happens to your search, just add -blog to it to exclude anything with the word "blog" on it. Works well.
Except that it allows people to use Linux (or whatever) to access your legitimately-bought DRM-protected songs without having to break the encryption.
No, it doesn't. The streaming protocol doesn't decrypt the music first. If you're not authorized (and would thus have the decryption key), you still can't listen to the music.
The guy didn't crack the new DRM scheme. He cracked the new authentication method for DAAP, which is the protocol iTunes uses to stream music to other iTunes clients over the network.
It's the "Music Sharing" functionality. It's what let's iTunes play from other iTunes shares. All that breaking the auth does is let you write programs to share music back and forth with iTunes over the network.
This has NOTHING to do with the DRM methodology in purchased iTMS songs!
Look, if you could get your message into my inbox by actions that you could take, then the SPAM filter has *failed* and would need adjustment.
The idea is to filter out things that look like spam. And I'm sorry, but what you say you're sending sounds like a lot of the spam I get, so it rightly should get filed as Junk.
That's not to say that it is, indeed, spam, if it's a pay for it sort of list. But the thing is that no email service deletes spam by default. If your message are getting foldered off somewhere, then it's up to the users to whitelist you and let your emails appear in their inbox instead of getting junkfiled. All of these free mail services have such capabilities.
But I would certainly hope that there would be nothing the sender of the email could do that would move his mail from my junk folder to my inbox. If they can, then the spam detection needs to be fixed. See the idea here?
They fixed the reversing order smart playlist bug??
Well, maybe. I haven't had my playlists get out of order since the new firmware, but then it always happened pretty randomly anyway. One can only hope.
No it wasn't. That was the logic of the poster before him (the "warning" Windows would show did not cause windows to function incorrectly, it just made the user think that there was something wrong, just like a "tainted kernel" messages make a user on a linux system think that something is going wrong).
I'm not entirely certain, but I don't think it spits out "tainted kernel" messages anywhere but in the log files. It's not like it's popping up a message to the user here, or spitting out a big flashing banner line in the boot sequence.
-The "Grouping" fields in the iPod's Database (with regards to live updating smart playlists) -A new Smart Playlist field for referencing other playlists -Support for playing the new lossless compression format -Bugfixes with regards to live updating smart playlists that reverse their order for no obvious reason (I'm betting that's in there anyway)
And probably other stuff that hasn't been found yet. There's not exactly a fountain of info on the new firmware yet.
Agreed, in theory. But the solution they use here is worse, no? Because now, instead of unhappy users, you have ticked off kernel developers. And they have no reason to support you, your users, your business model, anything. They now start talking about blacklisting you and your drivers and your children from the kernel in any way whatsoever. So now, instead of having stuff that worked but didn't get free support, you have stuff that won't work because the community has decided that they hate you and want to see you and your crappy hardware to burn in hell.
If Office 2003 started asking the Win32 API - areYouReallyMicrosoftWindows(). Then MS Windows would return true...
What would Wine get to return?
Wine would get to return true as well, if answering true was essential to get the software to work.
Take the case of the gameboy (I think). One of the checks the thing did when loading a game was to look for the Nintendo logo in the header of the game. If it wasn't there, it wouldn't run it. Someone else put the logo in their games to get it to run, Nintendo sued for trademark infringement. Nintendo lost, because they had made it absolutely necessary to include that logo in order for third parties to achieve interoperability with the product. Instead of preventing third parties from developing games (which was what they wanted), they lost control of their trademark to some degree. Not good.
However, this case is different. You don't need to lie to the kernel about your license to achieve interoperability. It'll load the module regardless of what you put in the license string. The only thing the license string does is to signal to the kernel developers that non-free modules are loaded into the kernel. It's been "tainted", and then they can choose to not support problems with tainted kernels.
This isn't lying to the kernel so much as it is lying to the kernel developers.
Sure. This isn't a matter of something you read on a webpage, it's a matter of their code itself.
See, they have a binary-only kernel module. You load it into the kernel, and you get support for their modem. But binary-only means that they won't provide you with the source to the module.
Anyway, this isn't "free software". One of the things that you have to do to load a module into the kernel is to tell the kernel what your license is. Every module has to do this. The kernel loads the module regardless of the license, but if a module with a non-free license gets loaded, then a flag gets set that marked the kernel as "tainted". All this really means is that debug dumps and such get marked as being tainted as well, and thus you won't get any support from the free-software people (unless you can reproduce the problem without the non-free module). They don't want to debug or support somebody else's code when that code isn't even free-software.
What this module is doing is playing a rather evil little trick. Essentially, it says that anything in the GPL directory is covered under the GPL, while the rest is covered under the LICENSE file, but it tells this to the kernel in such a way that the kernel only sees "GPL" and nothing else. And the GPL directory is, in fact, empty. The upshot is that their module tells the kernel it's GPL'd when it's not, thus avoiding the tainted flag.
Why they'd really want to avoid this flag is beyond me though. The flag doesn't change the operation of the kernel in any way, it just lets kernel developers know that the user with a problem has binary only modules, and thus they can tell the user that they don't support binary only modules. Okay, this tends to tick off the users to some degree, but by lying to the kernel, they're ticking off the developers to a greater degree, and that's real bad news for anyone wanting to develop kernel modules. Taken too far, then kernel devs could simply refuse to load their modules anymore, and tell them to go screw themselves.. It's not like the kernel devs are pushing for compatibility in general anyway.. Their goal is to make a good kernel, not to please the masses.
License be damned... I have the right to listen to music that I paid for and no amount of BS legal mumbo jumbo stuck in a EULA is going to change that.
If they have a problem with it, let them sue someone converting their purchased music to MP3. We'll see how long that lasts in court.
All locks are rated, not in terms of their binary perfection, but rather in terms of the time and cost to defeat them. So what? Who cares? The analogy doesn't hold up though... In the case of DRM, the company wants to make a door that you can open as long only as you're wearing that companies special gloves, which cost you something to purchase (either in cash or in rights, depending on your point of view).
But not everybody has the same size hands. Some people lost their arms in the war, or some people have different numbers of fingers, or some people want to open entirely different doors.. Or some people simply don't like gloves. The point being that once the method for creating those gloves has been determined, and someone has figured out how the gloves work, then they can pretty easily open the door, get inside, and use a screwdriver to remove the hinges. Bam, now the door is open, and the hinges are all bent so the company can't get the door back on. It's broken for good.......
Okay, so maybe you can take bad analogies too far.:)
Anyway, DRM is fundamentally unlike anything physical in this world. They want people to be able to experience a thing but be unable to copy that thing. This is simply impossible because of the nature of experience. All of our mediums for holding experiences like music or video or whatever have been expressly designed to be copyable. They have to be. Otherwise they would only be able to make one and then they couldn't sell many of the same thing over and over again.
So trying to make an experience that cannot be copied on a medium that was designed to be easily copied is more than a bit stupid, don't you think? It can't be done. Not because encryption is tricky, or because nobody's found the right way to do it, or even because they're just trying to make it "hard enough". It's because there's a fundamental inconsistancy between the neccessities of the design of the medium and the purposes to which they are trying use that medium for. And the design of the medium itself is based on fundamental human perceptual abilites and it cannot realistically be altered to fit these purposes.
This is why it cannot be done. You cannot do the impossible. That's why we call it "impossible". Some people think that people call things impossible lightly. Well, that's true, but hey, we really mean it this time, yeah?:)
Can you identify a single, lawful use of playfair?
Making it possible to transcode the song into an MP3 in order to put it onto an MP3 player other than an iPod (and without wasting an audio CD to do it).
Making it possible to transcode the song into any other format in order to achieve compatibility with any other music playing device at all, for that matter. No need to limit it to MP3 players, really. Essentially, M4P's are only playable by iTunes and the iPod. Other programs that can play them now *all* use the code that DVDJon came up with, in one form or another. Apple hasn't licensed that ability to anybody. RealPlayer can now play M4P's, in fact... They're probably violating the GPL, now that I think about it...
This is stupid. Look, data transfer is free by necessity. You pay your ISP for your bandwidth, and that's it. Every major network transfers other network's bandwidth by agreement because that's what the internet *is*. It's a network for networks.
If the stamp idea were to take off, another free email system would simply emerge using other methods. Simple as that. I gotta pay to send over port 25? Fine, I'll use port 2525 instead. Whatever. Everyone would switch to the new free email system, in a rather short period of time most likely, and the wheel would be reinvented. SMTP, or whatever you had to pay for "stamps", would very quickly be dead as a method of email transport.
Hell, if e-stamps took off, I'd do my absolute damnest to develop the next email protocol as fast as humanly possible. I'd probably make a mint too.
So forget about it. It's funny. Laugh. That people could seriously think that the concept of e-stamps is even feasible is the funny part. The internet routes around censorship, but it also routes around dumb ideas.:P
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As to your second question, I'm not really sure what you are asking, but I'll try to respond anyway - just because it's easy to vandalize our articles doesn't make it any less wrong to do it. To make an analogy - let's say you put your coat down on a chair and go to the bathroom, and while you are away someone steals it. Even though you made it easy for them, is it any less wrong for them to have stolen it?
I've heard this argument from wiki-heads before, and it's as much fluff now as it was then. But the more common analogy I hear is just because I don't lock my front door and leave it wide open doesn't make it okay for someone to come in and trash my place.
Both the locking and coat on a chair analogies are valid and, in fact, true. But at the same time, if you come up to me and tell me that you left your door wide open and your place got trashed, I'd say "well, next time you won't be so freakin' stupid, will you?"
Yes, it's wrong for somebody to do. But it's also the case that you deserve some of the blame for being so stupid as to not account for human nature. You can expect people to all be good and nice and so forth, but if you honestly think that is in fact true, then you are naive, gullible, and more than a little bit stupid. And no, I don't feel any pity for stupid people. Stop being so stupid and then I'll agree with you that people suck for doing the things they do.
Well, if I was running a pirated version of Windows, and found out I couldn't secure my system because it was a pirated version, it would encourage me to actually buy a copy.
Are you nuts? A copy of windows runs around $200.
No, what someone will do is go find a fix for their Windows that will allow them to install the update. Or they'll more likely say "fuck it, I don't need the update", and forget about it.
If someone is pirating Windows and the alternative is to pay $200 or so, then you can bet your ass that paying for it is simply not an option. $200? Hell, that's food for a month for many people.
What if they work at a gas station as a gas pumper?
The fact is, employers hire someone to do a specific task. Whether they should do this or not is up for debate, but its what they do.
Depends on how you define "employer". If you're talking about most any kind of corporation, then who exactly is your "employer"? The company? Your boss? His boss? It's not as simple as that.
In most medium to large companies, employment works like this: Position is available to be filled. Requirements are drawn up, probably by the immediate boss of that position. Requirements go up the chain a bit, sometimes, but more usually they go directly to HR. HR tries to find people in-house that fit, or they go out looking for people, or they pass it on to headhunters, or all three. Whatever.
The point being that the person actually out looking for someone to fill the position isn't the one who needs the position filled in the first place. There's a gap there, and that gap tends to break the position down into specific tasks and keywords and such things.
The person who actually needs someone to fill the position needs a very general kind of person, say. Somebody who knows C and Linux, somebody who can use an Oracle database, and is a good coder/reader, learns quickly, etc. They need a general developer to develop things, in other words.
But in creating a document for the HR person to go find somebody, this tends to get damped down into easily explainable parts like "C Experience" or "Unix experience" or "Oracle experience" or "CS Degree". Just the obvious stuff that is needed *right now* makes it onto the sheet. What they really need is not "somebody who knows C and Oracle databases", what they need is "a developer who can get the job done, and who has some experience at the sort of crap we're doing so we won't have a hard time training the guy".
But yes, you do need knowledge of specifics, but not specific knowledge of those specifics, if you get my meaning. It's more important to understand databases than it is to know any particular database system. Yes, this well rounded person has a disadvantage, which is why someone can do "creative resume writing" and get away with it.
I've used Oracle. I've used MySQL. Not extensively on either one, but hey, how hard is it to connect to a port and shoot some SQL at it? If you know relational databases and you know SQL, then you can pick up the fundamentals of Oracle or MySQL or SQLServer or whatever in a very short period of time.
I've programmed in Java before.. Only small applications and applets, but hey, all programming languages are pretty much the same, really. If you can do C++ well, then hey, you can pick up Java and whatever IDE they're using there real quick. It's more important to know OOP than to know Java in specific detail.
That sort of thing.
My personal experience was Algebra II (basically complex algebra with some beginning trig thrown in) at 13 (7th grade), Geometry at 14, Trig at 15, Pre-calc (which is just advanced trig and an introduction to the infinity and limit and summation concepts, really) at 16, and Calculus at 17 (with "Advanced Calculus" at 18, which was basically the first half of Calc II, taken really slowly). Note that I also went to what are listed as some of the worst school systems in the country too.
It's quite possible, and somewhat easy in fact, to get a good education in American public schools, it's just that most people don't.
A friend of mine once told me that, in his opinion, the public schools in America offered a better overall education than did the private schools. However, at the private schools, you are required to learn the material, and it is not possible to just "skate by", whereas in the public schools you have an opportunity at a better education, but you have to want to learn in order to get it. For the most part, I agree with his assessment. I've never been to a private school, though, so I don't have the ability to judge for myself on that side of his argument.
Most colleges I've seen offer Algebra and Trig remedial type classes on a not-for-credit basis, for those who didn't learn it in High School.
You copied this strait from the comments below the article's text. You could at least mention this isn't your writing or thoughts or...
Actually, I posted this here first then registered and posted the same thing to the article itself, after some minor rewording. Notice the usernames.
From the article:
If you have the chance to take calculus in high school, I may surprise you with my advice. I would not automatically jump at the opportunity for a couple reasons. Please forgive me as I climb onto my soapbox, but keep in mind that I am a math teacher and I know a lot of this from experience.
First, high school calculus teachers tend to be the teachers in the math department the longest. The problem with this is that while these teachers are more experienced, they have been away from calculus longer than the other math teachers in most cases. Besides that, these teachers are often near retirement and may not be as motivated as younger teachers.
Second, calculus is the upper-crust of high school math. In college, it's one of the lowest math classes offered. This results in a completely different teacher mentality. A college calculus teacher will be used to working with struggling students because for many of them, that is the toughest class they will ever have to take. But high school calculus teachers will be more used to working with the top students in the school. If you aren't especially gifted in math, you may find that you don't get what you need from these teachers.
Here's the problem with those ideas:
1) In Calc I in HS, you're looking at a class of 30 people. 50, max. In Calc I in college, you'll likely be in a class with something on the order of 100-200 people. See, *everybody* takes Calc I their first year, not just the comp. sci's. All engineering majors, all the math geeks.. Hell, even English majors probably have basic math as a requirement... So most of the time, it's a big class, usually a seminar type of deal. If you're having a hard time with it in there, then you'll also likely need to take another not-for-credit class where they can give individual instruction or take some extra tutoring on the side. Whereas in high school, you've not only got a smaller class, you've got an experienced math teacher, who likely knows his stuff, and you've got a year to learn it as opposed to 1 semester only. Okay, so the HS teacher may be less motivated, but you've got a longer time period, a smaller class, and you're in that class with the top students in the school (who can probably help you out somewhat) instead of in there with everybody in the whole school (who likely need just as much help as you do).
2) Yes, calculus is the upper crust of high school math. It's also a heck of a lot easier than a college level math class. But here's a thought: The high school class doesn't usually count towards your college GPA, while the college level one does. What's so bad about taking it twice? Take the high school calc if you can swing it, then take it again in college. You may still have a hard time in the college calculus, but it'll be somewhat easier because you've got at least some background to it already.
Other than the words "Eric" and "Smith", I see nothing in common between those two people. Even the middle initial is wrong (S vs. A).
Considering the commonness of the name "Eric" and the freakin' cliche commonness of "Smith", I think it's a bit of a leap to instantly assume these are the same person. I'm not saying they are not, but I am saying that I'd personally need a bit more evidence to buy into your theory here...
However, I find an increasing number of these messages never get through. Instead of smooth operations that provide the requested information immediately, I hear from someone 2 weeks after I responded to their trouble ticket and they're irate because I "never responded".
I hear you and understand your dilemma, but what I'm saying is that if you have any actual way out of this dilemma then it's likely that the system is broken. The whole point is to put the user in control of what they get, and to remove control from the sender. The problem with this is that you have clueless users. Okay, I feel your pain, but hey, you're not the first to deal with this problem. My advice is to stop trying to bypass the system and to tell your users, "hey, it was sent, but I can't guarantee WTF happens on your end.. Talk to your ISP." Because catering to the clueless doesn't give them incentive to get a clue.
I want to be able to ensure things get delivered, not because I want to flagrantly disregard all respect for email privacy, but because people are expecting the messages they request to actually arrive.
They can *expect* any damn thing they please. But you send it and have no errors, then your job is done and your legal obligation is fulfilled, AFAICT. You cannot be held responsible beyond that. I'd tell them that the message was sent, and beyond that they are on their own. If they leave, they leave. Some customers simply aren't worth your time to support.
And BTW, if you are offering any kind of your own guarantees on email getting through, then you're a fool to begin with. E-Mail is not a guaranteed system... never has been, never will be.
A coffee shop (or any business, or private party) can't just hook up a cablemodem and resell their bandwidth. Their ISP would have a fucking FIT. It's against their Terms of Service.
Generally, you don't get to resell your cablemodem bandwidth. You might be able to work out a deal with your ISP, but you'll definitely be paying more than $70.
I have yet to see a cablemodem provider that doesn't offer "business class". You're right about the $70 being low, but if the lowest grade of business class service they offer is greater than about $200-$250, I'd be freakin' shocked.
And those Terms of Service do allow reselling, or at least use in a such a way as to allow something like internet for your customers. That's the whole point of getting business class service in the first place.
Low end business class in my area runs around $150, gives you 6mbit down, 1.5 up, and yes, you can resell to your greedy little hearts content.
Heck yes, back in my day we didn't have no fancy bottled helium. We had to make our own helium by banging hydrogen atoms together.
Well, of course, we had it tough. All we had was chaos. And not even well defined chaos at that.
And you try and tell the young people of today that... and they won't believe you.
Nearly every useless blog site has "blog" on the page somewhere. Next time that happens to your search, just add -blog to it to exclude anything with the word "blog" on it. Works well.
Except that it allows people to use Linux (or whatever) to access your legitimately-bought DRM-protected songs without having to break the encryption.
No, it doesn't. The streaming protocol doesn't decrypt the music first. If you're not authorized (and would thus have the decryption key), you still can't listen to the music.
Some people need to RTFA before spouting off.
The guy didn't crack the new DRM scheme. He cracked the new authentication method for DAAP, which is the protocol iTunes uses to stream music to other iTunes clients over the network.
It's the "Music Sharing" functionality. It's what let's iTunes play from other iTunes shares. All that breaking the auth does is let you write programs to share music back and forth with iTunes over the network.
This has NOTHING to do with the DRM methodology in purchased iTMS songs!
Look, if you could get your message into my inbox by actions that you could take, then the SPAM filter has *failed* and would need adjustment.
The idea is to filter out things that look like spam. And I'm sorry, but what you say you're sending sounds like a lot of the spam I get, so it rightly should get filed as Junk.
That's not to say that it is, indeed, spam, if it's a pay for it sort of list. But the thing is that no email service deletes spam by default. If your message are getting foldered off somewhere, then it's up to the users to whitelist you and let your emails appear in their inbox instead of getting junkfiled. All of these free mail services have such capabilities.
But I would certainly hope that there would be nothing the sender of the email could do that would move his mail from my junk folder to my inbox. If they can, then the spam detection needs to be fixed. See the idea here?
They fixed the reversing order smart playlist bug??
Well, maybe. I haven't had my playlists get out of order since the new firmware, but then it always happened pretty randomly anyway. One can only hope.
No it wasn't. That was the logic of the poster before him (the "warning" Windows would show did not cause windows to function incorrectly, it just made the user think that there was something wrong, just like a "tainted kernel" messages make a user on a linux system think that something is going wrong).
I'm not entirely certain, but I don't think it spits out "tainted kernel" messages anywhere but in the log files. It's not like it's popping up a message to the user here, or spitting out a big flashing banner line in the boot sequence.
It adds support for:
-The "Grouping" fields in the iPod's Database (with regards to live updating smart playlists)
-A new Smart Playlist field for referencing other playlists
-Support for playing the new lossless compression format
-Bugfixes with regards to live updating smart playlists that reverse their order for no obvious reason (I'm betting that's in there anyway)
And probably other stuff that hasn't been found yet. There's not exactly a fountain of info on the new firmware yet.
You pay a price in the market.
Agreed, in theory. But the solution they use here is worse, no? Because now, instead of unhappy users, you have ticked off kernel developers. And they have no reason to support you, your users, your business model, anything. They now start talking about blacklisting you and your drivers and your children from the kernel in any way whatsoever. So now, instead of having stuff that worked but didn't get free support, you have stuff that won't work because the community has decided that they hate you and want to see you and your crappy hardware to burn in hell.
Not a good plan, it seems to me.
If Office 2003 started asking the Win32 API - areYouReallyMicrosoftWindows(). Then MS Windows would return true...
What would Wine get to return?
Wine would get to return true as well, if answering true was essential to get the software to work.
Take the case of the gameboy (I think). One of the checks the thing did when loading a game was to look for the Nintendo logo in the header of the game. If it wasn't there, it wouldn't run it. Someone else put the logo in their games to get it to run, Nintendo sued for trademark infringement. Nintendo lost, because they had made it absolutely necessary to include that logo in order for third parties to achieve interoperability with the product. Instead of preventing third parties from developing games (which was what they wanted), they lost control of their trademark to some degree. Not good.
However, this case is different. You don't need to lie to the kernel about your license to achieve interoperability. It'll load the module regardless of what you put in the license string. The only thing the license string does is to signal to the kernel developers that non-free modules are loaded into the kernel. It's been "tainted", and then they can choose to not support problems with tainted kernels.
This isn't lying to the kernel so much as it is lying to the kernel developers.
Could someone explain to me why this is an issue?
;)
Sure. This isn't a matter of something you read on a webpage, it's a matter of their code itself.
See, they have a binary-only kernel module. You load it into the kernel, and you get support for their modem. But binary-only means that they won't provide you with the source to the module.
Anyway, this isn't "free software". One of the things that you have to do to load a module into the kernel is to tell the kernel what your license is. Every module has to do this. The kernel loads the module regardless of the license, but if a module with a non-free license gets loaded, then a flag gets set that marked the kernel as "tainted". All this really means is that debug dumps and such get marked as being tainted as well, and thus you won't get any support from the free-software people (unless you can reproduce the problem without the non-free module). They don't want to debug or support somebody else's code when that code isn't even free-software.
What this module is doing is playing a rather evil little trick. Essentially, it says that anything in the GPL directory is covered under the GPL, while the rest is covered under the LICENSE file, but it tells this to the kernel in such a way that the kernel only sees "GPL" and nothing else. And the GPL directory is, in fact, empty. The upshot is that their module tells the kernel it's GPL'd when it's not, thus avoiding the tainted flag.
Why they'd really want to avoid this flag is beyond me though. The flag doesn't change the operation of the kernel in any way, it just lets kernel developers know that the user with a problem has binary only modules, and thus they can tell the user that they don't support binary only modules. Okay, this tends to tick off the users to some degree, but by lying to the kernel, they're ticking off the developers to a greater degree, and that's real bad news for anyone wanting to develop kernel modules. Taken too far, then kernel devs could simply refuse to load their modules anymore, and tell them to go screw themselves.. It's not like the kernel devs are pushing for compatibility in general anyway.. Their goal is to make a good kernel, not to please the masses.
Anyway, this will get ugly.
License be damned... I have the right to listen to music that I paid for and no amount of BS legal mumbo jumbo stuck in a EULA is going to change that.
If they have a problem with it, let them sue someone converting their purchased music to MP3. We'll see how long that lasts in court.
All locks are rated, not in terms of their binary perfection, but rather in terms of the time and cost to defeat them. So what? Who cares?
... ...
:)
:)
The analogy doesn't hold up though... In the case of DRM, the company wants to make a door that you can open as long only as you're wearing that companies special gloves, which cost you something to purchase (either in cash or in rights, depending on your point of view).
But not everybody has the same size hands. Some people lost their arms in the war, or some people have different numbers of fingers, or some people want to open entirely different doors.. Or some people simply don't like gloves. The point being that once the method for creating those gloves has been determined, and someone has figured out how the gloves work, then they can pretty easily open the door, get inside, and use a screwdriver to remove the hinges. Bam, now the door is open, and the hinges are all bent so the company can't get the door back on. It's broken for good.
Okay, so maybe you can take bad analogies too far.
Anyway, DRM is fundamentally unlike anything physical in this world. They want people to be able to experience a thing but be unable to copy that thing. This is simply impossible because of the nature of experience. All of our mediums for holding experiences like music or video or whatever have been expressly designed to be copyable. They have to be. Otherwise they would only be able to make one and then they couldn't sell many of the same thing over and over again.
So trying to make an experience that cannot be copied on a medium that was designed to be easily copied is more than a bit stupid, don't you think? It can't be done. Not because encryption is tricky, or because nobody's found the right way to do it, or even because they're just trying to make it "hard enough". It's because there's a fundamental inconsistancy between the neccessities of the design of the medium and the purposes to which they are trying use that medium for. And the design of the medium itself is based on fundamental human perceptual abilites and it cannot realistically be altered to fit these purposes.
This is why it cannot be done. You cannot do the impossible. That's why we call it "impossible". Some people think that people call things impossible lightly. Well, that's true, but hey, we really mean it this time, yeah?
Can you identify a single, lawful use of playfair?
Making it possible to transcode the song into an MP3 in order to put it onto an MP3 player other than an iPod (and without wasting an audio CD to do it).
Making it possible to transcode the song into any other format in order to achieve compatibility with any other music playing device at all, for that matter. No need to limit it to MP3 players, really. Essentially, M4P's are only playable by iTunes and the iPod. Other programs that can play them now *all* use the code that DVDJon came up with, in one form or another. Apple hasn't licensed that ability to anybody. RealPlayer can now play M4P's, in fact... They're probably violating the GPL, now that I think about it...
This is stupid. Look, data transfer is free by necessity. You pay your ISP for your bandwidth, and that's it. Every major network transfers other network's bandwidth by agreement because that's what the internet *is*. It's a network for networks.
:P
If the stamp idea were to take off, another free email system would simply emerge using other methods. Simple as that. I gotta pay to send over port 25? Fine, I'll use port 2525 instead. Whatever. Everyone would switch to the new free email system, in a rather short period of time most likely, and the wheel would be reinvented. SMTP, or whatever you had to pay for "stamps", would very quickly be dead as a method of email transport.
Hell, if e-stamps took off, I'd do my absolute damnest to develop the next email protocol as fast as humanly possible. I'd probably make a mint too.
So forget about it. It's funny. Laugh. That people could seriously think that the concept of e-stamps is even feasible is the funny part. The internet routes around censorship, but it also routes around dumb ideas.