He'll most certainly explain to her exactly what
he's expressed here: that he wants her to be able
to benefit from the internet, but he's concerned
about what sort of content and/or people she
could be exposed to.
Parents/step-parents shouldn't have to make a
secret of the fact that they're concerned about
what children are exposed to. That is what
parenting is about.
The goal of a capitalist economy is to maximize individual profit.
The goal of a communist economy is to provide for everyone.
State communism is an oxymoron. Capitalist democracy is an oxymoron.
State and capitalism need each other. Democracy and communism need each other.
I think you're blurring the distinction between
communism and socialism.
Communism is more than just the socialist ideal
that society (i.e. government) should ensure that
all people are provided with at least a reasonable
minimum standard of living. Communism is also a
specific form of government, which has never to
my knowledge been associated with effective
democracy. (Yes, they do have elections in
communist states, and no I don't count those as
effective democracy, since the right to appear
on the ballot or win the election is not
universal.)
First you imply that Elian's family should have been using guns to keep him here, then you say he should have been taken anyhow. Next you imply that it was in fact the US government which blew up that building in Oklahoma.
No offense, but I don't much like the thought of you carrying a gun.
satanic symbolism employed by the Nazis, such as the Swastika
I don't know about Satanists, but I know that a lot of other people throughout the ages have used that same symbol.
Usually it represents the rotation of the night sky around the north star or the procession of the zodiac, in which case the direction (clockwise vs. counter-clockwise) depends on which hemisphere you're in.
I've seen it in SouthEast Asia, usually with four dots in the cross, used as a good luck symbol.
But yes, I do agree that the high-level Nazis had some weird mysticism stuff going on. So what? The Nazis committed their worst atrocities (genocide) in the name of science. The fact that it was scientifically flawed and horribly immoral doesn't change the fact that their motivations were not religious. And the other groups mentioned were explicitly atheist. I do not see a cause and effect relationship between religion and violence.
Again, a modern day cult of personality is still a cult, and inherently religious in nature.
In other words, you define "religion" to mean anything fanatical with which you disagree. Sorry, but I don't buy it.
Fanatacism is what kills people, and religion is just one of the many thing which fanatics throughout the ages have committed atrocities in the name of.
Thoreau was a free-loader who just mooched of of his sister.:)
Seriously, I do agree with you. But I don't have a choice. I want to take a long trip (six months), and I need to work part-time while I'm travelling in order to fund the trip. Six months with a laptop is better then two weeks of email-free bliss, at this point in my life.
When I was looking for a job in Silicon Valley, the social responsibility of my employer was a big factor. I didn't want to be part of something I disagreed with.
I chose Hewlett-Packard, because overall I believe they're a company with good ethics. There are specific policies I've had problems with (like when they used to drug-test new hires), but by and large they do pretty well.
I remember reading an article in the San Jose Metro, called "Silicon Valley Scrooges", where they were complaining how all these wealthy high-tech companies do very little to help out the community. HP was mentioned several times as being the exception. Seeing this made me pretty happy with my choice.
Disclaimer: As a current employee of HP (about to take a six-month leave of absence to travel), you can't possibly expect this post to be even remotely impartial.
Emmett, why must you emphasize the nationality of a project or its leaders?
I know what you're saying, but I think you're missing the point.
The fact that Miguel is from Mexico isn't particularly interesting, by itself. What's interesting is that so many people involved in this whole free software thing are from so many different countries. The international cooperation that happens in free software projects is a source of pride for many people in the free software "community" (whatever that means).
linux is the proven enterprise leader in scalability,
Not by a long shot.
security
Fair enough, although OpenBSD is better.
and reliability.
That's debateable. The OS is solid code, but what about hardware failures? Linux doesn't currently offer much in the way of single-system high availability. The only high-availability Linux offers is what I heard Linus Torvalds refer to as "cheezy high availability".
Don't get me wrong, I run Linux and love it. (My primary motivation is the GPL, actually.) But calling it the "proven enterprise leader" seems a little premature when it still has so much room for improvement. When you say "enterprise", I think terabyte-sized databases, and that's definitely not a space that Linux can play in today. It's getting there, it's the future that I'm betting on, but let's not jump the gun.
Mozilla is free software. You (slashdot) say they're hiding security holes... Oh really? How's that?
Let's say they find out about a security problem, but they don't tell *you* (not a mozilla developer) about it, they just check in a fix. Well, all the information that anybody should need to know about it is contained in the source tree, isn't it? The only difference is that it wasn't packaged nicely for the script-kiddies. It's available in a form that is really only useful to people who care to know the code. Which is fine, since they're the only ones who are going to be fixing the bugs, aren't they?
This approach is *not* security through obscurity, not by a long shot. And it's not unique to Mozilla; it's standard best practice in the free software community. Just ask debian, redhat, or openbsd; this is how they've been doing things for years, with *excellent* results.
You said: So while religion doesn't deserve to be totally bashed since it did have it's place, it does deserve to be removed from modern society.
And your sig is: "If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
Kinduv ironic that you're arguing against the utility of religion in modern society while paying respect to an important modern man who was very religious.:)
I don't know, I think it's interesting for geeks to talk about the technological infrastructure in other countries.
But I do agree that the idea that somehow internet access is gonna revolutionize the world is ludicrous. So many people in countries like the US assume that the third world is the way it is because the people living there don't know any better. People aren't as stupid as Americans tend to think they are.
Still, I think it makes sense to have a slashdot article where people talk about how much internet access people have in various parts of the world, and why.
How would access to medicine, food and water effect social change?
In the past few years, internet cafes have popped up all over Southeast Asia. They're *everywhere* in Thailand and Indonesia, and they're even fairly common in Cambodia. You pay a small fee by the minute to access your hotmail account (or whatever).
I really don't think that cultural barriers are much of an issue. Not in SouthEast Asia, at least. The biggest thing slowing it down is the financial and infrastructure barriers preventing people from having internet access in their homes. If you can only check your email for a fee at a cafe, it's gonna curb how much you rely on the internet.
The internet is spreading through third world countries rapidly. No big deal.
These folks need to deal with professional counsellors who can really help them, not a bunch of wannabe psychologists hanging out in newsgroups giving out bad advice.
Professional counsellors typically encourage people to get involved in support group environments. The professionals tend to believe that it's good for people to network with other people who are in similar situations.
I'm gonna reply to this, at the risk of pissing off the FreeBSD folks.:)
In my opinion, the reason FreeBSD hasn't caught on to the extent that Linux has is that they really don't care much about user-friendly type issues. It's no surprise that GNOME and KDE are coming from the Linux camps, for example.
Now, FreeBSD can be made just as friendly. For example, you can build the Linux software (or just run the binaries using FreeBSD's amazing binary compatibility). But the point is, user-friendliness is an extra, not the default.
FreeBSD is great, but their focus has been primarily on servers and hardcore UNIX geeks, not on non-technical users, and it's cost them the fame that Linux now has.
Yes, it is copy protection, as well as viewing restriction. It's all that and more. Half the freedom, at twice the cost. What a bargain!:)
It serves no use in preventing people from illegally making DVDs
Sure it does. It makes it a big PITA. It makes it unfeasable for your average home user to copy a DVD movie.
Before anybody talks about "bitwise copies" again, let me point out that your average home user can't do that since the DVD equipment they have won't cooperate.
And before anybody talks about how it's not economically feasible to burn a DVD, let me point out that to copy the content of a DVD disk does not mean it has to be written back to a DVD disk. Pulling it off of DVD and onto VCD or something is still copying.
And before anybody talks about how movies are too big for users to swap around on the internet or something, let me remind you that this used to be the case with sound files; bandwidth and storage is always going up.
Also, the fact that there are other ways this copy-protection could have been circumvented (again, not easily by non-technical people) does not change the fact that it was intended to be copy protection, and LiVid circumvents this copy protection.
Livid has to; their system was designed such that a free-software solution which honors copy protection is not possible. It's their own damn fault for not putting the copy protection entirely in the hardware.
Yes, and they're doing it at the expense of our rights as consumers. Don't get me wrong, I understand exactly what they're worried about. They have good reason to worry. But tough break.
We don't owe them a living.
Do you feel sorry for a company that goes out of business because the competition was better? Maybe. Should you outlaw competition, then? Certainly not. Same thing here. Sure, it sucks that their product isn't gonna work out the way they intended, but the suggested fix of violating everybody's rights just to satisfy a few (already very rich) interest groups isn't acceptable to me.
1. Piracy is possible without the use of the DeCSS player.
Possible? Yes. Feasible for your average home user? No.
2. The cost of writable DVD media makes piracy more expensive than actually purchasing DVDs.
So then make a VCD of it, or just put it on your hard drive or your ftp server or something. Who cares about writing it back to DVD once you've gotten the unencrypted data off of the DVD disk?
I agree wholeheartedly with your other two points, though.
And I think that big industry is *less* worried about professional "pirates" than it is about home users swapping data.
Besides, the big-time "pirates" will *always* find a way to do it. But home users won't "pirate" data if it's prohibitively difficult or expensive to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want something like this:
#!/usr/bin/ccscript
* My C program here...
*/
and you don't mind terrible performance, then
you can just write a shell script "interpreter"
which simply runs gcc on your program.
#!/bin/sh
# ccscript:
tmpdir=/tmp/tmpdir.$$
rm -rf -- "$tmpdir"
mkdir "$tmpdir" || exit 1
tmpobj=${tmpdir}/obj
tmpsrc=${tmpdir}/src.c
tail +2 "$1" > "$tmpsrc"
cc -o "$tmpobj" "$tmpsrc"
$tmpobj
exitval=$?
rm -rf -- $tmpdir
exit $exitval
I expect that this CSS program would run a lot
faster, though.
- Kevin
Huh? Why should he mind if she reads this?
He'll most certainly explain to her exactly what
he's expressed here: that he wants her to be able
to benefit from the internet, but he's concerned
about what sort of content and/or people she
could be exposed to.
Parents/step-parents shouldn't have to make a
secret of the fact that they're concerned about
what children are exposed to. That is what
parenting is about.
I think you're blurring the distinction between communism and socialism.
Communism is more than just the socialist ideal that society (i.e. government) should ensure that all people are provided with at least a reasonable minimum standard of living. Communism is also a specific form of government, which has never to my knowledge been associated with effective democracy. (Yes, they do have elections in communist states, and no I don't count those as effective democracy, since the right to appear on the ballot or win the election is not universal.)
First you imply that Elian's family should have been using guns to keep him here, then you say he should have been taken anyhow. Next you imply that it was in fact the US government which blew up that building in Oklahoma.
No offense, but I don't much like the thought of you carrying a gun.
satanic symbolism employed by the Nazis, such as the Swastika
I don't know about Satanists, but I know that a lot of other people throughout the ages have used that same symbol.
Usually it represents the rotation of the night sky around the north star or the procession of the zodiac, in which case the direction (clockwise vs. counter-clockwise) depends on which hemisphere you're in.
I've seen it in SouthEast Asia, usually with four dots in the cross, used as a good luck symbol.
But yes, I do agree that the high-level Nazis had some weird mysticism stuff going on. So what? The Nazis committed their worst atrocities (genocide) in the name of science. The fact that it was scientifically flawed and horribly immoral doesn't change the fact that their motivations were not religious. And the other groups mentioned were explicitly atheist. I do not see a cause and effect relationship between religion and violence.
Again, a modern day cult of personality is still a cult, and inherently religious in nature.
In other words, you define "religion" to mean anything fanatical with which you disagree. Sorry, but I don't buy it.
Fanatacism is what kills people, and religion is just one of the many thing which fanatics throughout the ages have committed atrocities in the name of.
Thoreau was a free-loader who just mooched of of his sister. :)
Seriously, I do agree with you. But I don't have a choice. I want to take a long trip (six months), and I need to work part-time while I'm travelling in order to fund the trip. Six months with a laptop is better then two weeks of email-free bliss, at this point in my life.
Sorry, but I see Caldera employees on the various development mailing lists I'm on, doing more than their fair share.
I don't know (or care) much about the CEO, but I don't like this unfair generalization.
When I was looking for a job in Silicon Valley, the social responsibility of my employer was a big factor. I didn't want to be part of something I disagreed with.
I chose Hewlett-Packard, because overall I believe they're a company with good ethics. There are specific policies I've had problems with (like when they used to drug-test new hires), but by and large they do pretty well.
I remember reading an article in the San Jose Metro, called "Silicon Valley Scrooges", where they were complaining how all these wealthy high-tech companies do very little to help out the community. HP was mentioned several times as being the exception. Seeing this made me pretty happy with my choice.
Disclaimer: As a current employee of HP (about to take a six-month leave of absence to travel), you can't possibly expect this post to be even remotely impartial.
Emmett, why must you emphasize the nationality of a project or its leaders?
I know what you're saying, but I think you're missing the point.
The fact that Miguel is from Mexico isn't particularly interesting, by itself. What's interesting is that so many people involved in this whole free software thing are from so many different countries. The international cooperation that happens in free software projects is a source of pride for many people in the free software "community" (whatever that means).
It's a world-wide revolution. :)
linux is the proven enterprise leader in scalability,
Not by a long shot.
security
Fair enough, although OpenBSD is better.
and reliability.
That's debateable. The OS is solid code, but what about hardware failures? Linux doesn't currently offer much in the way of single-system high availability. The only high-availability Linux offers is what I heard Linus Torvalds refer to as "cheezy high availability".
Don't get me wrong, I run Linux and love it. (My primary motivation is the GPL, actually.) But calling it the "proven enterprise leader" seems a little premature when it still has so much room for improvement. When you say "enterprise", I think terabyte-sized databases, and that's definitely not a space that Linux can play in today. It's getting there, it's the future that I'm betting on, but let's not jump the gun.
Mozilla is free software. You (slashdot) say they're hiding security holes... Oh really? How's that?
Let's say they find out about a security problem, but they don't tell *you* (not a mozilla developer) about it, they just check in a fix. Well, all the information that anybody should need to know about it is contained in the source tree, isn't it? The only difference is that it wasn't packaged nicely for the script-kiddies. It's available in a form that is really only useful to people who care to know the code. Which is fine, since they're the only ones who are going to be fixing the bugs, aren't they?
This approach is *not* security through obscurity, not by a long shot. And it's not unique to Mozilla; it's standard best practice in the free software community. Just ask debian, redhat, or openbsd; this is how they've been doing things for years, with *excellent* results.
You said: So while religion doesn't deserve to be totally bashed since it did have it's place, it does deserve to be removed from modern society.
And your sig is: "If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
Kinduv ironic that you're arguing against the utility of religion in modern society while paying respect to an important modern man who was very religious. :)
I'm wondering why the animal rights people are so rabbid about fur, but dont seem to have any problems with leather?
Who are "the" animal rights people? I've never considered myself to be an animal rights person, but I don't wear any leather. :)
I'm pretty certain that Thailand does have copyright laws in accordance with W.I.P.O. and all that junk.
It's just not really enforced. Not for the small stuff, at least.
I don't know, I think it's interesting for geeks to talk about the technological infrastructure in other countries.
But I do agree that the idea that somehow internet access is gonna revolutionize the world is ludicrous. So many people in countries like the US assume that the third world is the way it is because the people living there don't know any better. People aren't as stupid as Americans tend to think they are.
Still, I think it makes sense to have a slashdot article where people talk about how much internet access people have in various parts of the world, and why.
How would access to medicine, food and water effect social change?
Yeah; that statement says it all, really.
In the past few years, internet cafes have popped up all over Southeast Asia. They're *everywhere* in Thailand and Indonesia, and they're even fairly common in Cambodia. You pay a small fee by the minute to access your hotmail account (or whatever).
I really don't think that cultural barriers are much of an issue. Not in SouthEast Asia, at least. The biggest thing slowing it down is the financial and infrastructure barriers preventing people from having internet access in their homes. If you can only check your email for a fee at a cafe, it's gonna curb how much you rely on the internet.
The internet is spreading through third world countries rapidly. No big deal.
These folks need to deal with professional counsellors who can really help them, not a bunch of wannabe psychologists hanging out in newsgroups giving out bad advice.
Professional counsellors typically encourage people to get involved in support group environments. The professionals tend to believe that it's good for people to network with other people who are in similar situations.
I'm gonna reply to this, at the risk of pissing off the FreeBSD folks. :)
In my opinion, the reason FreeBSD hasn't caught on to the extent that Linux has is that they really don't care much about user-friendly type issues. It's no surprise that GNOME and KDE are coming from the Linux camps, for example.
Now, FreeBSD can be made just as friendly. For example, you can build the Linux software (or just run the binaries using FreeBSD's amazing binary compatibility). But the point is, user-friendliness is an extra, not the default.
FreeBSD is great, but their focus has been primarily on servers and hardcore UNIX geeks, not on non-technical users, and it's cost them the fame that Linux now has.
Yeah, except that Kevin Mitnick actually broke the law, unlike Jon Johansen.
(Note that I don't defend the way the Mitnick case was handled; it was very unfair. But he was a criminal nonetheless.)
> It's their own damn fault for not putting the copy protection entirely in the hardware.
I forgot to add: copy protection is an absurdly stupid idea, anyhow. As a consumer, I will never buy copy-protected media, ever.
Yes, it is copy protection, as well as viewing restriction. It's all that and more. Half the freedom, at twice the cost. What a bargain! :)
It serves no use in preventing people from illegally making DVDs
Sure it does. It makes it a big PITA. It makes it unfeasable for your average home user to copy a DVD movie.
Before anybody talks about "bitwise copies" again, let me point out that your average home user can't do that since the DVD equipment they have won't cooperate.
And before anybody talks about how it's not economically feasible to burn a DVD, let me point out that to copy the content of a DVD disk does not mean it has to be written back to a DVD disk. Pulling it off of DVD and onto VCD or something is still copying.
And before anybody talks about how movies are too big for users to swap around on the internet or something, let me remind you that this used to be the case with sound files; bandwidth and storage is always going up.
Also, the fact that there are other ways this copy-protection could have been circumvented (again, not easily by non-technical people) does not change the fact that it was intended to be copy protection, and LiVid circumvents this copy protection.
Livid has to; their system was designed such that a free-software solution which honors copy protection is not possible. It's their own damn fault for not putting the copy protection entirely in the hardware.
The MPAA is trying to protect their industry.
Yes, and they're doing it at the expense of our rights as consumers. Don't get me wrong, I understand exactly what they're worried about. They have good reason to worry. But tough break.
We don't owe them a living.
Do you feel sorry for a company that goes out of business because the competition was better? Maybe. Should you outlaw competition, then? Certainly not. Same thing here. Sure, it sucks that their product isn't gonna work out the way they intended, but the suggested fix of violating everybody's rights just to satisfy a few (already very rich) interest groups isn't acceptable to me.
1. Piracy is possible without the use of the DeCSS player.
Possible? Yes. Feasible for your average home user? No.
2. The cost of writable DVD media makes piracy more expensive than actually purchasing DVDs.
So then make a VCD of it, or just put it on your hard drive or your ftp server or something. Who cares about writing it back to DVD once you've gotten the unencrypted data off of the DVD disk?
I agree wholeheartedly with your other two points, though.
And I think that big industry is *less* worried about professional "pirates" than it is about home users swapping data.
Besides, the big-time "pirates" will *always* find a way to do it. But home users won't "pirate" data if it's prohibitively difficult or expensive to do so.