As a side note, why is Homebrew DS suddenly something amazing to be protected, especially with the multitude of alternatives? One or two neat things have come out of it, but it pales compared to the amazing works that have come out of independent flash development in rescent years.
Well for one thing, I can easily take my DS with me and have access to homebrew. That's not an option for flash applications (neither my DS, nor my iPhone, nor my old Treo support Flash).
Re:The Problem is Not Misunderstanding of Privacy
on
Understanding Privacy
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I'm not sure how you make the jump from "The problem is insufficient penalties for violating the privacy of another" to "therefore we need individuals to add more technological barriers around their data / activities." You even point out that that approach will only lead to an arms race, in which case you have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
The goal should be to disincentivize privacy violations. One way to do this is through the legal system; unfortunately we're not doing so well in that area. So we've got several other posters here--and of course the submitter of TFA--taking the social angle, educating people on the negative implications of privacy violations and trying to stir discussion about what expectations and limitations should exist.
But to access your information store with any decent level of security you still need to carry a secret across a border. If the secret is a GPG key they can still try to get the passphrase off you, then when you access your data they can intercept the data stream and decrypt it.
So just keep the GPG key on the server with your data, and memorize the passphrase. Then the only "secret" you're carrying across the border is in your head, with no outside indication that it exists. This should keep you safe until they make deep brain scans mandatory to enter the country.
oh, from what I can recall, your stable Debian will be upgraded automagically to the new stable Debian when it goes officially "stable... as AFAICR, the symlinks get pointed at the new directories and you don't have to do a thing... that's if you're using "stable" as a repository descriptor instead of using "woody" or is it "potato" now... dur...
That's correct, if you're using "stable" in your apt sources, then when sarge is finally released you'll automatically upgrade to sarge (on the next apt-get upgrade). If apt is looking at "woody", you'll stick with the current stable release. Ditto with "testing" vs "sarge". Though "unstable" and "sid" are always synonymous.
Make it illegal for solicitations not to have how they obtained one's e-mail address. In other words, require how one obtained your e-mail address at the bottom of the e-mail message. Such as, "Your e-mail address _____ was obtained from ______." Something like a $500 fine for not having that in the solicitation, and a $500 fine for lying in the "disclaimer" too.
Just because the spammer tells me how they got my email address, doesn't mean it isn't spam. Plus if the problem you're trying to solve is figuring out which legitimate businesses sold your email address to spammers, that's trivially solvable by buying your own domain and just creating accounts on the fly for each company you do business with.
Of course, the more fundamental problem with this proposed solution is that you're not going to be able to collect on those fines. Plus it's just silly for me to have to add "Your email address was obtained from you, when you told it to me" to the bottom of all my personal correspondence.
They are trying to sell this as a replacement for buisness T1 thats why the prices are so high. Though I seriously doupt they can provide the reliability and the uplink speeds of a T1.
I used to work at a small ISP where we pushed wireless access similar to this for business customers (but on a smaller scale than TFA is talking about). Basically, you put an antenna up on the customer's roof with line-of-sight to one of our POPs, toss in a router, then generally just run cat5 from the router to their internal PCs. IIRC you could get up to about 2Mb with our type of setup.
We preferred this to setting up a T1 because it was generally more reliable. Not that T1 service in our area was bad (it wasn't), but it's always a plus to not have to deal with the Telco. Pretty much the only points of failure were the routers at each end of the link and the antenna.
Now, whether this Space Needle implementation will take off, I don't know. But the concept of wireless as a T1 replacement is certainly sound.
Seriously, how many shitty audioplayers, xml editors, text editors, and the like are there in open source?
While this is certainly true, there's no shortage of shitty closed-source (commercial or shareware) audio/video players and text/HTML editors, either. There's squillions of them. So I think the issue is just that programmers in general like to keep scratching the same itches over, and over again--it has nothing to do with open source vs closed source.
"We are considering adding UI for this preference (see bug 166648); however, our theory is that if link prefetching needs to be disabled then there must be something wrong with the implementation."
And if you kept reading the FAQ, you'd see the following paragraph:
"Update: By popular demand, Mozilla 1.3+ includes a preference in the UI to disable prefetching. See Preferences->Advanced->Cache to disable prefetching."
Although Kirk didn't fire Scotty when he didn't have "the power"... unlike my job...::sigh::
actually, Kirk did fire Scotty for not having enough power to escape orbit in the episode The Apple (although when Scotty did come through 10 minutes later, he re-hired him):
Scotty: Captain, we pulled away a little, we gained...maybe an hour...but we blew almost every system in the ship doing it. There's nothing left to try again. I guess you'll have to fire me, sir. Kirk: You're fired.
BusinessWeek has an article about the perceived threat of patents to Microsoft, citing the SCO case, the opening of OSRM, and the Munich situation as evidence for the veracity of their conclusion that Windows isn't safe. Their solution? Relicense to the BSD license or the Mozilla license. On a positive note, the article's author does link to RMS' article Why Software Should Not Have Owners; good to see Stallman being quoted and linked to in a publication Like BusinessWeek.
If it's just the word choice you have a problem with (which, admittedly, is quite confusing for those not familiar with Debian's release philosophy), you could always just call it "sid" instead.
Just to throw in a personal anecdote, since everybody else in this thread seems to be doing so: I run sid on a couple of desktop machines, and woody+backports on several servers. I've never had a problem with the woody boxes, and the worst problem I've had with the sid boxes is apt getting really confused and refusing to install or upgrade certain packages for a while (usually fixed within a day or two). Which can be a pretty annoying problem, but it doesn't (at least in my experience) leave the system in a "not stable" condition. YMMV, but Debian works quite well for my needs.
Hopefully they'll release before the end of this year and they can show people linux in all it's 2002 glory!
Why is everyone obsessed with Debian making new releases all the time? They maintain three separate trees (stable, testing, unstable) for a reason, folks. Nothing magical happens when they "release" a new distro--if the stable branch is too old/outdated for you, go ahead and use testing or unstable instead (or continue to run stable, and just selectively install the packages you need to be bleeding edge from unstable).
This hardly seems like an issue to me. I mean, even if you're completely successful, what do you get out of it? Move a useless package onto the first CD, maybe bump something more useful back to CD 2 or 3? Who cares, most everyone who installs Debian does the majority over the Internet anyway. Besides, if they suddenly got a zillion submissions for some little-heard-of app, chances are they'd notice something fishy was going on.
About the only purpose I can see for even trying this type of abuse would be to try to "win" one of the famous flamewars (vi vs emacs, gnome vs kde, etc), and those are all high-profile enough that they'll probably all be at the head of the popularity list anyway.
MOM was also a great game. I remember spending countless hours playing both MOO and MOM, and dreaming about what the sequels would be like if they ever made them.
The killer feature of the MOO series for me was multiplayer capability, though, due in part to the terrible AI all those games had. In fact, I've got a handful of people on my ICQ list who still play multiplayer MOO2 games on a regular basis, whom I join whenever I have the time (which sadly is not very often nowadays).
As someone who has been taking Ritalin pretty much consistently since 1992, I take offense at this kind of attitude. Is ADD/ADHD over-diagnosed? Yes. Are Ritalin and similar drugs over-prescribed? Certainly. Does that mean we shouldn't prescribe medication to help treat children (and adults too, by the way)? Hell, no.
I was diagnosed with ADD (that's the non-hyperactive variant) in elementary school. At the time, I didn't even believe I had the symptoms of ADD, let alone the condition/disorder/whatever you want to call it. It wasn't until my junior year in high school that I finally admitted to myself that I had ADD, and even more so, that taking Ritalin was actually beneficial to me. I tried going off it one summer when I was in college, and ended up failing most of my classes the next semester (which convinced me to start taking the Ritalin again).
Now, I'm not saying that everybody who thinks they have ADD/ADHD should immediately go out and start taking drugs. I realize that some people with ADD can get by just fine without any treatment, and that's great; I wish I could. And many others have found that changing their diet and various other non-drug solutions work for them. I don't know if the parent was trolling or not, but this attitude is somewhat common. And personally, I find it insulting.
Well, mass murdering sure, but it wasn't actually stealing. The premise of the game was/is that you are a contestant on a game show, and the items you pick up are cash and prizes you win.
Of course, being an arcade game, the story isn't very important to the gameplay. And the end result is that you're probably right; people will bitch about it.
have an Athlon XP 1600 or some such, occupying an stainless steel case from a 286, with several modifications (aka pieces of metal cut out of it) to accommodate the newer placement of ports and such in the back. This machine still has a 5.25" floppy drive in it, and although it hasn't been used in at least 5 years, they still have a large box full of old 5.25" disks lying around somewhere (mostly lame shareware games & apps back when those shareware mail order catalogs were all the rage).
Compare the source media to a version run through a lossy compression algorithm. If the two are recognizably similar, then you have determined that media source's originally intended format.
That is a meaningless test. Of course, an audio file that you run through a JPEG compressor will end up not resembling the original. But wait a minute, running the same audio file through a different lossy compression algorithm (MP3, for example) will indeed result in a "recognizably similar" result. So this test only works if you get to specify which lossy compression algorithm to use. And arbitrarily saying "well, let's just standardize on JPEG" (or whatever) is just as pointless as arbitrarily speculating over the "intent" of the media.
As over-hyped as Master of Orion 3 was, I'd be surprised if many people other than hardcore TBS (turn-based strategy) fans knew anything about it. And for the record, as a huge fan of the series, I don't think MoO3 was that bad (though it's got nothing on MoO2).
if they can't protect their stuff in the first place, why are they suing people?
It has been well discussed that there is really no way to prevent CDs from being copied/ripped/shared/whatever without simultaneously preventing them from being listened to (this also applies to DVDs and other copyrighted stuff that gets shared on P2P apps). And yet the RIAA/MPAA/software publishers have tried to protect their stuff, for example with copy protection. Guess what, it hasn't worked, but it has caused some legitimate customers to have problems.
Protecting their stuff is not the issue. People would share mp3s on Kazaa even if CDs weren't so easy to rip to mp3 and share. And the RIAA is under no obligation to try and protect their stuff (although there's nothing preventing them from doing so if they wish).
And as far as why they're suing people, that's simple. People are illegally downloading music, and as the copyright holders, the RIAA (or specifically, the labels represented by the RIAA) have the right to sue them for it. I'll leave the discussion of their attitude and tactics regarding the whole file-sharing phenomenon for another discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
As a side note, why is Homebrew DS suddenly something amazing to be protected, especially with the multitude of alternatives? One or two neat things have come out of it, but it pales compared to the amazing works that have come out of independent flash development in rescent years.
Well for one thing, I can easily take my DS with me and have access to homebrew. That's not an option for flash applications (neither my DS, nor my iPhone, nor my old Treo support Flash).
I'm not sure how you make the jump from "The problem is insufficient penalties for violating the privacy of another" to "therefore we need individuals to add more technological barriers around their data / activities." You even point out that that approach will only lead to an arms race, in which case you have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
The goal should be to disincentivize privacy violations. One way to do this is through the legal system; unfortunately we're not doing so well in that area. So we've got several other posters here--and of course the submitter of TFA--taking the social angle, educating people on the negative implications of privacy violations and trying to stir discussion about what expectations and limitations should exist.
Of course, the more fundamental problem with this proposed solution is that you're not going to be able to collect on those fines. Plus it's just silly for me to have to add "Your email address was obtained from you, when you told it to me" to the bottom of all my personal correspondence.
They are trying to sell this as a replacement for buisness T1 thats why the prices are so high. Though I seriously doupt they can provide the reliability and the uplink speeds of a T1.
I used to work at a small ISP where we pushed wireless access similar to this for business customers (but on a smaller scale than TFA is talking about). Basically, you put an antenna up on the customer's roof with line-of-sight to one of our POPs, toss in a router, then generally just run cat5 from the router to their internal PCs. IIRC you could get up to about 2Mb with our type of setup.
We preferred this to setting up a T1 because it was generally more reliable. Not that T1 service in our area was bad (it wasn't), but it's always a plus to not have to deal with the Telco. Pretty much the only points of failure were the routers at each end of the link and the antenna.
Now, whether this Space Needle implementation will take off, I don't know. But the concept of wireless as a T1 replacement is certainly sound.
Seriously, how many shitty audioplayers, xml editors, text editors, and the like are there in open source?
/video players and text/HTML editors, either. There's squillions of them. So I think the issue is just that programmers in general like to keep scratching the same itches over, and over again--it has nothing to do with open source vs closed source.
While this is certainly true, there's no shortage of shitty closed-source (commercial or shareware) audio
"We are considering adding UI for this preference (see bug 166648); however, our theory is that if link prefetching needs to be disabled then there must be something wrong with the implementation."
And if you kept reading the FAQ, you'd see the following paragraph:
"Update: By popular demand, Mozilla 1.3+ includes a preference in the UI to disable prefetching. See Preferences->Advanced->Cache to disable prefetching."
Note that PCI-X and PCI-Express are not the same thing.
actually, Kirk did fire Scotty for not having enough power to escape orbit in the episode The Apple (although when Scotty did come through 10 minutes later, he re-hired him): link
BusinessWeek has an article about the perceived threat of patents to Microsoft, citing the SCO case, the opening of OSRM, and the Munich situation as evidence for the veracity of their conclusion that Windows isn't safe. Their solution? Relicense to the BSD license or the Mozilla license. On a positive note, the article's author does link to RMS' article Why Software Should Not Have Owners; good to see Stallman being quoted and linked to in a publication Like BusinessWeek.
If it's just the word choice you have a problem with (which, admittedly, is quite confusing for those not familiar with Debian's release philosophy), you could always just call it "sid" instead.
Just to throw in a personal anecdote, since everybody else in this thread seems to be doing so: I run sid on a couple of desktop machines, and woody+backports on several servers. I've never had a problem with the woody boxes, and the worst problem I've had with the sid boxes is apt getting really confused and refusing to install or upgrade certain packages for a while (usually fixed within a day or two). Which can be a pretty annoying problem, but it doesn't (at least in my experience) leave the system in a "not stable" condition. YMMV, but Debian works quite well for my needs.
Hopefully they'll release before the end of this year and they can show people linux in all it's 2002 glory!
Why is everyone obsessed with Debian making new releases all the time? They maintain three separate trees (stable, testing, unstable) for a reason, folks. Nothing magical happens when they "release" a new distro--if the stable branch is too old/outdated for you, go ahead and use testing or unstable instead (or continue to run stable, and just selectively install the packages you need to be bleeding edge from unstable).
This hardly seems like an issue to me. I mean, even if you're completely successful, what do you get out of it? Move a useless package onto the first CD, maybe bump something more useful back to CD 2 or 3? Who cares, most everyone who installs Debian does the majority over the Internet anyway. Besides, if they suddenly got a zillion submissions for some little-heard-of app, chances are they'd notice something fishy was going on.
About the only purpose I can see for even trying this type of abuse would be to try to "win" one of the famous flamewars (vi vs emacs, gnome vs kde, etc), and those are all high-profile enough that they'll probably all be at the head of the popularity list anyway.
MOM was also a great game. I remember spending countless hours playing both MOO and MOM, and dreaming about what the sequels would be like if they ever made them.
The killer feature of the MOO series for me was multiplayer capability, though, due in part to the terrible AI all those games had. In fact, I've got a handful of people on my ICQ list who still play multiplayer MOO2 games on a regular basis, whom I join whenever I have the time (which sadly is not very often nowadays).
Just wanted to say thanks for the link in your sig. I'm a huge fan of the MOO series (although 3 was a bit of a let down), so it caught my attention.
:P
Carry on now
As someone who has been taking Ritalin pretty much consistently since 1992, I take offense at this kind of attitude. Is ADD/ADHD over-diagnosed? Yes. Are Ritalin and similar drugs over-prescribed? Certainly. Does that mean we shouldn't prescribe medication to help treat children (and adults too, by the way)? Hell, no.
I was diagnosed with ADD (that's the non-hyperactive variant) in elementary school. At the time, I didn't even believe I had the symptoms of ADD, let alone the condition/disorder/whatever you want to call it. It wasn't until my junior year in high school that I finally admitted to myself that I had ADD, and even more so, that taking Ritalin was actually beneficial to me. I tried going off it one summer when I was in college, and ended up failing most of my classes the next semester (which convinced me to start taking the Ritalin again).
Now, I'm not saying that everybody who thinks they have ADD/ADHD should immediately go out and start taking drugs. I realize that some people with ADD can get by just fine without any treatment, and that's great; I wish I could. And many others have found that changing their diet and various other non-drug solutions work for them. I don't know if the parent was trolling or not, but this attitude is somewhat common. And personally, I find it insulting.
Well, mass murdering sure, but it wasn't actually stealing. The premise of the game was/is that you are a contestant on a game show, and the items you pick up are cash and prizes you win.
Of course, being an arcade game, the story isn't very important to the gameplay. And the end result is that you're probably right; people will bitch about it.
Don't bother with the Yacc code, Orwell already did the work for you. As I recall, eliminating synonyms was one of the primary goals of newspeak.
But then again, if God did not want us to use the metric system then how come s/he gave us Ten fingers?
Well, just to be pedantic, God didn't give us ten fingers. He went for the more practical combination of eight fingers and two thumbs.
A couple of my favorites are Jet Grind Radio, Virtua Tennis, and Grandia 2. And I'm still looking for a broadband adapter for less than $50 :(
have an Athlon XP 1600 or some such, occupying an stainless steel case from a 286, with several modifications (aka pieces of metal cut out of it) to accommodate the newer placement of ports and such in the back. This machine still has a 5.25" floppy drive in it, and although it hasn't been used in at least 5 years, they still have a large box full of old 5.25" disks lying around somewhere (mostly lame shareware games & apps back when those shareware mail order catalogs were all the rage).
Compare the source media to a version run through a lossy compression algorithm. If the two are recognizably similar, then you have determined that media source's originally intended format.
That is a meaningless test. Of course, an audio file that you run through a JPEG compressor will end up not resembling the original. But wait a minute, running the same audio file through a different lossy compression algorithm (MP3, for example) will indeed result in a "recognizably similar" result. So this test only works if you get to specify which lossy compression algorithm to use. And arbitrarily saying "well, let's just standardize on JPEG" (or whatever) is just as pointless as arbitrarily speculating over the "intent" of the media.
As over-hyped as Master of Orion 3 was, I'd be surprised if many people other than hardcore TBS (turn-based strategy) fans knew anything about it. And for the record, as a huge fan of the series, I don't think MoO3 was that bad (though it's got nothing on MoO2).
Protecting their stuff is not the issue. People would share mp3s on Kazaa even if CDs weren't so easy to rip to mp3 and share. And the RIAA is under no obligation to try and protect their stuff (although there's nothing preventing them from doing so if they wish).
And as far as why they're suing people, that's simple. People are illegally downloading music, and as the copyright holders, the RIAA (or specifically, the labels represented by the RIAA) have the right to sue them for it. I'll leave the discussion of their attitude and tactics regarding the whole file-sharing phenomenon for another discussion.