Most IRC clients will buffer quite a few (thousands) of lines in RAM. Is this sort of recording different? What if it gets swapped to disk? What about systems with long average uptimes--if I just leave my IRC window open for a month (or leave it up through hibernate/resume cycles), have I recorded it? What if I have that conversation on a laptop, and try to get it admitted as evidence without ever powering it down? ("Hurry up, Your Honor, klaptop says I've got 30 minutes of battery life left!") What if I hibernate it and resume it in the courtroom? Then it's technically been written to a permanent storage medium, but only as an extension of a volatile one.
The law needs clear definitions to work well... I don't think it's a blow to privacy rights for participants to assume that anyone party to a text conversation can record it.
Spoken conversations are by definition transient--the sound is gone as soon as it happens. The law makes sense for those. But for text conversations, with backscroll and long buffers, it quickly becomes silly.
... is hardware support. Nobody can sell hardware without making sure that it works for Windows out of the box; the same isn't true for Linux. It's a chicken and the egg problem: there won't be "mandatory" hardware support until Linux is widely used, and Linux won't be widely used until there is mandatory hardware support.
Of course, in the meantime the folks whose job it is to get this stuff working are able to do it pretty well without much help from the manufacturers. I don't know what's involved with it, or even who does it... I just know that I can load Mandrake on a machine and have 80% of the stuff "just work", and 15% more work after a quick google.
Metagaming is a PnP-RPG term for using information that you know, but that your character doesn't.
For instance, if the DM asks everyone to roll a d20, without telling them what it's for, and the party wizard then casts detect magic, that's metagaming.
I'm something of a Linux newbie, and have been pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to get stuff working.
Less stuff works out of the box than with Windows--that's a given, since hardware manufacturers can't sell anything that doesn't work out of the box with Windows.
However, nearly *everything* can be solved with a quick google. Today I googled "linux touchpad drivers" and had tap-clicking installed in ten minutes by following the links, downloading a tarball, and following the instructions.
I'm a physicist, not a network admin, so I don't know how much things cost. However, they already keep track of how much bandwidth people use at my school, as at most others. A posted sign that says "Transfer in excess of 5 Gbytes/month (or whatever) may result in your access being shut down.", followed by a few people losing their access or being throttled to 56k for a while, should provide better results for everyone.
DRM shouldn't matter for Public Radio!
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I prefer good old MP3 or OGG streaming like the feeds offered at WCPE but I'm sure no 'serious' company would consider it because they don't have their digital rights preserved."
This argument is rubbish. Anything you can stream you can record (using Audacity or similar) and save; for that matter, anything broadcast over the airwaves you can record.
Ultimately any form of broadcast/webcast can be converted to mp3/ogg with very little work. NPR should do everyone a service (that's why they're around, to do a public service) and just give us the mp3's/oggs.
Is lower latency on WWW for 99 percent a disservice? Uploaders on resnet consume upstream bandwidth that the directors claim would be better used by, say, the university's web site. If 1 percent of the users consume 50 percent of the upstream bandwidth that the university gets, is it in the university's interest to make it hard for the 1 percent to consume so much bandwidth?
It's not the accepting connections/uploading, then, that's causing the network degradation. It's the excessive bandwidth use. There are other ways to address that, and only that.
Mod parent up. Most of the networking people who now implement policies that reduce their workload but cripple students' ability to explore gained their skills from similar exploration years ago.
I don't think anyone objects to installing patches. What I, and others, object to is being railroaded into other things while I install them. If I own a house with a natural gas system, I don't want to sign a contract that says "you must call our technicians to fix any problems with your gas"--especially if I happen to know how to fix such things myself, or know someone else who does.
This is why the OSS model works better for security. I *can* run urpmi --update and trust that the results will be what I want. I can also look under the hood at exactly what gets updated and how. Or, I can download individual packages... or download things and compile them from source... or, if I want and have the skill and time, I can fix things myself.
Now, simply because there are alternatives, there is competitive pressure on the people who make autoupdaters to make them efficient, effective, and transparent--because, otherwise, people will stop using them.
I attend the University of Alabama in Huntsville, an engineering/research institution with enrollment around 15k. The Network Services people around here aren't really concerned about the value of openness to academia; in fact, most of their security is directed inward, against the students who have to use the machines.
For instance, the "start" button on every lab computer has been disabled--people only have access to the icons on the desktop. Furthermore, right-click context menus have been disabled.
On some public computers, even access to the address bar in IE is disabled--all you can do is follow the links from the homepage in IE.
When I took a Mathematica class in the physics lab, we used a heavily neutered version of Windows NT, with file permissions set unusably tight. Browsers would crash on startup because they didn't have write access to their cache files, virtual memory was disabled (!), and the like.
Network Services also has banned the use of BitTorrent on campus, causing consternation among people wanting to download contraband like, uh, Mandrake images.
This is the same campus where average packet loss on ResNet is 20-30%. Students play games over dialup because it's faster and more stable than ResNet.
I recently installed Mandrake on this machine, which has only a dial-up connection. It took quite a bit of phone time to suck down the ~30-40 megs of hdlist files from the mirrors in order to set up urpmi.
Couldn't versions of these files, up-to-date as of the distro release, be included on the CD's or iso's? Then, when setting up urpmi, you'd just have to download the changes in the hdlist made since the distro was released.
"Besides, P2P doesn't work well for residential or university dorm users who can't take incoming connections."
This is no excuse. The Internet is by definition a bi-directional system, and most of its promise comes from that: there are no "client" and "server" distinctions at the topology level.
Universities that provide residents with access that can't accept incoming connections are doing their residents a disservice. Maybe if more applications require them, the uni's will change their tune?
Grandparent is alluding to the "when you have sex, you're having sex with everyone your partner has ever had sex with" FUD (that's what it is) that's spread in many American abstinence-obsessed sex-education classes.
As I was scrolling down the page quickly, the name "Fired" caught my eye a bit before the rest of that sentence... and my brain's kneejerk reaction was "Fired? A daemon to change firefox's name?"
But a 2 or 3 is probably a miss, and an 18 or 19 is probably a hit. (And honestly, rolling a 15 or so and finding out you missed does a pretty good job of conveying the difficulty of an enemy to you.
Had a wonderful moment like this in a now-defunct PnP campaign of mine (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil).
6th level party meets lone man, unarmored, with nothing but a staff. He's obviously in a miserable mood. After the party gnome taunts him, he drops a confusion spell on them and goes inside his shack. The dwarven cleric (who made his save), played by someone not-so-bright, gives chase while the rest of the party scoops up their marbles.
When he gets near the doorway, the old man comes out. The following exchange takes place:
Me: "The old man takes a swing at you with his staff."
Player: "Hah, the wizard's meleeing us... he must be desperate!"
Me: *rolls a 4 on the d20 to hit* Does, um, AC 20 hit you?
Player: *jaw drops slightly* "Uh, yeah... it does... uh, a wizard with an attack bonus of +16?"
Me: *rolls a 6 on d6 for quarterstaff damage* "Take 18 points damage."
Player: *jaw hits floor*
Turned out the "wizard" wasn't a wizard at all--he was a 7th level cleric, buffed to the gills, with confusion (normally wizard-only) as a domain spell. He wound up killing the party cleric, after said cleric was knocked down to 1 hp and didn't heal himself for some strange reason.
Slashdot Mirror
How big is emacs?
The download isn't slashdotted... it's so tiny. My transfer was done before I'd decided where to save it.
Somebody hit him in the face with a football.
I don't think we want to encourage poking at check-boxes to be a legally-binding act.
Remember all the ire about clickthrough agreements? Yeah.
Most IRC clients will buffer quite a few (thousands) of lines in RAM. Is this sort of recording different? What if it gets swapped to disk? What about systems with long average uptimes--if I just leave my IRC window open for a month (or leave it up through hibernate/resume cycles), have I recorded it? What if I have that conversation on a laptop, and try to get it admitted as evidence without ever powering it down? ("Hurry up, Your Honor, klaptop says I've got 30 minutes of battery life left!") What if I hibernate it and resume it in the courtroom? Then it's technically been written to a permanent storage medium, but only as an extension of a volatile one.
The law needs clear definitions to work well... I don't think it's a blow to privacy rights for participants to assume that anyone party to a text conversation can record it.
Spoken conversations are by definition transient--the sound is gone as soon as it happens. The law makes sense for those. But for text conversations, with backscroll and long buffers, it quickly becomes silly.
... is hardware support. Nobody can sell hardware without making sure that it works for Windows out of the box; the same isn't true for Linux. It's a chicken and the egg problem: there won't be "mandatory" hardware support until Linux is widely used, and Linux won't be widely used until there is mandatory hardware support.
Of course, in the meantime the folks whose job it is to get this stuff working are able to do it pretty well without much help from the manufacturers. I don't know what's involved with it, or even who does it... I just know that I can load Mandrake on a machine and have 80% of the stuff "just work", and 15% more work after a quick google.
Windows is much purer than the *nix OS's.
I tried to cast the daemons out of my Linux machine, but it didn't work so well afterward...
Metagaming is a PnP-RPG term for using information that you know, but that your character doesn't.
For instance, if the DM asks everyone to roll a d20, without telling them what it's for, and the party wizard then casts detect magic, that's metagaming.
I'm something of a Linux newbie, and have been pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to get stuff working.
Less stuff works out of the box than with Windows--that's a given, since hardware manufacturers can't sell anything that doesn't work out of the box with Windows.
However, nearly *everything* can be solved with a quick google. Today I googled "linux touchpad drivers" and had tap-clicking installed in ten minutes by following the links, downloading a tarball, and following the instructions.
I'm a physicist, not a network admin, so I don't know how much things cost. However, they already keep track of how much bandwidth people use at my school, as at most others. A posted sign that says "Transfer in excess of 5 Gbytes/month (or whatever) may result in your access being shut down.", followed by a few people losing their access or being throttled to 56k for a while, should provide better results for everyone.
I prefer good old MP3 or OGG streaming like the feeds offered at WCPE but I'm sure no 'serious' company would consider it because they don't have their digital rights preserved."
This argument is rubbish. Anything you can stream you can record (using Audacity or similar) and save; for that matter, anything broadcast over the airwaves you can record.
Ultimately any form of broadcast/webcast can be converted to mp3/ogg with very little work. NPR should do everyone a service (that's why they're around, to do a public service) and just give us the mp3's/oggs.
Is lower latency on WWW for 99 percent a disservice? Uploaders on resnet consume upstream bandwidth that the directors claim would be better used by, say, the university's web site. If 1 percent of the users consume 50 percent of the upstream bandwidth that the university gets, is it in the university's interest to make it hard for the 1 percent to consume so much bandwidth?
It's not the accepting connections/uploading, then, that's causing the network degradation. It's the excessive bandwidth use. There are other ways to address that, and only that.
"Doctor, it hurts when I walk!"
"Go buy a wheelchair, then!"
Mod parent up. Most of the networking people who now implement policies that reduce their workload but cripple students' ability to explore gained their skills from similar exploration years ago.
I don't think anyone objects to installing patches. What I, and others, object to is being railroaded into other things while I install them. If I own a house with a natural gas system, I don't want to sign a contract that says "you must call our technicians to fix any problems with your gas"--especially if I happen to know how to fix such things myself, or know someone else who does.
This is why the OSS model works better for security. I *can* run urpmi --update and trust that the results will be what I want. I can also look under the hood at exactly what gets updated and how. Or, I can download individual packages... or download things and compile them from source... or, if I want and have the skill and time, I can fix things myself.
Now, simply because there are alternatives, there is competitive pressure on the people who make autoupdaters to make them efficient, effective, and transparent--because, otherwise, people will stop using them.
I attend the University of Alabama in Huntsville, an engineering/research institution with enrollment around 15k. The Network Services people around here aren't really concerned about the value of openness to academia; in fact, most of their security is directed inward, against the students who have to use the machines.
For instance, the "start" button on every lab computer has been disabled--people only have access to the icons on the desktop. Furthermore, right-click context menus have been disabled.
On some public computers, even access to the address bar in IE is disabled--all you can do is follow the links from the homepage in IE.
When I took a Mathematica class in the physics lab, we used a heavily neutered version of Windows NT, with file permissions set unusably tight. Browsers would crash on startup because they didn't have write access to their cache files, virtual memory was disabled (!), and the like.
Network Services also has banned the use of BitTorrent on campus, causing consternation among people wanting to download contraband like, uh, Mandrake images.
This is the same campus where average packet loss on ResNet is 20-30%. Students play games over dialup because it's faster and more stable than ResNet.
This is sort of off the subject, but about urpmi:
I recently installed Mandrake on this machine, which has only a dial-up connection. It took quite a bit of phone time to suck down the ~30-40 megs of hdlist files from the mirrors in order to set up urpmi.
Couldn't versions of these files, up-to-date as of the distro release, be included on the CD's or iso's? Then, when setting up urpmi, you'd just have to download the changes in the hdlist made since the distro was released.
"Besides, P2P doesn't work well for residential or university dorm users who can't take incoming connections."
This is no excuse. The Internet is by definition a bi-directional system, and most of its promise comes from that: there are no "client" and "server" distinctions at the topology level.
Universities that provide residents with access that can't accept incoming connections are doing their residents a disservice. Maybe if more applications require them, the uni's will change their tune?
Grandparent is alluding to the "when you have sex, you're having sex with everyone your partner has ever had sex with" FUD (that's what it is) that's spread in many American abstinence-obsessed sex-education classes.
As I was scrolling down the page quickly, the name "Fired" caught my eye a bit before the rest of that sentence... and my brain's kneejerk reaction was "Fired? A daemon to change firefox's name?"
Another mathematician seeming to think that physics is cheating. Pshaw. We've got plenty of those at the university.
I'd pay ten bucks for the original studio master tape of it.
I'd then slip it in the coat pocket of some guy going in for an MRI.
But a 2 or 3 is probably a miss, and an 18 or 19 is probably a hit. (And honestly, rolling a 15 or so and finding out you missed does a pretty good job of conveying the difficulty of an enemy to you.
Had a wonderful moment like this in a now-defunct PnP campaign of mine (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil).
6th level party meets lone man, unarmored, with nothing but a staff. He's obviously in a miserable mood. After the party gnome taunts him, he drops a confusion spell on them and goes inside his shack. The dwarven cleric (who made his save), played by someone not-so-bright, gives chase while the rest of the party scoops up their marbles.
When he gets near the doorway, the old man comes out. The following exchange takes place:
Me: "The old man takes a swing at you with his staff."
Player: "Hah, the wizard's meleeing us... he must be desperate!"
Me: *rolls a 4 on the d20 to hit* Does, um, AC 20 hit you?
Player: *jaw drops slightly* "Uh, yeah... it does... uh, a wizard with an attack bonus of +16?"
Me: *rolls a 6 on d6 for quarterstaff damage* "Take 18 points damage."
Player: *jaw hits floor*
Turned out the "wizard" wasn't a wizard at all--he was a 7th level cleric, buffed to the gills, with confusion (normally wizard-only) as a domain spell. He wound up killing the party cleric, after said cleric was knocked down to 1 hp and didn't heal himself for some strange reason.
Tried that. Didn't work. Balked when we realized how expensive senators were.
Extradition treaties are international law.
The US only pays attention to international law when it serves its own interests.
(and, yes, I am an American.)
Then they didn't have much a bloodstream!