You laugh! But my birthdate was once changed without my permission or knowledge. I had filed a routine name change form with Social Security, and some dumb clerk introduced a typo into my record turning 11 for November into 1 for January. I found out about it a few YEARS later, while speaking to an IRS agent (who was verifying my identity and apparently the IRS gets a feed from the SSA, and when she asked for my birthdate told me she had something different).
When I called the SSA to discuss this, they tried to act like they really hadn't made a mistake, and get this: it was now illegal (and they tried to shift the blame to President Clinton for signing the law) to change that part of my record without my filing a certified copy of my birth certificate and a request form. Yes. Your government has outlawed the practice of correcting its own mistakes.
And we're worried about corporations? At least most companies don't have standing armies and navies and immense stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
as an example of the encryption they've just outlawed discussing, cracking, and selling products to perform the decryption of automatically. Then you can thank them for outlawing math class when they discuss factoring and prime numbers (see related "RSA" story).
If you read their FAQ, you will get most of your answers. They estimate that in order to get the factors for a 760 bit key in a year or less it would take 215,000 Pentium class machines, each with 4gb of RAM (although they say a 430 bit key is trivial to factor). That's a lot of horsepower for a single set of factors. You'd need to rerun all that for each key you wanted to crack. Their purpose seems to be twofold: to prove how hard it is to get around the longer key security, and to encourage people to seek better algorithms related to factoring.
For the same reason we don't all live in houses built like bank vaults. Sometimes the tradeoff between high security and ease of use comes up a little short on the security side (this is both a product choice tradeoff and a use of sysop time tradeoff). And because the alternatives to Microsoft products are just as vulnerable to attacks. The real problem here is that we don't have enough variety in host operating systems and server software. A wide variety of systems will limit the scope of any single exploit.
If the "capitalist system" will survive on its own, maybe the government should stop interfering in interest rates, stop doing social engineering with taxes, stop building tax-supported infrastructure, stop providing national defense, stop regulating consumer safety in goods, as well as food and drugs, stop inspecting rental properties, stop subsidizing public education (which is why we have a workforce that can read and write), stop printing money to be used as a medium of exchange, stop enforcing contracts, stop imposing sanctions on infringements of "intellectual property" restrictions. I mean, this government interference. It's unthinkably horrible stuff, let's let private business just be private!
Is it any wonder why neo-socialists like Ralph Nader get more votes than libertarians? Could it be that most libertarians make no sense, whereas the socialists at least have an emotional appeal to people's better natures? Could it be that you may as well just call anarchy "anarchy" and be done with it? If the government does not exist to assist the public in regulating rogue citizens (like those that direct the activities of Microsoft-- after all, Microsoft does not exist without the people who work there) then what possible purpose does it serve?
The law that Microsoft has run afoul of is required to actually have capitalism work. When you have one company in a market you do not have a free market. At that point, since capitalism can't work, it is useful to have rules and regulations about just what is appropriate... and Microsoft got caught going beyond appropriate. They therefore forfeit their right to continue unimpeded.
I think the funniest thing is when people on the same LAN feel they have to attach files to email rather than sending a link to where the file is on a public drive.
Seriously, I like the notion. But I think it is mildly impractical to try and figure out an FTP scheme that is as flexible and user-friendly that would be ultimately any more secure than using email with attachments. You know the first thing every user would want is an "autofetch attachments" or "single click attachment fetch" option, and they'd all be downloading and opening the virus/worm/trojan anyway.
I'd say give general computer education time for the public to get to a basic, solid bedrock of how this stuff all works and the next generation coming up will make things like not opening attachments from strangers seem like second nature.
I can't tell you why you're wrong because I really don't understand your point.:)
It is AOL itself that is the monopoly threat in the internet arena, not Microsoft-- and Microsoft has been trying their hardest... they even broke the law from the sound of it. Yet AOL has an insane number of subscribers, has been around since before the whole internet/web, and has recently bought themselves a fairly huge media empire-- including a major cable provider. Playing the two against each other is never really going to be in the public best interest (and it hasn't really impeded either one to this point). This isn't a healthy competitive market, it's Godzilla vs. King Kong -- we're more likely to get caught in the crossfire than anything else. At least that's my thought on it.
Cool. Thanks for the tip. I, of course, have not read the manual at Google.:)
I liked that it was part of the natural flow on Teoma.
Re:Great. I'm sure this will be covered everywhere
on
Adobe Backs Down
·
· Score: 1
Man, I'm starting to sound like a conspiricy theorist... and that scares me.
It's not a conspiracy. It's an oligopoly. And the execs at these firms will hop firms to climb the ladder (to an extent) and they all hang out at the same industry conferences. And they are all addicted to wealth and position. And the more and more the companies conglomerate, the fewer execs will be needed, and the harder it will be for the men and women at that level to find peers with whom to go golfing and boating and the more they will end up hanging around each other. And don't get me started on the danger of allowing people to serve on the boards of more than one corporation at a time or allowing the execs of one company to serve on another's board.
And of course the NYT supports the DMCA, once they start moving to whatever the next phase of digital news content is (and I don't mean just pay-subscription web stuff), the DMCA will be protecting them and their content.
I don't give a rip whether they rip off every Google concept ever used. I don't care whether the site is identical to Google in almost every way. No patent should ever be allowed to protect the look and feel of a web site, they are designed to protect inventions-- and that would be the backend part on a web site. The look and feel should be a copyright or trademark issue, and frankly, I don't feel like Google has done anything distinctive in any of these categories to merit a patent or any other intellectual "property" protection.
Yes, Google has a rather nifty approach to ranking and search heuristics, but tough noogies on them if someone else can write software that reacts similarly to the information they gather from the world. As it is, Teoma has some features in their beta that differentiate them significantly from Google (in good ways). Already I've managed to see who is linking to me (and not having to rely on referrer logs for that) and that is way cool (and if Google shows that, I am interested in knowing how to see it).
On a less enthusiastic note, a search on "ichimunki" turned up www.ichimunki.com first (woohoo!) and a whole boatload of Slashdot postings (bleah, who needs that indexed).
Hmmm. Yet Apple, who are known for actually giving a rat's ass about the Real Usability of their interface have had an Apple menu for the last 16 years and no one was so confused that they stopped using it. The all-purpose, one great menu really doesn't have a good name (although I agree that start makes at least as much sense as any alternatives) and the logo of the desktop maker is as good as any. Personally I prefer they not put a word on such a menu, since it's meaningless.
An infinite loop doesn't actually cause a crash, it causes a hang. The difference being that you can only detect an infinite loop by staring at the screen for an infinite amount of time. A crash may have more visible results.
So if this were a Linux worm, the whole infinite loop thing would be over in five minutes.;)
My little brat goes to school to learn, not to participate or waste her own time while your little god-fearing robots are reciting some prayer they don't even understand. But please let me know when you're ready for your little rugrats to take time out 3 time during their school day to face Mecca and pray. Or give up their pepperoni pizza lunches so we can have kosher school food. Or when those Atheists among us can actually discuss evolution in science class without your Creationist crap having to get equal or us having to go to court just to learn about Darwin's scientifically sound theories.
BTW, you're the one who needs to go to church a little more often if you think it's at all Christian to go around calling the children of others "brats" without having even met said children. You lack the very values you are trying to instill in your children. And yes, America is getting better. In many countries kids don't even get to public schools, they're too busy making shoes for Americans or running from the military or wondering what they'll eat tonight-- rare problems in the USA. Name one place better to raise children than America-- and then go there to live, twerp.
I'd rather blame consumers than the DMCA. The government is such an easy bogeyman to go after, since it only requires that we carp on our elected officials-- most of whom we'll never come into contact with and it alleviates our own complicity in the current situation.
Consumers, OTOH, includes us Slashbots as well as our friends and families. And it is lack of consideration on the part of consumers, who will sacrifice their freedom of choice on a regular basis for the sake of convenience, that is allowing and funding these corporations as they take away our ability to enjoy our previous standard of behavior. If we truly care, we won't be buying DVD players and DVDs protected by CSS, we won't buy CDs with this scheme (and I guess since they aren't telling us which CDs are protected that means we just stop buying CDs), we won't be purchasing e-books that we can decrypt for Fair Use purposes, etc etc. But the consumers, and that includes the Slashbots, don't seem to really want to change their behavior or risk having to listen to all the music they've already bought when some great new Britney CD is coming out. And it includes explaining this stuff to your friends and families without drooling and raving.
You know, maybe it's time we started figuring out how to live without these sorts of corporations, if this is how they are going to be. The sooner the better.
Take your bigoted nonsense and cram it, twerp. The USA was not some wonderland before the 1960's and courtesy in youths is hardly related to your fairy-tale religion being forced on them in schools. America is getting better every day in spite of you rightwing religious nuts and your attempts to keep pushing the rest of us back into the Dark Ages. And oh, am I not being polite enough for you? Tough. When someone wants the government to enforce their mythology on me and my children, I think the time for courtesy has past.
Considering there is already some GPL software available for Palm OS, and that it is trivial to obtain development tools for Palm OS, I don't see why anyone would want to load their funky Linux OS on a PDA only to have it become encumbered with a bunch of non-Free software. I mean, are we all looking to get a multi-tasking, multi-user OS on our Palms that bad? I know I'm not. Especially since I've already paid the Palm tax to have the Palm OS come preinstalled on the device.:)
Well, except that it's a real chicken/egg issue. They won't make drivers, they won't assist with making drivers, so why would consumers switch to a non-Windows OS if there are no drivers and therefore a much smaller device base to choose from. It seems to me that the first hardware companies to niche market their peripherals and cards as having actual manufacturer-produced Linux drivers are going to be the manufacturer's that profit. While Linux users don't like buying software, we love buying hardware. But the OS can't catch on Big Time until there are serious options in the home peripheral market. It just goes round and round.
I bought a Mac quite a while ago (long before OS X was really much more than a vague promise), and it won't ever run OS X well, but it kicks ass with YDL 2. Linux is a vast improvement over pre-X Mac OS's in everything but device support, which is coming along nicely.
You're being silly while trying to make a good point.
The problem with your example is that ROT-26'ing the entire book will leave me with very readable text, which I can then copy manually or with a photocopier to take advantage of my Fair Use rights. The DMCA does not restrict Fair Use on its own.
The problem is that without breaking the protection scheme on much digital media, I have no chance to exercise my Fair Use rights at all. The data is stuck in a format which is controlled by applications produced or produced in collusion with the copyright holders, such that the data is inaccessible by means which allow me to excerpt it normally (i.e. cut and paste from a protected PDF, nope, cut a slice from a DVD, nope, sample a.nap file, nope). This means that the technology itself prevents Fair Use which would normally be legal. The law then provides for sanctions against anyone who would crack the protection and share information on how to perform that crack with the public-- even thought the use of that crack is perfectly legal otherwise (i.e. quoting from a PDF, sampling a DVD or.nap file).
Not necessarily. The comparison isn't necessarily valid not because one compiles more slowly than the other but because the thing being compiled was not the same piece of software. If, using the same config, you compiled one kernel on an x86 machine and cross-compiled the same kernel for x86 on PPC, then you might start getting closer to a valid comparison. As it is, you may as well compare compiling emacs on x86 to compiling vi on PPC.
Slashdot Mirror
You laugh! But my birthdate was once changed without my permission or knowledge. I had filed a routine name change form with Social Security, and some dumb clerk introduced a typo into my record turning 11 for November into 1 for January. I found out about it a few YEARS later, while speaking to an IRS agent (who was verifying my identity and apparently the IRS gets a feed from the SSA, and when she asked for my birthdate told me she had something different).
When I called the SSA to discuss this, they tried to act like they really hadn't made a mistake, and get this: it was now illegal (and they tried to shift the blame to President Clinton for signing the law) to change that part of my record without my filing a certified copy of my birth certificate and a request form. Yes. Your government has outlawed the practice of correcting its own mistakes.
And we're worried about corporations? At least most companies don't have standing armies and navies and immense stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
That is hilarious. Really hilarious. I may just do that. :)
ack. my line break between the M and the N disappeared. That's supposed to read:
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
And there is a typo in the previous example as well. Geez. I think I need some more coffee.
Do include the following ROT-13 key:
ABCDEFGHIJKLM NOPQRSTUVWZYZ
as an example of the encryption they've just outlawed discussing, cracking, and selling products to perform the decryption of automatically. Then you can thank them for outlawing math class when they discuss factoring and prime numbers (see related "RSA" story).
If you read their FAQ, you will get most of your answers. They estimate that in order to get the factors for a 760 bit key in a year or less it would take 215,000 Pentium class machines, each with 4gb of RAM (although they say a 430 bit key is trivial to factor). That's a lot of horsepower for a single set of factors. You'd need to rerun all that for each key you wanted to crack. Their purpose seems to be twofold: to prove how hard it is to get around the longer key security, and to encourage people to seek better algorithms related to factoring.
Sorry. I forgot FHS, which is the filesystem hierarchy standard itself, which can be found in the related information section at FSB.
LDP = Linux Documentation Project
LSB = Linux Standard Base
For the same reason we don't all live in houses built like bank vaults. Sometimes the tradeoff between high security and ease of use comes up a little short on the security side (this is both a product choice tradeoff and a use of sysop time tradeoff). And because the alternatives to Microsoft products are just as vulnerable to attacks. The real problem here is that we don't have enough variety in host operating systems and server software. A wide variety of systems will limit the scope of any single exploit.
If the "capitalist system" will survive on its own, maybe the government should stop interfering in interest rates, stop doing social engineering with taxes, stop building tax-supported infrastructure, stop providing national defense, stop regulating consumer safety in goods, as well as food and drugs, stop inspecting rental properties, stop subsidizing public education (which is why we have a workforce that can read and write), stop printing money to be used as a medium of exchange, stop enforcing contracts, stop imposing sanctions on infringements of "intellectual property" restrictions. I mean, this government interference. It's unthinkably horrible stuff, let's let private business just be private!
Is it any wonder why neo-socialists like Ralph Nader get more votes than libertarians? Could it be that most libertarians make no sense, whereas the socialists at least have an emotional appeal to people's better natures? Could it be that you may as well just call anarchy "anarchy" and be done with it? If the government does not exist to assist the public in regulating rogue citizens (like those that direct the activities of Microsoft-- after all, Microsoft does not exist without the people who work there) then what possible purpose does it serve?
The law that Microsoft has run afoul of is required to actually have capitalism work. When you have one company in a market you do not have a free market. At that point, since capitalism can't work, it is useful to have rules and regulations about just what is appropriate... and Microsoft got caught going beyond appropriate. They therefore forfeit their right to continue unimpeded.
I think the funniest thing is when people on the same LAN feel they have to attach files to email rather than sending a link to where the file is on a public drive.
Seriously, I like the notion. But I think it is mildly impractical to try and figure out an FTP scheme that is as flexible and user-friendly that would be ultimately any more secure than using email with attachments. You know the first thing every user would want is an "autofetch attachments" or "single click attachment fetch" option, and they'd all be downloading and opening the virus/worm/trojan anyway.
I'd say give general computer education time for the public to get to a basic, solid bedrock of how this stuff all works and the next generation coming up will make things like not opening attachments from strangers seem like second nature.
I can't tell you why you're wrong because I really don't understand your point. :)
It is AOL itself that is the monopoly threat in the internet arena, not Microsoft-- and Microsoft has been trying their hardest... they even broke the law from the sound of it. Yet AOL has an insane number of subscribers, has been around since before the whole internet/web, and has recently bought themselves a fairly huge media empire-- including a major cable provider. Playing the two against each other is never really going to be in the public best interest (and it hasn't really impeded either one to this point). This isn't a healthy competitive market, it's Godzilla vs. King Kong -- we're more likely to get caught in the crossfire than anything else. At least that's my thought on it.
Cool. Thanks for the tip. I, of course, have not read the manual at Google. :)
I liked that it was part of the natural flow on Teoma.
Man, I'm starting to sound like a conspiricy theorist... and that scares me.
It's not a conspiracy. It's an oligopoly. And the execs at these firms will hop firms to climb the ladder (to an extent) and they all hang out at the same industry conferences. And they are all addicted to wealth and position. And the more and more the companies conglomerate, the fewer execs will be needed, and the harder it will be for the men and women at that level to find peers with whom to go golfing and boating and the more they will end up hanging around each other. And don't get me started on the danger of allowing people to serve on the boards of more than one corporation at a time or allowing the execs of one company to serve on another's board.
And of course the NYT supports the DMCA, once they start moving to whatever the next phase of digital news content is (and I don't mean just pay-subscription web stuff), the DMCA will be protecting them and their content.
I don't give a rip whether they rip off every Google concept ever used. I don't care whether the site is identical to Google in almost every way. No patent should ever be allowed to protect the look and feel of a web site, they are designed to protect inventions-- and that would be the backend part on a web site. The look and feel should be a copyright or trademark issue, and frankly, I don't feel like Google has done anything distinctive in any of these categories to merit a patent or any other intellectual "property" protection.
Yes, Google has a rather nifty approach to ranking and search heuristics, but tough noogies on them if someone else can write software that reacts similarly to the information they gather from the world. As it is, Teoma has some features in their beta that differentiate them significantly from Google (in good ways). Already I've managed to see who is linking to me (and not having to rely on referrer logs for that) and that is way cool (and if Google shows that, I am interested in knowing how to see it).
On a less enthusiastic note, a search on "ichimunki" turned up www.ichimunki.com first (woohoo!) and a whole boatload of Slashdot postings (bleah, who needs that indexed).
Hmmm. Yet Apple, who are known for actually giving a rat's ass about the Real Usability of their interface have had an Apple menu for the last 16 years and no one was so confused that they stopped using it. The all-purpose, one great menu really doesn't have a good name (although I agree that start makes at least as much sense as any alternatives) and the logo of the desktop maker is as good as any. Personally I prefer they not put a word on such a menu, since it's meaningless.
Two thoughts:
;)
An infinite loop doesn't actually cause a crash, it causes a hang. The difference being that you can only detect an infinite loop by staring at the screen for an infinite amount of time. A crash may have more visible results.
So if this were a Linux worm, the whole infinite loop thing would be over in five minutes.
My little brat goes to school to learn, not to participate or waste her own time while your little god-fearing robots are reciting some prayer they don't even understand. But please let me know when you're ready for your little rugrats to take time out 3 time during their school day to face Mecca and pray. Or give up their pepperoni pizza lunches so we can have kosher school food. Or when those Atheists among us can actually discuss evolution in science class without your Creationist crap having to get equal or us having to go to court just to learn about Darwin's scientifically sound theories.
BTW, you're the one who needs to go to church a little more often if you think it's at all Christian to go around calling the children of others "brats" without having even met said children. You lack the very values you are trying to instill in your children. And yes, America is getting better. In many countries kids don't even get to public schools, they're too busy making shoes for Americans or running from the military or wondering what they'll eat tonight-- rare problems in the USA. Name one place better to raise children than America-- and then go there to live, twerp.
I'd rather blame consumers than the DMCA. The government is such an easy bogeyman to go after, since it only requires that we carp on our elected officials-- most of whom we'll never come into contact with and it alleviates our own complicity in the current situation.
Consumers, OTOH, includes us Slashbots as well as our friends and families. And it is lack of consideration on the part of consumers, who will sacrifice their freedom of choice on a regular basis for the sake of convenience, that is allowing and funding these corporations as they take away our ability to enjoy our previous standard of behavior. If we truly care, we won't be buying DVD players and DVDs protected by CSS, we won't buy CDs with this scheme (and I guess since they aren't telling us which CDs are protected that means we just stop buying CDs), we won't be purchasing e-books that we can decrypt for Fair Use purposes, etc etc. But the consumers, and that includes the Slashbots, don't seem to really want to change their behavior or risk having to listen to all the music they've already bought when some great new Britney CD is coming out. And it includes explaining this stuff to your friends and families without drooling and raving.
You know, maybe it's time we started figuring out how to live without these sorts of corporations, if this is how they are going to be. The sooner the better.
Take your bigoted nonsense and cram it, twerp. The USA was not some wonderland before the 1960's and courtesy in youths is hardly related to your fairy-tale religion being forced on them in schools. America is getting better every day in spite of you rightwing religious nuts and your attempts to keep pushing the rest of us back into the Dark Ages. And oh, am I not being polite enough for you? Tough. When someone wants the government to enforce their mythology on me and my children, I think the time for courtesy has past.
Considering there is already some GPL software available for Palm OS, and that it is trivial to obtain development tools for Palm OS, I don't see why anyone would want to load their funky Linux OS on a PDA only to have it become encumbered with a bunch of non-Free software. I mean, are we all looking to get a multi-tasking, multi-user OS on our Palms that bad? I know I'm not. Especially since I've already paid the Palm tax to have the Palm OS come preinstalled on the device. :)
Well, except that it's a real chicken/egg issue. They won't make drivers, they won't assist with making drivers, so why would consumers switch to a non-Windows OS if there are no drivers and therefore a much smaller device base to choose from. It seems to me that the first hardware companies to niche market their peripherals and cards as having actual manufacturer-produced Linux drivers are going to be the manufacturer's that profit. While Linux users don't like buying software, we love buying hardware. But the OS can't catch on Big Time until there are serious options in the home peripheral market. It just goes round and round.
I bought a Mac quite a while ago (long before OS X was really much more than a vague promise), and it won't ever run OS X well, but it kicks ass with YDL 2. Linux is a vast improvement over pre-X Mac OS's in everything but device support, which is coming along nicely.
You're being silly while trying to make a good point.
.nap file, nope). This means that the technology itself prevents Fair Use which would normally be legal. The law then provides for sanctions against anyone who would crack the protection and share information on how to perform that crack with the public-- even thought the use of that crack is perfectly legal otherwise (i.e. quoting from a PDF, sampling a DVD or .nap file).
The problem with your example is that ROT-26'ing the entire book will leave me with very readable text, which I can then copy manually or with a photocopier to take advantage of my Fair Use rights. The DMCA does not restrict Fair Use on its own.
The problem is that without breaking the protection scheme on much digital media, I have no chance to exercise my Fair Use rights at all. The data is stuck in a format which is controlled by applications produced or produced in collusion with the copyright holders, such that the data is inaccessible by means which allow me to excerpt it normally (i.e. cut and paste from a protected PDF, nope, cut a slice from a DVD, nope, sample a
Wow. Not often I get caught completely abusing the English language by accident. Thanks. :)
Not necessarily. The comparison isn't necessarily valid not because one compiles more slowly than the other but because the thing being compiled was not the same piece of software. If, using the same config, you compiled one kernel on an x86 machine and cross-compiled the same kernel for x86 on PPC, then you might start getting closer to a valid comparison. As it is, you may as well compare compiling emacs on x86 to compiling vi on PPC.