"Nonetheless, I wonder if some Libertarian influence on the way government spends money might increase its efficiency, even if we didn't adopt the ideology hook, line, and sinker."
Of course it would. All too often political types get locked into ideologies and forget that their job is to *make Joe Schmoe's life better* regardless of method.
We have socialized roads: the government collects taxes and, in exchange, builds us roads. I like this system (except for Highway 72 which sucks ass.) I'm not a "socialist", but I think this is a situation in which socialism makes my life easier.
On the flip side, there are lots of areas that Libertarian influence would make my life easier, mainly by lowering my taxes.
The FCC could use a good dose of libertarianism too, now that I think about it. The 2.4GHz band basically has one rule: "Play nice." And, out of that itty bitty bit of frequency, we have wifi, one of the neatest and most successful bits of technology in recent years. On the highly regulated FM bands, we have: lots of radio stations playing commercials, interspersed with boring music.
The line between speech and use of psychological tricks to coerce is a grey one, and I don't claim to have all the answers for the issues it raises.
But I do know that the difference between encouraging someone having a bad day to jump off a bridge and encouraging someone to take a harmful substance is only a difference of degree/directness.
That wasn't my main point, though, and the driving analogy fails to address it: habitual driving does not put you in a state in which I have to pay for your upkeep. Heroin use can.
I used to have two quibbles, but Badnarik neatly resolved one of them. I used to worry about the Libertarians giving too much power to the mega-corp types, but his answer -- "let's make them compete on a level legal playing field and let the courts, rather than regulation, keep them in line" -- seems like it could work if the government kept a tight watch on it during the transition.
However, I have to question the Libs' attitude toward drug legalization.
I support the decriminalization of marijuana, on the grounds that someone can smoke pot in their home and I'd never know, let alone be impacted negatively. However, harder drugs (thinking mainly of heroin and crack here) can impact me.
How?
Well, I think it is part of the government's duty (or society's duty) to assure a certain minimum standard of living for everyone. We cannot in good conscience allow people to starve in the streets, or die of diseases that could be treated easily.
Fortunately, nearly everyone of sound body and mind can provide for themselves that standard of living. Unfortunately, because society/government has this duty to itself, and because heroin and crack addicts often cannot provide that for themselves, junkies cost the public coffers (or philanthropists, which is the same thing) money to feed their drug-addicted asses.
The libertarian ideal has everyone providing for themselves and no one relying on the government for support. Unfortunately, I fear that hard-drug legalization will give the government a hard choice: let addicts starve in the streets, or raise taxes to pay for them.
Of course, even if the drugs themselves are legal, encouraging others to use them (i.e. "pushing") should remain illegal, just as tobacco/alcohol advertising should be illegal: it consitutes encouraging another to harm himself. People have the right to shoot themselves in the foot all they want, but not to try to convince others that shooting themselves in the foot is good fun.
People really shouldn't rely on the built-in WinXP firewall for protection.
It might be alright for compartmentalization--keeping boxes on a LAN safe from each other. But I sure wouldn't want to put a machine on the internet with just the WinXP firewall between it and the Big Network.
Sygate is easy to use, informative, and more secure than the built-in firewall. Hardware firewalls/routers/NAT-gizmos are cheap and for the most part will keep Joe Sixpack safe* while letting him do what he wants to do with no fuss.
Ideally each machine on a lan has its own software firewall, and then the lan has its own gateway/firewall--either a NAT-in-a-box or a Linux machine. Even in that situation I wouldn't trust Microsoft for the software firewall, mainly because it'll probably get in the way and I can't fine-tune it.
But anyone who puts a WinXP machine on the net with nothing but the built-in firewall is asking for trouble.
*wlan security aside, but that's a whole separate issue--and another argument for software firewalls on every machine.
Indeed. Especial applause to AMD for always finding new things to do. They realized that there was a market for 64-bit, so they made the Athlon 64. Then they realized that their target market for the A64's was enthusiasts who live in the same room as their computers, so they introduced Cool and Quiet.
And, of course, they noticed the rising market share of laptops and realized that the same technology they use to make A64 machines not sound like leafblowers can also provide decent battery life on a laptop.
The Athlon 64 laptops don't have battery life like a Centrino, but they're much better than Intel's P4-based laptop line, and they blow the Pentium-M's out of the water in performance for hundreds less.
The Athlon 64 may have started out as a niche product, but now it's the preferred performance-processor for many enthusiasts and a decent processor for both performance and low-price laptops (you can get an Athlon 64 laptop for $1150).
Then they realize that Intel has been neglecting the low-end foreign markets: *poof*, Sempron.
The Athlon XP-M chips are still wonderful in laptops--they're Fast Enough for almost anyone, don't drain that much power, and are cheap.
AMD gets credit for doing marketing the old-fashioned way: find an area that Intel's not up to par in, and design something that beats Intel's current offering in that area. This is the sort of marketing I benefit from, the sort of marketing that gives me cheap, fast hardware. I like that.
I don't want games that will only run on a P4 3GHz equivalent. I do, however, wish that the non-graphics portions of games would take advantage of at least the power of (say) a Celery 2.4GHz equivalent, rather than a P3 1.2 GHz.
Besides: Nobody is going to be running Doom 3 well on any machine less than 2 GHz P4 equivalent, unless they go out of their way to put a high-end video card in an old machine. Why does it always have to be graphics that forces people to upgrade?
There is a big difference between believing that religion is losing/will soon lose its dominant role in sociology and believing that religious people should be deprived of freedom or that religion is dead.
I believe, for instance, that Internet Explorer is losing its stranglehold on internet browsing. Does this mean that nobody uses IE now? Nope. Does it mean that nobody should be permitted to use IE? Hell no. It does mean, however, that the current trend points to IE being less important a year from now than it was a year ago.
About the only thing that a single blindingly fast processor is good for is gaming. Now, the whole watercooling/Alienware thing strikes me as silly--instead of paying $2000 extra for an overclocked machine, just wait six months and Moore's Law will have caught up.
But instead of debating that, it's more informative to wonder what all those bogomips would DO in today's games.
Some people would reply: more frames per second! More varied stuff in those frames! But there's a limit to how much more graphics muscle will improve the gameplay experience in any given game (my Athlon 64 3200+/2GHz machine runs Halflife no better than my Athlon XP 1800+/1.53GHz machine), and there's also a limit to what graphics crunching can do for a game. Doom 3 may be shiny, but by all accounts you could write a game with the same gameplay as Doom 3 (but less prettiness) that would run on a P3/Geforce2.
I'm ready to see a game that really makes use of modern computers' incredible power for gameplay/AI/physics. How about a version of Homeworld with realistic trajectory modelling of every mass-driver shot, a version of NWN with *real* intelligent AI opponents, or one of a million different ideas for games whose gameplay design, in addition to their graphics, takes into account modern computers.
NWN did this -- sort of. But it took so long to release (which is a good thing!), and has been a while since release, that modern machines still get bored running its scripting/AI. Hopefully all this will be spiffed up in NWN2.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order-Terrible trends.
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Are you sure about that LCD?
I'm not sure if more resolution or more size leads to more power use, but my laptop has a 15.1" LCD.
When the computer's idling and the LCD is on max brightness (which is pretty bright),/proc/acpi says I'm pulling down about 25 watts. I've not closed the lid and ssh'd in yet to check power use with the screen off, but--based on power use specs for the processor--I imagine the screen pulls 8-10 watts.
Are you sure a 1600x1200 LCD would use sixty?
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
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Well, if you live in a warmer climate, much of that heating/cooling budget goes to cooling. Every joule your light bulbs draw is 1) a joule that you pay for, and 2) a joule that you pay for again as your heat pump "pumps" it out.
Not sure about the % efficiency of heat pumps (thermo was a long time ago), but minimizing power use is a bigger deal in Alabama summers than it is in Minnesota winters.
In Minnesota, every joule of heat your light bulbs or computer make is a joule that you don't have to pump in. Granted, a heat pump (AFAIK) can deliver more than one joule of heat for every joule of power it uses.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
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Don't the Athlon 64 desktop models auto-throttle?
I've heard that they are basically the same chip as the Mobiles--which do throttle quite nicely. Not quite the same battery life as the Athlon XP mobiles, but close.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
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Don't forget that they look better. I dislike the sickly reddish-yellow glow of incandescant lights--like a dying red dwarf or something.
CF's look much more natural.
Re:It's not the CRT
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Or just use a laptop. Mine cost ~$1250, uses between 25 and 50 watts total, depending on load (so sayeth/proc/acpi--actual AC use might be slightly more since AC->DC isn't 100% efficient), and has all the power I could want at the moment.
And this is for a relatively power-hungry (Athlon 64, 15" screen) laptop. I'm sure you can get a Pentium-M model for $1500 that uses half the power of mine.
The power-saving tech is out there, but it's slow to find its way to desktop systems. Don't the desktop Athlon 64's have the same power-saving system (rebranded as "Cool & Quiet") as the mobile models?
Grammar checkers aren't worth the bits of disk they're printed on.
Once upon a time I wrote something that referenced Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris. Just for kicks, I ran it through the grammar checker. Out came: "Do not use "dame" except as a title of English nobility, as it is considered sexist."
I've not used a grammar checker since, except as a replacement for Comedy Central, as I have no television.
(I also went through the CTY thing -- my high score was math, so I wound up getting a math book. But, basically the same.)
I'm thinking about this from the AP owner's perspective, not the wardriver's. I'm not trying to rationalize wifi mooching for myself--I'm trying to rationalize it for the guy who's on this end of town running errands and wants to check his mail.
First off, the word "take" implies that the person from whom the object is taken no longer has it. This isn't the case--if you drive by and check your mail on my AP, I haven't lost anything unless my service is degraded as a result.
If I'm attempting to play Starcraft over 56k, and you're sitting in front of the house in your car loading graphics-heavy webpages for thirty minutes causing my game to lag, that's theft. At that point bandwidth is a limited commodity, and your use of part of it to browse porn is depriving me of that piece of it that I want for my game. (If you check your mail and I hit a five-second lag spike, I don't care. Hence, the clause about "mind losing"--that's not going to give me conniptions, but constant lag while you look at porn might.)
You could make the valid argument at this point that it's impossible to know if someone minds your use of their bandwidth. This is true, and until we have a better mechanism for dealing with things like that, people just need to be polite and respect the likely wishes of the AP owner.
Don't use your neighbor's wifi as a permanent substitute for your own connection. That really is theft: you're splitting a connection with someone but making them pay for the whole thing. Even if there's plenty of bandwidth to go around, it's still not equitable: two people get service, only one pays. This is when you go visit them and offer to pay half their cable bill.
Neighborhoods run on courtesy: doing things for people just because the world will be a little bit nicer that way. Use my AP if you want, but, please, don't abuse it.
And, if you run an AP and feel so inclined, let me use it when I'm in your neck of the woods.
Someone hires you as a sysadmin, it's your duty to be honest with them. Explain to them why ftp is insecure, why that insecurity matters, why scp is an acceptable replacement, and how to use it. Tell them that, in your professional opinion, you need to block ftp access.
But intentionally breaking something and then not owning up to it is unprofessional, counterproductive, and not what you've been hired to do.
Well, the telephone box outside my house has a jack with a little note: "Plug phone in here to test connection. If you can dial out, the problem is in your internal wiring."
Granted, this is 30-year-old wiring, but it exists.
If you're going to do that, then I can make the following argument: (IANAL, btw)
I bought the CD. That's not in dispute: if I want I can play frisbee with it. The physical media is mine. I can't do anything with it that violates the law, like crack it in half and stab you with a sharp piece of it, but otherwise I can do whatever I want with it.
Before I read the EULA, the disc is just another piece of property of mine. I haven't clicked away any rights yet, so I can do anything that isn't otherwise illegal... like copy data files to my disk, decompress them, etc. I can't distribute copies, of course, but I can copy them to my hard drive, just like I am legally allowed to rip mp3's and backup software.
If I manage to produce a working copy of the game without going through the installer and reading the EULA, I'm golden. I still can't do anything illegal, but -- if the EULA says "You agree we can come stick hamsters in your drive bays" and the guys with hamsters show up -- I can tell them to shove off, since I never agreed.
I can't be required to follow the terms of something I never agreed to, can I?
This is related to the GPL, of all things. The GPL mentions that you can use the software all you want *without agreeing to the license*, because you have that right already. The only reason you need to agree to the GPL is to do things that are otherwise illegal: copy the copyrighted software.
In short: EULAs are invalid, because they seek to put conditions on things that you already have the right to do. I should be able to not accept the EULA and still do whatever I want with the bits on that disc, because I bought the disc. In legal-speak, they call this "consideration"--both parties must gain something from a contract for it to be binding. I don't gain anything from most EULA's.
The GPL is valid, because it doesn't take away any rights. It gives you extra rights (distribution), in exchange for conditions on the exercise of those rights.
Libertarians, at least the mainstream ones that live on lp.org, are worried about excesses of power and inefficiency in government, and want to pare down the powers of government as much as possible. They also believe in what they call an "unfettered free market" and their opponents call "no checks on the excesses of large corporations."
Hacker types tend toward Libertarianism in the sense that they want the government to have less power ("What do you care if I smoke weed in my own house? Fuck off!"), but they also want large corporations to have less power. Rather than portraying the conflict as government-against-private and coming down on the side of private (people and corporations), the hacker types see it as big-guys-vs.-little-guys, and support the little guys. It doesn't matter WHO the big guy with all the power is--they oppose it.
The Democrats may be just as big-government as the Republicans, but they support less power for big corporations.
Specifically, the big-governmental roles that hacker types object to are generally moral and ethical rather than financial. They oppose government interference in what they consider to be private matters more than they oppose higher taxes.[1]
Conventional wisdom says that the Republicans want more of this sort of control than Democrats: they are the party that wants to ban abortions, write the heterosexuality of marriage into the constitution, is more vehement in attacking drug use, and so on.
So, the GOP has lost with the hackers on two counts: favor to large corporations, and moralistic interference in private life. The Dems still want a large role for government, but their idea of large government isn't as oppressive to hacker types.
[1] The Republicans generally portray themselves as the party that will tax Americans less; whether this is true or not is beyond the scope of this post.
http://www.opensecrets.org/presidential/index.as p
Incidentally, if the best that you can come up with for an insult is "French-looking lying loser" (hyphenated incorrectly in the original), you might want to work on your rhetorical skills.
Go sulk under a bridge and eat goats; come back when you've improved your posting skills.
Uh, my mom's a computer newbie, and she gets by just fine on Mandrake.
If all you're using a computer for is mail, web, and word processing, how exactly is clicking on the "konqueror", "kmail", and "openoffice" icons harder than clicking on the "ie", "outlook", and "word" icons?
The only people XP might be easier for is people advanced enough to want to do networking things and the like, but not advanced enough to read man ifconfig and man iwconfig.
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"Nonetheless, I wonder if some Libertarian influence on the way government spends money might increase its efficiency, even if we didn't adopt the ideology hook, line, and sinker."
Of course it would. All too often political types get locked into ideologies and forget that their job is to *make Joe Schmoe's life better* regardless of method.
We have socialized roads: the government collects taxes and, in exchange, builds us roads. I like this system (except for Highway 72 which sucks ass.) I'm not a "socialist", but I think this is a situation in which socialism makes my life easier.
On the flip side, there are lots of areas that Libertarian influence would make my life easier, mainly by lowering my taxes.
The FCC could use a good dose of libertarianism too, now that I think about it. The 2.4GHz band basically has one rule: "Play nice." And, out of that itty bitty bit of frequency, we have wifi, one of the neatest and most successful bits of technology in recent years. On the highly regulated FM bands, we have: lots of radio stations playing commercials, interspersed with boring music.
The line between speech and use of psychological tricks to coerce is a grey one, and I don't claim to have all the answers for the issues it raises.
But I do know that the difference between encouraging someone having a bad day to jump off a bridge and encouraging someone to take a harmful substance is only a difference of degree/directness.
That wasn't my main point, though, and the driving analogy fails to address it: habitual driving does not put you in a state in which I have to pay for your upkeep. Heroin use can.
I used to have two quibbles, but Badnarik neatly resolved one of them. I used to worry about the Libertarians giving too much power to the mega-corp types, but his answer -- "let's make them compete on a level legal playing field and let the courts, rather than regulation, keep them in line" -- seems like it could work if the government kept a tight watch on it during the transition.
However, I have to question the Libs' attitude toward drug legalization.
I support the decriminalization of marijuana, on the grounds that someone can smoke pot in their home and I'd never know, let alone be impacted negatively. However, harder drugs (thinking mainly of heroin and crack here) can impact me.
How?
Well, I think it is part of the government's duty (or society's duty) to assure a certain minimum standard of living for everyone. We cannot in good conscience allow people to starve in the streets, or die of diseases that could be treated easily.
Fortunately, nearly everyone of sound body and mind can provide for themselves that standard of living. Unfortunately, because society/government has this duty to itself, and because heroin and crack addicts often cannot provide that for themselves, junkies cost the public coffers (or philanthropists, which is the same thing) money to feed their drug-addicted asses.
The libertarian ideal has everyone providing for themselves and no one relying on the government for support. Unfortunately, I fear that hard-drug legalization will give the government a hard choice: let addicts starve in the streets, or raise taxes to pay for them.
Of course, even if the drugs themselves are legal, encouraging others to use them (i.e. "pushing") should remain illegal, just as tobacco/alcohol advertising should be illegal: it consitutes encouraging another to harm himself. People have the right to shoot themselves in the foot all they want, but not to try to convince others that shooting themselves in the foot is good fun.
People really shouldn't rely on the built-in WinXP firewall for protection.
It might be alright for compartmentalization--keeping boxes on a LAN safe from each other. But I sure wouldn't want to put a machine on the internet with just the WinXP firewall between it and the Big Network.
Sygate is easy to use, informative, and more secure than the built-in firewall. Hardware firewalls/routers/NAT-gizmos are cheap and for the most part will keep Joe Sixpack safe* while letting him do what he wants to do with no fuss.
Ideally each machine on a lan has its own software firewall, and then the lan has its own gateway/firewall--either a NAT-in-a-box or a Linux machine. Even in that situation I wouldn't trust Microsoft for the software firewall, mainly because it'll probably get in the way and I can't fine-tune it.
But anyone who puts a WinXP machine on the net with nothing but the built-in firewall is asking for trouble.
*wlan security aside, but that's a whole separate issue--and another argument for software firewalls on every machine.
Indeed. Especial applause to AMD for always finding new things to do. They realized that there was a market for 64-bit, so they made the Athlon 64. Then they realized that their target market for the A64's was enthusiasts who live in the same room as their computers, so they introduced Cool and Quiet.
And, of course, they noticed the rising market share of laptops and realized that the same technology they use to make A64 machines not sound like leafblowers can also provide decent battery life on a laptop.
The Athlon 64 laptops don't have battery life like a Centrino, but they're much better than Intel's P4-based laptop line, and they blow the Pentium-M's out of the water in performance for hundreds less.
The Athlon 64 may have started out as a niche product, but now it's the preferred performance-processor for many enthusiasts and a decent processor for both performance and low-price laptops (you can get an Athlon 64 laptop for $1150).
Then they realize that Intel has been neglecting the low-end foreign markets: *poof*, Sempron.
The Athlon XP-M chips are still wonderful in laptops--they're Fast Enough for almost anyone, don't drain that much power, and are cheap.
AMD gets credit for doing marketing the old-fashioned way: find an area that Intel's not up to par in, and design something that beats Intel's current offering in that area. This is the sort of marketing I benefit from, the sort of marketing that gives me cheap, fast hardware. I like that.
I don't want games that will only run on a P4 3GHz equivalent. I do, however, wish that the non-graphics portions of games would take advantage of at least the power of (say) a Celery 2.4GHz equivalent, rather than a P3 1.2 GHz.
Besides: Nobody is going to be running Doom 3 well on any machine less than 2 GHz P4 equivalent, unless they go out of their way to put a high-end video card in an old machine. Why does it always have to be graphics that forces people to upgrade?
There is a big difference between believing that religion is losing/will soon lose its dominant role in sociology and believing that religious people should be deprived of freedom or that religion is dead.
I believe, for instance, that Internet Explorer is losing its stranglehold on internet browsing. Does this mean that nobody uses IE now? Nope. Does it mean that nobody should be permitted to use IE? Hell no. It does mean, however, that the current trend points to IE being less important a year from now than it was a year ago.
About the only thing that a single blindingly fast processor is good for is gaming. Now, the whole watercooling/Alienware thing strikes me as silly--instead of paying $2000 extra for an overclocked machine, just wait six months and Moore's Law will have caught up.
But instead of debating that, it's more informative to wonder what all those bogomips would DO in today's games.
Some people would reply: more frames per second! More varied stuff in those frames! But there's a limit to how much more graphics muscle will improve the gameplay experience in any given game (my Athlon 64 3200+/2GHz machine runs Halflife no better than my Athlon XP 1800+/1.53GHz machine), and there's also a limit to what graphics crunching can do for a game. Doom 3 may be shiny, but by all accounts you could write a game with the same gameplay as Doom 3 (but less prettiness) that would run on a P3/Geforce2.
I'm ready to see a game that really makes use of modern computers' incredible power for gameplay/AI/physics. How about a version of Homeworld with realistic trajectory modelling of every mass-driver shot, a version of NWN with *real* intelligent AI opponents, or one of a million different ideas for games whose gameplay design, in addition to their graphics, takes into account modern computers.
NWN did this -- sort of. But it took so long to release (which is a good thing!), and has been a while since release, that modern machines still get bored running its scripting/AI. Hopefully all this will be spiffed up in NWN2.
Are you sure about that LCD?
/proc/acpi says I'm pulling down about 25 watts. I've not closed the lid and ssh'd in yet to check power use with the screen off, but--based on power use specs for the processor--I imagine the screen pulls 8-10 watts.
I'm not sure if more resolution or more size leads to more power use, but my laptop has a 15.1" LCD.
When the computer's idling and the LCD is on max brightness (which is pretty bright),
Are you sure a 1600x1200 LCD would use sixty?
Well, if you live in a warmer climate, much of that heating/cooling budget goes to cooling. Every joule your light bulbs draw is 1) a joule that you pay for, and 2) a joule that you pay for again as your heat pump "pumps" it out.
Not sure about the % efficiency of heat pumps (thermo was a long time ago), but minimizing power use is a bigger deal in Alabama summers than it is in Minnesota winters.
In Minnesota, every joule of heat your light bulbs or computer make is a joule that you don't have to pump in. Granted, a heat pump (AFAIK) can deliver more than one joule of heat for every joule of power it uses.
Don't the Athlon 64 desktop models auto-throttle?
I've heard that they are basically the same chip as the Mobiles--which do throttle quite nicely. Not quite the same battery life as the Athlon XP mobiles, but close.
Don't forget that they look better. I dislike the sickly reddish-yellow glow of incandescant lights--like a dying red dwarf or something.
CF's look much more natural.
Or just use a laptop. Mine cost ~$1250, uses between 25 and 50 watts total, depending on load (so sayeth /proc/acpi--actual AC use might be slightly more since AC->DC isn't 100% efficient), and has all the power I could want at the moment.
And this is for a relatively power-hungry (Athlon 64, 15" screen) laptop. I'm sure you can get a Pentium-M model for $1500 that uses half the power of mine.
The power-saving tech is out there, but it's slow to find its way to desktop systems. Don't the desktop Athlon 64's have the same power-saving system (rebranded as "Cool & Quiet") as the mobile models?
No, but proof of presence is, well, proof of presence.
There might be a hundred dollars cash in my mailbox. Are you willing to pay me fifty dollars to have a look inside to see if anyone's mailed me money?
There is unequivocal evidence that Mars exists.
There is no such evidence that anyone plans to launch a nuke-tipped ICBM at us.
Grammar checkers aren't worth the bits of disk they're printed on.
Once upon a time I wrote something that referenced Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris. Just for kicks, I ran it through the grammar checker. Out came: "Do not use "dame" except as a title of English nobility, as it is considered sexist."
I've not used a grammar checker since, except as a replacement for Comedy Central, as I have no television.
(I also went through the CTY thing -- my high score was math, so I wound up getting a math book. But, basically the same.)
I'm thinking about this from the AP owner's perspective, not the wardriver's. I'm not trying to rationalize wifi mooching for myself--I'm trying to rationalize it for the guy who's on this end of town running errands and wants to check his mail.
First off, the word "take" implies that the person from whom the object is taken no longer has it. This isn't the case--if you drive by and check your mail on my AP, I haven't lost anything unless my service is degraded as a result.
If I'm attempting to play Starcraft over 56k, and you're sitting in front of the house in your car loading graphics-heavy webpages for thirty minutes causing my game to lag, that's theft. At that point bandwidth is a limited commodity, and your use of part of it to browse porn is depriving me of that piece of it that I want for my game. (If you check your mail and I hit a five-second lag spike, I don't care. Hence, the clause about "mind losing"--that's not going to give me conniptions, but constant lag while you look at porn might.)
You could make the valid argument at this point that it's impossible to know if someone minds your use of their bandwidth. This is true, and until we have a better mechanism for dealing with things like that, people just need to be polite and respect the likely wishes of the AP owner.
Don't use your neighbor's wifi as a permanent substitute for your own connection. That really is theft: you're splitting a connection with someone but making them pay for the whole thing. Even if there's plenty of bandwidth to go around, it's still not equitable: two people get service, only one pays. This is when you go visit them and offer to pay half their cable bill.
Neighborhoods run on courtesy: doing things for people just because the world will be a little bit nicer that way. Use my AP if you want, but, please, don't abuse it.
And, if you run an AP and feel so inclined, let me use it when I'm in your neck of the woods.
Theft consists of depriving someone of something of value that they mind losing.
A few kilobytes of bandwidth both ways as some passing person notices an open AP and checks their email does not count.
For that you should have lost your job.
Someone hires you as a sysadmin, it's your duty to be honest with them. Explain to them why ftp is insecure, why that insecurity matters, why scp is an acceptable replacement, and how to use it. Tell them that, in your professional opinion, you need to block ftp access.
But intentionally breaking something and then not owning up to it is unprofessional, counterproductive, and not what you've been hired to do.
Well, the telephone box outside my house has a jack with a little note: "Plug phone in here to test connection. If you can dial out, the problem is in your internal wiring."
Granted, this is 30-year-old wiring, but it exists.
If you're going to do that, then I can make the following argument: (IANAL, btw)
I bought the CD. That's not in dispute: if I want I can play frisbee with it. The physical media is mine. I can't do anything with it that violates the law, like crack it in half and stab you with a sharp piece of it, but otherwise I can do whatever I want with it.
Before I read the EULA, the disc is just another piece of property of mine. I haven't clicked away any rights yet, so I can do anything that isn't otherwise illegal... like copy data files to my disk, decompress them, etc. I can't distribute copies, of course, but I can copy them to my hard drive, just like I am legally allowed to rip mp3's and backup software.
If I manage to produce a working copy of the game without going through the installer and reading the EULA, I'm golden. I still can't do anything illegal, but -- if the EULA says "You agree we can come stick hamsters in your drive bays" and the guys with hamsters show up -- I can tell them to shove off, since I never agreed.
I can't be required to follow the terms of something I never agreed to, can I?
This is related to the GPL, of all things. The GPL mentions that you can use the software all you want *without agreeing to the license*, because you have that right already. The only reason you need to agree to the GPL is to do things that are otherwise illegal: copy the copyrighted software.
In short: EULAs are invalid, because they seek to put conditions on things that you already have the right to do. I should be able to not accept the EULA and still do whatever I want with the bits on that disc, because I bought the disc. In legal-speak, they call this "consideration"--both parties must gain something from a contract for it to be binding. I don't gain anything from most EULA's.
The GPL is valid, because it doesn't take away any rights. It gives you extra rights (distribution), in exchange for conditions on the exercise of those rights.
Libertarians, at least the mainstream ones that live on lp.org, are worried about excesses of power and inefficiency in government, and want to pare down the powers of government as much as possible. They also believe in what they call an "unfettered free market" and their opponents call "no checks on the excesses of large corporations."
Hacker types tend toward Libertarianism in the sense that they want the government to have less power ("What do you care if I smoke weed in my own house? Fuck off!"), but they also want large corporations to have less power. Rather than portraying the conflict as government-against-private and coming down on the side of private (people and corporations), the hacker types see it as big-guys-vs.-little-guys, and support the little guys. It doesn't matter WHO the big guy with all the power is--they oppose it.
The Democrats may be just as big-government as the Republicans, but they support less power for big corporations.
Specifically, the big-governmental roles that hacker types object to are generally moral and ethical rather than financial. They oppose government interference in what they consider to be private matters more than they oppose higher taxes.[1]
Conventional wisdom says that the Republicans want more of this sort of control than Democrats: they are the party that wants to ban abortions, write the heterosexuality of marriage into the constitution, is more vehement in attacking drug use, and so on.
So, the GOP has lost with the hackers on two counts: favor to large corporations, and moralistic interference in private life. The Dems still want a large role for government, but their idea of large government isn't as oppressive to hacker types.
[1] The Republicans generally portray themselves as the party that will tax Americans less; whether this is true or not is beyond the scope of this post.
"Way more money than Bush?"
s p
http://www.opensecrets.org/presidential/index.a
Incidentally, if the best that you can come up with for an insult is "French-looking lying loser" (hyphenated incorrectly in the original), you might want to work on your rhetorical skills.
Go sulk under a bridge and eat goats; come back when you've improved your posting skills.
Yeah, it's on C:.
Named 3QINRPCP.SXW.
Uh, my mom's a computer newbie, and she gets by just fine on Mandrake.
If all you're using a computer for is mail, web, and word processing, how exactly is clicking on the "konqueror", "kmail", and "openoffice" icons harder than clicking on the "ie", "outlook", and "word" icons?
The only people XP might be easier for is people advanced enough to want to do networking things and the like, but not advanced enough to read man ifconfig and man iwconfig.