I'm really sick of this argument. Why is it that whenever someone mentions the abolition of copyrights, someone has to stand up and call them left wing or communist. Since when are government granted monoplies an aspect of a free market economy? And your scientist example is incorrect because it is not taken to it's logical conclusion. Welfare need not be the answer for our materialistic PhD. In fact capitalism would suggest that if we need such a complicated and easily abused system to maintain our current levels of technological innovation that we are currently spending to much on such endeavors. Under a real free market economy we would probably have fewer inventors and we would be spending the money on whatever it is that society actually wants. And we would probably be spending our money much more efficiently as well.
Wow! What an amazingly shody study. For one thing, according to VNU the greatest drop in sales was the year before napster even existed. What were their methods? What Universities did they select? How did they chose the Universites and stores they would select? Why did they only consider sales of brick and mortar retailers? Also, apparantly VNU doesn't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Even if there weren't so many holes in the rest of the study concluding from these numbers that, "It is now clear that the controversial practices of companies that provide directories and an easy interface to libraries of unlicensed music are in fact detrimental to the growth of the music business and those artists whom they claim to support." is completely unfounded. This is the sort of mistake that made 19th century scientists say, "Old meat rots and old meat has lots of maggots on it. Therefore rotting meat must synthesize maggots." This study is such pseudo-science that it wouldn't last five minutes under pier review.
Actually your umask environment variable determines what the default permissions for files will be. Most systems initially install with a line in one of the default login scripts that sets umask to read/write for user, privlidges for anyone else.
I feel I must speak out against respect for Eminem. I don't like his music much but since musical tastes are mostly a matter of opinion I won't base my disrepect for him on that. My reasons for not respecting Eminem come from his behavior at one of his concerts. Eminem came to play at our university last year. After yelling at one of his fans and telling her how lame she was for holding too simple a sign, he invited two other girls onto the stage. Suddenly he stopped singing and told them "Show us your tits." He wouldn't continue the show untill they had both complied. Only then does it occur to him to ask them how old they are. When it turns out that they are probably under age (they couldn't produce any ID) did he apologize for being a prick? No! He told them "Get the fsck off my stage. What, are you trying to get me arrested?" Wait a second. If his pedophilic ass hadn't told them to flash the audience there wouldn't have been anything to get arrested over. I hope he does get arrested and when he does I hope a large inmate kicks him in the nuts and "expands his horizons" with a baseball bat.
We spend alot of time complaining about how lamely DNS is being run. What if we could regulate DNS through a open system. I believe it's possible to completely overhaul DNS, even against the will of government or corprate regulation, without breaking any laws. All we need is a sufficent number of people with dedicated internet connections. Setting up a DNS server is easy. If it doesn't accept any other servers as authoritative it is in effect a top level domain name server. If enough other people accept that machine as authoritative we've created a second DNS network independant of the original one. If enough people select machines from the DNS2 as their primary name servers any information in this system will suplant that in the original DNS. No longer would we be subject to arbitrary legislation that serves the best intrest of whoever has the most money. If anyone's interested in working on this send me an email. I can provide web space and a DNS.
I agree that very few people will expend their blood sweat and tears for the good of society unless they get paid for it. But I also don't think the abolition of patent would force us to depend on these rare souls for our technological advancement. For one thing, very little is invented in garages, at least in the past few decades. As much as I hate to say it, most innovation goes on in corprate and academic labs. We've already seen that Open Source programmers are willing to code something up just so they can gain the benefits of better software, even though they know they won't get paid for their code directly. Academians would obviously continue to do research with or without patents. As long as they can publish and their grants keep rolling in, they're pretty happy. So the other question is would the private sector continue to innovate without the protection of patents? I think they would. There are still alot of benefits to being the first one to bring a new technology to the market. You automatically get some monopoly time while everyone reverse engineers your stuff, converts their assembly lines, revamps their add campaign etc. You also get bragging rights, "Base your company on our products and you'll have new toys before your competitors do." As for the small time private investor. They aren't really protected by current patent law. How often do you hear about someone successfully suing a large company that stole their idea? But they can take advantage of bragging rights too, "Hey hire me and I'll invent my cool new toys at your company first." Trying to fix the patent process is like sticking your fingers in the dike. We should just tear it down and where we absolutly need government sanctioned monopolies let's think them through carefully before we implement them.
I think the entire patent system should be abolished. Now before you write me off as a kook think about it. Why do we, as a society, grant patents at all? Usually when I ask this question people answer, "To reward innovation." But that's really only a means to an end. I contend that the real reason we grant patents is to encourage innovation. What's the difference? Once an innovation has been introduced society gains no benefit from rewarding the inventor. But most of us consider innovation to be a good thing and we believe that by promising the protection of patents we can encourage individuals to expend time, resources, and their brains to create things that would not ordinarily have been created. But our economy and population has reached a size where the incentive of exclusive use is no longer a necessary motivation for innovation. I'm sure people can find examples of technologies that probably wouldn't get invented without the incentive of patents but overall the patent system does more to stifle innovation than to promote it. I say the patent system is not worth fixing. Let's ditch it and we'll see more innovation, not less.
Re:Geographically Correct?
on
Quake Wedding
·
· Score: 1
I'm half Austrian half Chinese. Most people are pretty sure that Austria is a continent on the souther hemisphere with lot's of kangaroos. I've been asked if I was Italian (mostly by Austrians who assume I'm from South of the Border), Irish (by an Irish woman in an Irish bar), and even part African American (by a guy in my office "because I kinda' have a swing to my step"). Every time I run into someone like that I usually spend hours laughing about it afterwards.
Maybe he doesn't think the show will generate enough intrest. Perhaps a bunch of emails concering etoys would convince him to check out the story and air it? Here is a link to the Awful Truth http://www.theawfultruth.com website. Here is the email address awfultv@aol.com for the show. And remember be nice we're trying to enlist this guy as a friend.
They didn't actually ask for help with Redhat. They just said that they're considering it. And I think it's good that they did too. I, for one, hate it when people ask for advice with their linux problems but neglect to tell me exactly what is going on. Imagine if some newbie was having trouble with splat and forgot to mention that he was running Redhat. Doh!
Ever since we started using currency (as opposed to just barter), people have been trying to counterfeit currency. Every time governments came out with a new currency, counterfeiters would find a new way to copy it. And every time counterfeiters found a way to copy the currency, governments came out with a new currency. But recently it's gotten to the point where counterfeiters can keep up with the government too easily. This is because todays technology allows us to create things that _look_ like whatever we want, and up until now the only way to tell if a bill is fake is to notice that it looks wrong. The answer is clearly to switch away from a paper based currency. It has been fairly well demonstrated that (until quantum computers are a reality) we can use public key cryptosystems to create an unforgeable currency. If the government wants to keep people from counterfeiting money they should do a better job with the currency rather than creating a temptation and then trying to watch everyone who might be a potential counterfeiter.
Ever since the "haxors guid to/." was posted here I've noticed a proliferation of the types of posts described in said document. Granted such posts were around before but I think there are more of them. It would be interesting to see what effect other joke articles on/. have not only on itelf but on other news articles. Imagine as annoying as these posts are here, if I so it as a comment on a more mainstream publication I'd get a bit of a laugh out of it.
That's interesting. I always wondered why the list of crimes in the Church of Scientology included "Continued association with squirels." Do you have any idea why they picked the word "squirrls" for this?
It's interesting that viruses are now described as "going wild" or "escaping". Could this be indicative of a trend? Consider the following. As new network connections are laid down each host on the internet has the potential to connect to and accept connections from a rapidly growing number of other hosts. Network services are being automated more and more often. We are seeing a proliferations of tools which aid in cross platform execution different tasks. This is the perfect breeding ground for an organism. Good ecological diversity, lots of cover/protection from predators, lots of resources, and it's condusive to easy transportation. It shouldn't be to hard to create a virus (or worm) which would reproduce sexually rather than asexually. We did something similar in simulated environments and we got some amazing results. Agents (the individual organisms) would even evolve to work with other agents and display group behavior. Sometimes we would get dominant populations using algorithms that we hadn't even predicted. I think the biology analogy for viruses is going to get alot clearer in the next few years.
Admiral Grace Hopper may be a hard coder and a Righteous Babe, but I'm putting my vote in for Ada Lovelace. I mean really. This chick was the first programmer (of *either* sex), ever. She wrote assembly code and she had to do all her debugging without actually running any tests of her programs. It's too bad her slacker husband couldn't get his com-u-turd finished. I wonder if anyone has ever gone ahead and built that thing, I bet most of Ada's code would have run correctly on it.
AFAIK most virus checkers already scan for viruses based on hashes of key parts of the virus. This doesn't stop someon from creating a completely new virus or from making minor changes to the part of the virus which is being scanned for. Is is even possible to create a virus checker that would adaptively search for "virus like" code without severly impeding the normal operation of the computer? I can imagine that there might be some sort of distributed database which would allow the first person who noticed an infection to notify everyone else quickly. After that the fix could be automatically sent out to innoculate/cure all the systems in the group. Maybe if all programs used some sort of cryptographic certification you could identify viruses based on their lack of certification.
I'm gonna have fun with this one. And to think all my friends thought I was on crack when I told them that Linux was going to take out MS. "No way man, MS is just too big." HA!
I get the error message Error: Couldn't load pics/colormap.pcx when I try to run kingpin. When I do a search on it I find alot of people asking about this but I can't figure out what it means. Any help?
I don't owe aleigance to any particular religion (I mostly follow science) but there's nothing wrong with being respectful of other people's beliefs. Note that one of our own logicians (Goedel) threw some nice monkey wrenches into logic. As I see it religions attempts to explain that which is outside logic. Therefore they cannot be logically consitent. But unless you already believe in logic, logical consitency is irrelevant. I propose a challenge. PROVE that logic is a an accurate model of reality. And remember you can't use circular logic and you can only base proofs off of conclusions you've already proven. Good Luck.
Why does anyone care what other people call them? If I spend all my spare time optimizing my home network am I any less skilled for being called a cracker? If I spend my time installing Back Orifice on people machines do I sudenly understand more about my computer because someone calls me a hacker? Do "real" hackers unlearn anthything from it?
I think the distinction between hacker and cracker is a little silly anyway. It's not like real people are all hacker or all cracker anyway.
Most of the people I know have a wide variety of interests. I practice Karate, I cook better than alot of profesional chefs, I play video games, I write code, I maintain my network, and sometimes I circumvent security.
So go ahead, label me. Call me hacker, cracker, looser, idiot, wannabe, whatever. But when I'm sitting at home eating sauteed chicken with white wine sauce over rice, and recompiling my kernel guess how much I'll care.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really sick of this argument. Why is it that whenever someone mentions the abolition of copyrights, someone has to stand up and call them left wing or communist. Since when are government granted monoplies an aspect of a free market economy? And your scientist example is incorrect because it is not taken to it's logical conclusion. Welfare need not be the answer for our materialistic PhD. In fact capitalism would suggest that if we need such a complicated and easily abused system to maintain our current levels of technological innovation that we are currently spending to much on such endeavors. Under a real free market economy we would probably have fewer inventors and we would be spending the money on whatever it is that society actually wants. And we would probably be spending our money much more efficiently as well.
Wow! What an amazingly shody study. For one thing, according to VNU the greatest drop in sales was the year before napster even existed. What were their methods? What Universities did they select? How did they chose the Universites and stores they would select? Why did they only consider sales of brick and mortar retailers? Also, apparantly VNU doesn't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Even if there weren't so many holes in the rest of the study concluding from these numbers that, "It is now clear that the controversial practices of companies that provide directories and an easy interface to libraries of unlicensed music are in fact detrimental to the growth of the music business and those artists whom they claim to support." is completely unfounded. This is the sort of mistake that made 19th century scientists say, "Old meat rots and old meat has lots of maggots on it. Therefore rotting meat must synthesize maggots." This study is such pseudo-science that it wouldn't last five minutes under pier review.
Actually your umask environment variable determines what the default permissions for files will be. Most systems initially install with a line in one of the default login scripts that sets umask to read/write for user, privlidges for anyone else.
Yes! There is justice in the world.
I feel I must speak out against respect for Eminem. I don't like his music much but since musical tastes are mostly a matter of opinion I won't base my disrepect for him on that. My reasons for not respecting Eminem come from his behavior at one of his concerts. Eminem came to play at our university last year. After yelling at one of his fans and telling her how lame she was for holding too simple a sign, he invited two other girls onto the stage. Suddenly he stopped singing and told them "Show us your tits." He wouldn't continue the show untill they had both complied. Only then does it occur to him to ask them how old they are. When it turns out that they are probably under age (they couldn't produce any ID) did he apologize for being a prick? No! He told them "Get the fsck off my stage. What, are you trying to get me arrested?" Wait a second. If his pedophilic ass hadn't told them to flash the audience there wouldn't have been anything to get arrested over. I hope he does get arrested and when he does I hope a large inmate kicks him in the nuts and "expands his horizons" with a baseball bat.
We spend alot of time complaining about how lamely DNS is being run. What if we could regulate DNS through a open system.
I believe it's possible to completely overhaul DNS, even against the will of government or corprate regulation, without breaking any laws.
All we need is a sufficent number of people with dedicated internet connections. Setting up a DNS server is easy. If it doesn't accept any other servers as authoritative it is in effect a top level domain name server. If enough other people accept that machine as authoritative we've created a second DNS network independant of the original one.
If enough people select machines from the DNS2 as their primary name servers any information in this system will suplant that in the original DNS.
No longer would we be subject to arbitrary legislation that serves the best intrest of whoever has the most money.
If anyone's interested in working on this send me an email. I can provide web space and a DNS.
I agree that very few people will expend their blood sweat and tears for the good of society unless they get paid for it.
But I also don't think the abolition of patent would force us to depend on these rare souls for our technological advancement.
For one thing, very little is invented in garages, at least in the past few decades. As much as I hate to say it, most innovation goes on in corprate and academic labs.
We've already seen that Open Source programmers are willing to code something up just so they can gain the benefits of better software, even though they know they won't get paid for their code directly.
Academians would obviously continue to do research with or without patents. As long as they can publish and their grants keep rolling in, they're pretty happy.
So the other question is would the private sector continue to innovate without the protection of patents? I think they would. There are still alot of benefits to being the first one to bring a new technology to the market. You automatically get some monopoly time while everyone reverse engineers your stuff, converts their assembly lines, revamps their add campaign etc. You also get bragging rights, "Base your company on our products and you'll have new toys before your competitors do."
As for the small time private investor. They aren't really protected by current patent law. How often do you hear about someone successfully suing a large company that stole their idea? But they can take advantage of bragging rights too, "Hey hire me and I'll invent my cool new toys at your company first."
Trying to fix the patent process is like sticking your fingers in the dike. We should just tear it down and where we absolutly need government sanctioned monopolies let's think them through carefully before we implement them.
I think the entire patent system should be abolished.
Now before you write me off as a kook think about it. Why do we, as a society, grant patents at all?
Usually when I ask this question people answer, "To reward innovation." But that's really only a means to an end. I contend that the real reason we grant patents is to encourage innovation.
What's the difference? Once an innovation has been introduced society gains no benefit from rewarding the inventor.
But most of us consider innovation to be a good thing and we believe that by promising the protection of patents we can encourage individuals to expend time, resources, and their brains to create things that would not ordinarily have been created.
But our economy and population has reached a size where the incentive of exclusive use is no longer a necessary motivation for innovation. I'm sure people can find examples of technologies that probably wouldn't get invented without the incentive of patents but overall the patent system does more to stifle innovation than to promote it.
I say the patent system is not worth fixing. Let's ditch it and we'll see more innovation, not less.
I'm half Austrian half Chinese. Most people are pretty sure that Austria is a continent on the souther hemisphere with lot's of kangaroos. I've been asked if I was Italian (mostly by Austrians who assume I'm from South of the Border), Irish (by an Irish woman in an Irish bar), and even part African American (by a guy in my office "because I kinda' have a swing to my step"). Every time I run into someone like that I usually spend hours laughing about it afterwards.
Maybe he doesn't think the show will generate enough intrest. Perhaps a bunch of emails concering etoys would convince him to check out the story and air it?
Here is a link to the Awful Truth http://www.theawfultruth.com website.
Here is the email address awfultv@aol.com for the show.
And remember be nice we're trying to enlist this guy as a friend.
They didn't actually ask for help with Redhat. They just said that they're considering it.
And I think it's good that they did too. I, for one, hate it when people ask for advice with their linux problems but neglect to tell me exactly what is going on.
Imagine if some newbie was having trouble with splat and forgot to mention that he was running Redhat. Doh!
Ever since we started using currency (as opposed to just barter), people have been trying to counterfeit currency. Every time governments came out with a new currency, counterfeiters would find a new way to copy it. And every time counterfeiters found a way to copy the currency, governments came out with a new currency. But recently it's gotten to the point where counterfeiters can keep up with the government too easily. This is because todays technology allows us to create things that _look_ like whatever we want, and up until now the only way to tell if a bill is fake is to notice that it looks wrong. The answer is clearly to switch away from a paper based currency. It has been fairly well demonstrated that (until quantum computers are a reality) we can use public key cryptosystems to create an unforgeable currency. If the government wants to keep people from counterfeiting money they should do a better job with the currency rather than creating a temptation and then trying to watch everyone who might be a potential counterfeiter.
Ever since the "haxors guid to /." was posted here I've noticed a proliferation of the types of posts described in said document. /. have not only on itelf but on other news articles.
Granted such posts were around before but I think there are more of them.
It would be interesting to see what effect other joke articles on
Imagine as annoying as these posts are here, if I so it as a comment on a more mainstream publication I'd get a bit of a laugh out of it.
That's interesting. I always wondered why the list of crimes in the Church of Scientology included "Continued association with squirels." Do you have any idea why they picked the word "squirrls" for this?
Go to the main /. page and click on the link that says "code".
It's interesting that viruses are now described as "going wild" or "escaping". Could this be indicative of a trend? Consider the following. As new network connections are laid down each host on the internet has the potential to connect to and accept connections from a rapidly growing number of other hosts. Network services are being automated more and more often. We are seeing a proliferations of tools which aid in cross platform execution different tasks. This is the perfect breeding ground for an organism. Good ecological diversity, lots of cover/protection from predators, lots of resources, and it's condusive to easy transportation. It shouldn't be to hard to create a virus (or worm) which would reproduce sexually rather than asexually. We did something similar in simulated environments and we got some amazing results. Agents (the individual organisms) would even evolve to work with other agents and display group behavior. Sometimes we would get dominant populations using algorithms that we hadn't even predicted. I think the biology analogy for viruses is going to get alot clearer in the next few years.
Admiral Grace Hopper may be a hard coder and a Righteous Babe, but I'm putting my vote in for Ada Lovelace. I mean really. This chick was the first programmer (of *either* sex), ever. She wrote assembly code and she had to do all her debugging without actually running any tests of her programs. It's too bad her slacker husband couldn't get his com-u-turd finished. I wonder if anyone has ever gone ahead and built that thing, I bet most of Ada's code would have run correctly on it.
AFAIK most virus checkers already scan for viruses based on hashes of key parts of the virus. This doesn't stop someon from creating a completely new virus or from making minor changes to the part of the virus which is being scanned for.
Is is even possible to create a virus checker that would adaptively search for "virus like" code without severly impeding the normal operation of the computer?
I can imagine that there might be some sort of distributed database which would allow the first person who noticed an infection to notify everyone else quickly. After that the fix could be automatically sent out to innoculate/cure all the systems in the group.
Maybe if all programs used some sort of cryptographic certification you could identify viruses based on their lack of certification.
I'm gonna have fun with this one. And to think all my friends thought I was on crack when I told them that Linux was going to take out MS. "No way man, MS is just too big." HA!
Tried that. No luck.
What is this file anyway?
Well no it's not.
I also had this problem trying to run quake2.
Any idea where I can get this file?
I get the error message
Error: Couldn't load pics/colormap.pcx
when I try to run kingpin.
When I do a search on it I find alot of people asking about this but I can't figure out what it means.
Any help?
Does this mean that there are zero supercomputeres in China? That sounds likely.
I don't owe aleigance to any particular religion (I mostly follow science) but there's nothing wrong with being respectful of other people's beliefs.
Note that one of our own logicians (Goedel) threw some nice monkey wrenches into logic.
As I see it religions attempts to explain that which is outside logic. Therefore they cannot be logically consitent.
But unless you already believe in logic, logical consitency is irrelevant.
I propose a challenge. PROVE that logic is a an accurate model of reality.
And remember you can't use circular logic and you can only base proofs off of conclusions you've already proven.
Good Luck.
Why does anyone care what other people call them?
If I spend all my spare time optimizing my home network am I any less skilled for being called a cracker?
If I spend my time installing Back Orifice on people machines do I sudenly understand more about my computer because someone calls me a hacker?
Do "real" hackers unlearn anthything from it?
I think the distinction between hacker and cracker is a little silly anyway. It's not like real people are all hacker or all cracker anyway.
Most of the people I know have a wide variety of interests. I practice Karate, I cook better than alot of profesional chefs, I play video games, I write code, I maintain my network, and sometimes I circumvent security.
So go ahead, label me. Call me hacker, cracker, looser, idiot, wannabe, whatever. But when I'm sitting at home eating sauteed chicken with white wine sauce over rice, and recompiling my kernel guess how much I'll care.