A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.
According to films like "Airplane!" and "SST Death Flight", there's always at least one disgraced ex-pilot on every commercial flight that can be counted on to take the controls if needed, and besides which landing a plane is so easy that even the ditziest stewardess can do it so long as someone on the ground talks her through it...
Lets face it- almost everything our politicians do now is either in the interests of business, stripping our rights, or pork-grabbing for votes come next election(some all of the above).
Everything reported on yro.slashdot.org, maybe.
Do you watch C-SPAN and follow the Congressional Record to see what our politicians are really doing, or do you let your perception get clouded by media filters?
Let's remember that "working" and "finished" are two different milestones.
Even if there's a feature freeze, a product that works can always be made to work BETTER. Developers can either go into an endless cycle of improving their code, or eventually decide "good enough" and prep it for release.
And if the developers can't do the latter, the bean-counters SHOULD. It sounds like neither id or Activision is going to, though, which is Bad Management.
To make full use of the potential of the net, one must be able to freely allocate IP addresses to any devices that want them, no matter how trivial it may seem today.
Who's in charge here, the devices, or the people?
"The Internet" has already become too big to be represented by a single amorphous cloud where any arbitrary point within the cloud can communicate with any other arbitrary point. When every node was a centralized server on a college campus, this model made sense -- but in a future where every toaster and washing machine has an IP, that kind of global accessibility is actually counter-productive.
she learned it thanks to a consistent graphical metaphor and standards that work across apps.
Have you ever watched Sally Secretary work? Sure she knows where the editing commands she uses in MS Word are, but ask her to execute similar commands in, say, Photoshop. She'll be lost.
let's not forget the much simpler fat file tree and 3 digit extension and the lack of 10 different directories to control 8 different aspects of an installed app.
Actually, let's forget them. They're irrelevant to Sally. All she needs to do is start an application, do her work, and save files somewhere. She'll never know the code for the app resides in "10" different directories. Her Linux software will still save files with 3-character extensions, just like Windows. The files will be saved to "/home/sally" instead of "C:\My Documents".
she can ignore the clip. r-click on it and choose hide assistant. couldn't be simpler.
Does SHE know about that? Does she mind doing that EVERY MORNING when she opens up Office?
Is the digital output Macrovision-"enhanced", though?
It seems silly to take a clean digital source, convert it to analog in order to introduce intentional signal degradation, and then convert it back to digital for output...
How much time, money, and effort does it take to shred sensitive documents before throwing them away? I can get a small shredder at Office Depot for a couple of bills. It only takes 5 extra seconds to put a piece of paper through it instead of going straight in the trash.
Even if the difference in risk between discarding shredded and unshredded documents is minimal, I think the extra effort can be easily justified.
I'd rather play it safe than find out that my credit card was compromised because someone pulled a 2-year-old account statement out of my filthy trash.
Bush declared early on that he would not be "doing" email as President, mostly to avoid ANY messages that would or could be construed as incriminating to himself or others.
It would make perfect sense for the Republicans to send out emails for contributions to those on the "for" list.
It would also be an enormous ethics violation, and thanks to those geeks among us who use a different email username for each site we submit data too it would be simple to prove what was happening.
The "liberal media" (if any) would have a field day with it.
there's a saying that if everyone is breaking a law, there is probably something wrong with the law (or, more likely, with the people making the laws)
Or--and this is an option you should not be too hasty to discount--there is something wrong with the people BREAKING the laws.
Consider speed limits on roadways. At one time or another, virtually all motorists have exceeded the limit and therefore violated the law. I'd guess more of us have been caught and ticketed for this violation than any other unlawful behavior, either.
Does that mean speed limit laws are intrinsically faulty? I don't think so. The laws are there to enforce safe driving practices -- without such laws, there would be a lot more 17-year-olds tearing down the highway at 100mph, which inevitably would mean more accidents.
The question is, is a limit of 55mph appropriate for a road with a given accident rate, or would people benefit more if the limit were 65mph? This is the same question we should be asking about copyright laws. Filesharing is a much smaller problem than people selling bootleg DVDs and CDs (selling!) on the street, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Now that Brad Kuhn has weighed in and the article submission has been updated accordingly, who am I supposed to believe about the nature of LGPL and Java -- the guy from the FSF, or the guy from the FSF?
Sosa "doesn't care" because he's a doctor and he'd lose a lot more than $3500 in the time it'd take him to fight this (and be unlikely to recover those costs even if he did win). He said it himself, he's got a family to look after.
And? His children are not going to starve because he has to cut back his hours temporarily to fight against a frivolous lawsuit. He IS a doctor, after all.
Dr. Sosa is symptomatic of the mindset that Money is more important than anything -- even Justice. Assuming he actually wasn't doing what DirecTV was accusing him of, his willingness to hand over his lunch money to the schoolyard bully sickens me.
Unfortunately, it appears that posting "our legal system is all about who has the deeper pockets" is still sufficient to get moderated up to +5 Insightful on Slashdot.
I could provide countless examples that disprove this statement, but why bother? I won't change anyone's mind.
Sometimes it seems like the Slashdot crowd would rather sit around clucking to each other about how we're all going to Hell in a handbasket than actually FIGHT against anything they find unjust.
GET UP, people! It's not someone else's problem. It's YOUR PROBLEM.
It's nowhere nearly as cut-and-dried as you seem to think.
Actually, the exceptions to the basic "you cannot copy something without permission" tenet of copyright law are concretely enumerated. Sure, there's debate about what "fair use" means as applied to recordings, or poems, or source code, or whatever, but that's to be expected.
I don't think anyone could reasonably deduce that they have the right to offer full copies of a copyrighted work to the public at large, even if they aren't profiting from it. Fair use just doesn't extend that far.
Copyright was supposed to be a bargain between creators and the public. We agree to give them exclusive rights for a limited period of time, and then we get unfettered access to that work once the period has expired.
Do think of non-intellectual property in the same way? You would find it absurd if, 20 years after you had built a house, you were required to let the general public come and go through your home as they pleased.
But the issue is not about the lengthening of copyright durations, anyway. I would bet you that a vast majority of files being transferred on P2P would be covered by copyright law even if the durating of copyright protection were only TEN years. People aren't trading Edison wax cylinders online, or even Dave Clark Five LP's. They're trading this year's Brittany (sic) Spears CD's.
We are talking about a simple grep here, not a big search requiring many man hours like you guys make it seem.
So it takes 3 minutes to look up the info for one IP address.
Multiply that by 1000 requests a week, and it's a full-time job. Your ISP would have to hire an employee that does nothing but grep logs all day long.
If the FBI shows up wanting information about a users and you consistantly have no information for them, eventually they will hold you responsible for your user's crimes. That's how it works here in the states.
Slashdot Mirror
You could easily be charged as an accessory to murder if you loan a gun to a friend and he misuses it to kill someone.
ESPECIALLY if your friend lacks firearms training and/or licensing.
Run arbitrary code through a midi file? That's huge, and deserves to be on the front page.
How many people actually play MIDI files on a regular basis? Show of hands here.
No?
The only time Joe Average encounters a MIDI file is on Jane's Shitty Geocities Webpage.
While the vulnerability is potentially dangerous, the exploit is uncommon enough that the actual threat level is pretty low IMO.
A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.
According to films like "Airplane!" and "SST Death Flight", there's always at least one disgraced ex-pilot on every commercial flight that can be counted on to take the controls if needed, and besides which landing a plane is so easy that even the ditziest stewardess can do it so long as someone on the ground talks her through it...
Okay, OT, but what about simply not pissing of 1/3 of the planet?
No matter what America does, it's going to piss SOMEONE off. It comes with the territory when you're a superpower.
This is offtopic.
Apparently, some people (mostly outside the US?) are still swallowing the "Lynch rescue was a hoax" story whole, too.
The truth lies somewhere in between.
Lets face it- almost everything our politicians do now is either in the interests of business, stripping our rights, or pork-grabbing for votes come next election(some all of the above).
Everything reported on yro.slashdot.org, maybe.
Do you watch C-SPAN and follow the Congressional Record to see what our politicians are really doing, or do you let your perception get clouded by media filters?
The RIAA exists to be the bad cop in the music industry's good cop/bad cop routine.
...?
And the good cop is...?
anyone...?
Maybe YOU'RE too lazy to take 15 minutes out of your week to drive to the recycling center, that doesn't mean the rest of us are.
Laziness is part of the problem, not an inherent part of the system that the solution must be designed to accomodate.
Let's remember that "working" and "finished" are two different milestones.
Even if there's a feature freeze, a product that works can always be made to work BETTER. Developers can either go into an endless cycle of improving their code, or eventually decide "good enough" and prep it for release.
And if the developers can't do the latter, the bean-counters SHOULD. It sounds like neither id or Activision is going to, though, which is Bad Management.
I'm sorry, you must not have been around in 1992. Doom didn't create the FPS genre... Wolfenstein 3D did!
(And of course, Wolf3D had precedents too.)
To make full use of the potential of the net, one must be able to freely allocate IP addresses to any devices that want them, no matter how trivial it may seem today.
Who's in charge here, the devices, or the people?
"The Internet" has already become too big to be represented by a single amorphous cloud where any arbitrary point within the cloud can communicate with any other arbitrary point. When every node was a centralized server on a college campus, this model made sense -- but in a future where every toaster and washing machine has an IP, that kind of global accessibility is actually counter-productive.
she learned it thanks to a consistent graphical metaphor and standards that work across apps.
Have you ever watched Sally Secretary work? Sure she knows where the editing commands she uses in MS Word are, but ask her to execute similar commands in, say, Photoshop. She'll be lost.
let's not forget the much simpler fat file tree and 3 digit extension and the lack of 10 different directories to control 8 different aspects of an installed app.
Actually, let's forget them. They're irrelevant to Sally. All she needs to do is start an application, do her work, and save files somewhere. She'll never know the code for the app resides in "10" different directories. Her Linux software will still save files with 3-character extensions, just like Windows. The files will be saved to "/home/sally" instead of "C:\My Documents".
she can ignore the clip. r-click on it and choose hide assistant. couldn't be simpler.
Does SHE know about that? Does she mind doing that EVERY MORNING when she opens up Office?
Is the digital output Macrovision-"enhanced", though?
It seems silly to take a clean digital source, convert it to analog in order to introduce intentional signal degradation, and then convert it back to digital for output...
How much time, money, and effort does it take to shred sensitive documents before throwing them away? I can get a small shredder at Office Depot for a couple of bills. It only takes 5 extra seconds to put a piece of paper through it instead of going straight in the trash.
Even if the difference in risk between discarding shredded and unshredded documents is minimal, I think the extra effort can be easily justified.
I'd rather play it safe than find out that my credit card was compromised because someone pulled a 2-year-old account statement out of my filthy trash.
Can anyone think of a time when the freedoms of the average American were more at threat from their own government?
How about when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus?
Bush may be a knucklehead and a megalomaniac, but he hasn't yet declared that war protesters must be arrested under Martial Law. Lincoln did.
Do you still think he's spinning in his grave?
Bush declared early on that he would not be "doing" email as President, mostly to avoid ANY messages that would or could be construed as incriminating to himself or others.
Also, because he can't reed or rite so good.
It would make perfect sense for the Republicans to send out emails for contributions to those on the "for" list.
It would also be an enormous ethics violation, and thanks to those geeks among us who use a different email username for each site we submit data too it would be simple to prove what was happening.
The "liberal media" (if any) would have a field day with it.
there's a saying that if everyone is breaking a law, there is probably something wrong with the law (or, more likely, with the people making the laws)
Or--and this is an option you should not be too hasty to discount--there is something wrong with the people BREAKING the laws.
Consider speed limits on roadways. At one time or another, virtually all motorists have exceeded the limit and therefore violated the law. I'd guess more of us have been caught and ticketed for this violation than any other unlawful behavior, either.
Does that mean speed limit laws are intrinsically faulty? I don't think so. The laws are there to enforce safe driving practices -- without such laws, there would be a lot more 17-year-olds tearing down the highway at 100mph, which inevitably would mean more accidents.
The question is, is a limit of 55mph appropriate for a road with a given accident rate, or would people benefit more if the limit were 65mph? This is the same question we should be asking about copyright laws. Filesharing is a much smaller problem than people selling bootleg DVDs and CDs (selling!) on the street, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Now that Brad Kuhn has weighed in and the article submission has been updated accordingly, who am I supposed to believe about the nature of LGPL and Java -- the guy from the FSF, or the guy from the FSF?
I agree, the EFF should get involved.
This "vexatious litigant" law you cite sounds like a clear violation of plaintiffs' rights and the California Supreme Court out to strike it down.
Sosa "doesn't care" because he's a doctor and he'd lose a lot more than $3500 in the time it'd take him to fight this (and be unlikely to recover those costs even if he did win). He said it himself, he's got a family to look after.
And? His children are not going to starve because he has to cut back his hours temporarily to fight against a frivolous lawsuit. He IS a doctor, after all.
Dr. Sosa is symptomatic of the mindset that Money is more important than anything -- even Justice. Assuming he actually wasn't doing what DirecTV was accusing him of, his willingness to hand over his lunch money to the schoolyard bully sickens me.
Unfortunately, it appears that posting "our legal system is all about who has the deeper pockets" is still sufficient to get moderated up to +5 Insightful on Slashdot.
I could provide countless examples that disprove this statement, but why bother? I won't change anyone's mind.
Sometimes it seems like the Slashdot crowd would rather sit around clucking to each other about how we're all going to Hell in a handbasket than actually FIGHT against anything they find unjust.
GET UP, people! It's not someone else's problem. It's YOUR PROBLEM.
Do the /. editors actually do any fact checking before they post???
Yeah, right before they do their SPELL checking.
It's nowhere nearly as cut-and-dried as you seem to think.
Actually, the exceptions to the basic "you cannot copy something without permission" tenet of copyright law are concretely enumerated. Sure, there's debate about what "fair use" means as applied to recordings, or poems, or source code, or whatever, but that's to be expected.
I don't think anyone could reasonably deduce that they have the right to offer full copies of a copyrighted work to the public at large, even if they aren't profiting from it. Fair use just doesn't extend that far.
Copyright was supposed to be a bargain between creators and the public. We agree to give them exclusive rights for a limited period of time, and then we get unfettered access to that work once the period has expired.
Do think of non-intellectual property in the same way? You would find it absurd if, 20 years after you had built a house, you were required to let the general public come and go through your home as they pleased.
But the issue is not about the lengthening of copyright durations, anyway. I would bet you that a vast majority of files being transferred on P2P would be covered by copyright law even if the durating of copyright protection were only TEN years. People aren't trading Edison wax cylinders online, or even Dave Clark Five LP's. They're trading this year's Brittany (sic) Spears CD's.
We are talking about a simple grep here, not a big search requiring many man hours like you guys make it seem.
So it takes 3 minutes to look up the info for one IP address.
Multiply that by 1000 requests a week, and it's a full-time job. Your ISP would have to hire an employee that does nothing but grep logs all day long.
If the FBI shows up wanting information about a users and you consistantly have no information for them, eventually they will hold you responsible for your user's crimes. That's how it works here in the states.
Really? According to which Congressional statute?