I'm willing to extend the "right to life" to everyone, once, based on their being human. But I think that everyone else has the right to revoke that when it's obviously being abused.
If a dangerous animal gets lose you might try to shoot it with a tranquilizer, but only if you know you'll be able to get another shot with a lethal bullet if the first attempt fails.
I think we should treat people the same way. You use rubber bullet to bring down a dangerous person, but if they've got body armor and shrug those off, go for the teflon coated rounds and bring them down before they hurt innocents.
On to the death penalty...
Once we've got them, alive, what do we do with them? Well, you'll probably be suprised at this because of my views, but I'm against the death penalty.
Not for moral reasons though, hell no. I could easily throw the switch and fry Osama, or any other mass murderer. My reasons against killing prisoners is that it's final and our court system makes a lot of mistakes. You might say that we "know" so&so did it, so we can kill them, but that line of absolute proof will fade a little and we'll be back to killing anyone of the wrong race, or accused of an unpopular crime.
If I didn't see us already sliding down the slippery slope, I'd see no problem with giving Osama to the families of the dead. Or Dahlmer. Or Manson. Or, George Bush Sr. (who ordered the deaths of thousands of Iraqi conscripts rather than targetting Sadamm.)
Hell, for Osama, I'd suggest some punishments. The sex change idea, along with violating his religious doctrine (pork? alcohol?) so that his followers believe he didn't get a final reward.
I just don't think the government should be killing people once we've peacefully restrained them. It's Pandora's box, just waiting to be opened.
I don't give a fuck for MS's stockholders. They should know not to buy the stock of a company that's performing many illegal actions.
The people I care about are the stockholders and employees of the companies MS drove out of business with their monopolistic practices.
I support making stockholders liable for the criminal actions of the companies they own stock in, when any due dilligence would have uncovered these practices.
Same here. I've got a box of 5.25s that I haven't pitched yet, and a few boxes of 3.5s I still occasionally use for boot disks.
The difference is that when I got 3.5s and slowly stopped using 5.25s, I copied everything I had from 50+ disks onto 5 or so higher-capacity ones. When I got a HD and stopped using floppies much, I used 30MB or so and copied all my stuff off of floppies.
In fact, if I go into e:\OldDrive on my 80GB drive, there's my old directory structure (with the OS and other stuff removed). Trace down in that and you'll find a bunch of zip files, each one holding a 1.4MB floppy of data. Some of those floppy images contain smaller zip files...
For 1.5GB of space, I've got a backup of my old data which I made before it became hard to get a floppy drive. I've also burned the important stuff onto a CD.
One day this ATA66 drive will be unusable, but by then I'll have burned it onto two DVD disks, and I'll copy those onto the new storage devices of the day.
And in 2081, someone will be able to use a string of emulators to run AppleWin and load up those old programs I wrote a hundred years ago.
You only assume that lawlessness would run rampant with the control measure of the week.
If phones were just invented and police weren't allowed to tap them, criminals would use them, but police would bug or tap something else. If they wanted to know what a criminal was doing, they'd follow him around and use a directional mic.
What would happen if someone invented a quantum communicator, so-called because it involves instantaneous communication between two points with no in-between signal. It would be untappable by nature. Would you advocate crippling it by either covering up the technology, or requiring every communicator to have a second communications channel that recorded everything at a government monitoring station?
My main problem with phone tapping and key escrow is that they allow automated tapping. Automated tapping is where you get your abuses. It's so easy, so why don't they simply record everything and scan it at their leisure. Voice recognition means that keyword scanning is a possibility, and text can trivially be scanned.
In the days when tapping a phone meant that you had to leave a reel-to-reel tape recorder on it, and then have an agent listen to it you couldn't do it indiscriminately.
Today's technology raises the scary spectre of McCarthy-ism. Imagine when all your communications in the last twenty years can be quickly perused and used against you. However, by keeping evesdropping hard, the government (or anyone who could potentially crack their databases) would have to suspect you of a crime instead of just going on a fishing expedition.
There are many ways now that criminals can communicate safely, including over the telephone, and crime isn't rampant. I think you're grasping at straws.
MAPS doesn't properly disclose why companies got on the list. They blackhole Spamford Wallace right along with some company that simply denies their right to scan the mail servers.
As such, I think they do cross the line to libel (or slander) by implying that any company on their list is spamming or harbouring spam. Many admins just don't like their heavy-handed ways, yet are blackmailed into cooperating.
If MAPS was a more open process, and democratic, where all communications with the offending admins were posted and people got to vote to block them, I'd support it more. As is, with it a black-box system where you simply have to trust MAPS... No.
I will (voluntarily) cede NOTHING to the government, unless I am convinced that it will help.
If the government banned strong crypto, it wouldn't help, at all. Strong crypto already exists. When used with stegonagraphy, strong crypto can produce essentially invisible messages. This means criminals could continue to use strong crypto, but ordinary law-abiding citizens couldn't.
Thus, if I give up my right to crypto, I haven't actually helped to make the world any safer. In fact, by putting all my communications in plain-text (trusting DMCA-type laws to prevent evesdropping) I'd have made life even easier for the criminals.
There's a good article on Counterpane (www.counterpane.com/labs.html) about this very thing. He says that it makes sense to be inconvenienced by some security measures, but only if they actually provide security. If they don't make anything more secure, they're just a placebo (at best) and might be harmful.
Do you care to suggest some rights that I might choose to give up?
I don't know if you're joking, so I'll be pedantic...
If a molecule weighs four times as much, any given volume of the gas (in the same conditions) will weigh four times as much. Molecule size is (mostly) irrelevant when considering the number of molecules / volume.
Phones: Need mucho-CPU for encryption, data-handling, games, etc.
TVs: On-screen menus (Tivo/Replay built-in), Wake-on-Word (watching captions on multiple channels). Potentially decoding some Flash/Shockwave-type protocol for easy field-upgradability.
Set-top boxes: Potentially computer replacements, need enough CPU to work with a few million polygons (eventually) for high-end graphics.
Microwave ovens: How about instead of entering the desired time, if you could tell the microwave what type of food you were cooking and it could tell when it was done via surface temperature and oven-humidity? This is already possible for simple foods like popcorn and baked-potatoes.
DVDs/CDs: Same requirements as a TV, except also the ability to decode higher MPEG levels for future expansion. Also to support decent wireless networking so you can configure play-lists on a device with an interface (handheld, or desktop computer.)
Stereo: 5.1 Theatre sound decoding, etc. Audio filters.
Now, a lot of that doesn't need a general-purpose CPU. You could do it with a smaller CPU and a DSP, but DSPs cost more to develop for (if you're getting their full potential from them you've got to know a lot more about the chip and do a little ASM). Transmeta also has a possible advantage here in emulating CPUs, giving you a faster version of whatever you were using before, removing any development time that would be spent porting.
Show me where Kazaa payed Knuth for what their programmers learned from his pioneering work. Or Tannenbaum for his networking, etc.
If they cloned themselves, raised the clones in a bubble away from society, and trained them to be programmers, from scratch, then I might accept that they have no debt to public knowledge.
If they didn't do these amazing things, maybe you should realize that their precious p2p network is just a rehashing of Napster, Gnutella, FTP, HTTP, and other networking protocols and topologies. The only way they "own" what they created was the bizarre "IP" laws of the US. By any sensible system they can no-more claim to be the creators of something new than someone who republishes Shakespear in a large-type edition.
I'm not hostile towards those who run a business, just towards those who think the world owes them a living just because they do. You may have a great idea which translates into a great business, but you have no right to say I can't look at that idea and start my own business. If I can take your idea and make it better, I deserve the business you once had. There's no difference there than when you took the collection of publicly-created knowledge you'd been taught over the years and had one semi-original idea based on it. It's still a derivative work.
gIFT did exactly what they should have. They wanted to use the same protocol as Kazaa clients, to trade with them, so instead of taking an existing Kazaa client and NOPing out the ad-display code, they wrote their own. To say they aren't entitled is ridiculous.
Hollywood flicks are for morons who can't handle a book, and "real" parties are for people who can't meet someone and have sex without needing to get the women drunk first.
Well, if you like those two things, you'd probably need help getting your computer running and don't have a girlfriend. Maybe a LAN party isn't for you.
Patents are supposed to cover non-obvious technologies. This patent is incredibly obvious, and trivial. Even worse, it was obvious back in '92 when it was patented.
The reason TiVo didn't see the patent was likely because it was submarined... they kept it 'pending' for years, so that it would be issued publicly just before that wanted to enforce it.
TiVo patented their own method of doing this in '99, and that wouldn't have been granted if the '92 patent was available for them to see.
Face it, patents are usually crap and this is a perfect example of it. You corporate apologists have your work cut out for you here.
As people pointed out, pausing live television has been a desired feature for a long time. _I Dream of Jeannie_ supposedly had an episode where she did this, back in the early 70s.
Circular buffers are a trivial concept, I myself invented them independently in grade four, for use in an undo feature.
Assuming that all professional programmers either read about or figured out circular buffers on their own, the only "innovation" here is in applying that solution to the problem. However, as this is likely the way anyone would solve this problem, it's not very innovative.
Face it, it's a bogus patent. So are most that get mentioned on Slashdot. "We" bash most patents because peopel are free to patent shit like business models these days.
Not only has the patent office completely given up on its mandate, but patents are a broken idea to begin with. They reward the first person to register with the patent office, not necessarily the inventor. And when they do reward an inventor, they screw everyone else who developed that independently.
Furthermore, this patent appears to have been intentionally delayed so as to bring it out when the market was already using the technology, allowing the "inventor" to extort money from everyone who independently invented the technology.
In my not so humble opinion, the filer of the patent is a thief. They package up other people's ideas, wait for someone to make a useful product, and try to get the courts to award them a large percentage of it. The laws may currently allow this, but that doesn't make it a good thing.
I actually posted a bit about this a day or two ago... Someone mentioned getting together on a quake server and communicating through jumps and basic gestures. That had a few flaws, so I tried to come up with a way you could just play the game and still communicate to an observer, yet not be conspicuous.
The thread is at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21984&cid=2353 112
But the jist of it is that you modulate your ping (at your end) and the observer factors out common ping fluctuations, to find your changes, which are based on a secret message.
Well, it's been shown you can figure out a lot of what a CPU is doing by watching power consumption (very accurately).
And by watching time-sharing you can get a fairly good idea about what other users on the computer are doing. Someone showed this being used to figure out a secret key, based on how much CPU time they got while the target was decrypting something. I imagine you'd need quite a few decryptions before you got it all, but even a hint helps the cracking.
Yes, these subtle communications channels can be very powerful.
Since when does a third-party to the deal (Microsoft) get to forbid something which may be illegal? If they think I'm breaking the law (selling warezed copies) then they need to call the police, who on seeing evidence, can investigate further.
Besides, all I need to sell Windows is the CD it came on. Why should I need to keep original receipts to prove that the legit CD is legit?
You're advocating guilt until proven innocent, and allowing MS to enforce the law without bothering with a trial.
If MS thinks I'm selling a pirated copy of windows, they should buy it, and if I did, sue me. (Both for fraud as a seller, and copyright violation.) Otherwise they're out of luck.
Gotcha, by your standards, age is what it's all about. Gotta respect the old COBOL programmer, he's got skillz.
You're getting tiresome. You refuse to read and blame the views of some on everyone.
I don't specifically believe that any of those five reasons I mentioned are a good reason to treat the NYT and GPLed code different, but they are reasons I know people use.
All I have stated that I believe in, is situational ethics. Your comeback is "that's just rationalization". Feh, how unoriginal. Of course it's rationalization, because unlike you, I'm not afraid to think for myself.
I have the ability to evaluate a sitation and act as I feel is justified. I'm rational, and I rationalize. That's a GOOD thing. Only sheep think otherwise.
The message was a reply to the story posting, if you didn't notice; intended for the editors who posted the story and run the place and anyone else for whom the shoe fits.
There are multiple editors, and they post news items they don't necessarily agree with. It's news for nerds, not propoganda for the proles.
"Big media", your paranoia about being tracked, etc. is irrelevant.
Not at all. Those are some of the reasons people see a difference between GPL'd free software and the NYT registration. You're free to think they're identical if you want, but it just shows you can't evaluate things based on the context they're in.
I'm not even saying all or any of those reasons are valid, just that they are reasons people see a difference.
Excuse me, but if our account #'s are any indication I've been around here a lot longer than you have, so piss off.
Testy. I've also posted three times as much as you, so by my standards you're the relative newbie.
Real ethics don't work that way.
Real ethics are situational. That's the difference between murder and self-defense. Any morals worth having recognize the situational context and take it into account.
And if you think I give a flying rat's ass about the bullshit that passes for moderation around here then you've got another think coming.
The main use of moderation on Slashdot is to hide spam, crap flooding, or clueless/offtopic comments. I couldn't care less what your karma is, I merely advocate moderating down people who don't seem to understand the difference between individuals and a group. Even moreso, it's redundant. Every time there's a GPL or MS related post (very often) one or two people post something like you did, asking how Slashdot as a singular entity, can hold two conflicting views. Even if you had anything insightful to say, it's already been said.
I've actually suggested this before. It's not a bad idea, except that you'd get fragged a lot unless you found a quiet server.
If you were willing to wait a while, you could even encode a message by adding to your ping time. Every two seconds, add 20% to your ping for a one, or remove the modifier for a zero. Of course, ping times fluctuate anyways, but this is how you hide your fluctuations.
The observer figures out the best guess of 'normal' ping fluctuations, by watching all clients on the server and removing any changes common to all of them.
This final data stream would still have some errors in it, but reed-solomon redundancy would take care of that, at the expense of increasing the ammount of data that needed to be sent.
But, the good thing about this is you could enjoy a nice game of Quake at the same time, and your behaviour wouldn't look suspicious to anyone watching.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm willing to extend the "right to life" to everyone, once, based on their being human. But I think that everyone else has the right to revoke that when it's obviously being abused.
If a dangerous animal gets lose you might try to shoot it with a tranquilizer, but only if you know you'll be able to get another shot with a lethal bullet if the first attempt fails.
I think we should treat people the same way. You use rubber bullet to bring down a dangerous person, but if they've got body armor and shrug those off, go for the teflon coated rounds and bring them down before they hurt innocents.
On to the death penalty...
Once we've got them, alive, what do we do with them? Well, you'll probably be suprised at this because of my views, but I'm against the death penalty.
Not for moral reasons though, hell no. I could easily throw the switch and fry Osama, or any other mass murderer. My reasons against killing prisoners is that it's final and our court system makes a lot of mistakes. You might say that we "know" so&so did it, so we can kill them, but that line of absolute proof will fade a little and we'll be back to killing anyone of the wrong race, or accused of an unpopular crime.
If I didn't see us already sliding down the slippery slope, I'd see no problem with giving Osama to the families of the dead. Or Dahlmer. Or Manson. Or, George Bush Sr. (who ordered the deaths of thousands of Iraqi conscripts rather than targetting Sadamm.)
Hell, for Osama, I'd suggest some punishments. The sex change idea, along with violating his religious doctrine (pork? alcohol?) so that his followers believe he didn't get a final reward.
I just don't think the government should be killing people once we've peacefully restrained them. It's Pandora's box, just waiting to be opened.
I don't give a fuck for MS's stockholders. They should know not to buy the stock of a company that's performing many illegal actions.
The people I care about are the stockholders and employees of the companies MS drove out of business with their monopolistic practices.
I support making stockholders liable for the criminal actions of the companies they own stock in, when any due dilligence would have uncovered these practices.
Same here. I've got a box of 5.25s that I haven't pitched yet, and a few boxes of 3.5s I still occasionally use for boot disks.
The difference is that when I got 3.5s and slowly stopped using 5.25s, I copied everything I had from 50+ disks onto 5 or so higher-capacity ones. When I got a HD and stopped using floppies much, I used 30MB or so and copied all my stuff off of floppies.
In fact, if I go into e:\OldDrive on my 80GB drive, there's my old directory structure (with the OS and other stuff removed). Trace down in that and you'll find a bunch of zip files, each one holding a 1.4MB floppy of data. Some of those floppy images contain smaller zip files...
For 1.5GB of space, I've got a backup of my old data which I made before it became hard to get a floppy drive. I've also burned the important stuff onto a CD.
One day this ATA66 drive will be unusable, but by then I'll have burned it onto two DVD disks, and I'll copy those onto the new storage devices of the day.
And in 2081, someone will be able to use a string of emulators to run AppleWin and load up those old programs I wrote a hundred years ago.
You only assume that lawlessness would run rampant with the control measure of the week.
If phones were just invented and police weren't allowed to tap them, criminals would use them, but police would bug or tap something else. If they wanted to know what a criminal was doing, they'd follow him around and use a directional mic.
What would happen if someone invented a quantum communicator, so-called because it involves instantaneous communication between two points with no in-between signal. It would be untappable by nature. Would you advocate crippling it by either covering up the technology, or requiring every communicator to have a second communications channel that recorded everything at a government monitoring station?
My main problem with phone tapping and key escrow is that they allow automated tapping. Automated tapping is where you get your abuses. It's so easy, so why don't they simply record everything and scan it at their leisure. Voice recognition means that keyword scanning is a possibility, and text can trivially be scanned.
In the days when tapping a phone meant that you had to leave a reel-to-reel tape recorder on it, and then have an agent listen to it you couldn't do it indiscriminately.
Today's technology raises the scary spectre of McCarthy-ism. Imagine when all your communications in the last twenty years can be quickly perused and used against you. However, by keeping evesdropping hard, the government (or anyone who could potentially crack their databases) would have to suspect you of a crime instead of just going on a fishing expedition.
There are many ways now that criminals can communicate safely, including over the telephone, and crime isn't rampant. I think you're grasping at straws.
MAPS doesn't properly disclose why companies got on the list. They blackhole Spamford Wallace right along with some company that simply denies their right to scan the mail servers.
As such, I think they do cross the line to libel (or slander) by implying that any company on their list is spamming or harbouring spam. Many admins just don't like their heavy-handed ways, yet are blackmailed into cooperating.
If MAPS was a more open process, and democratic, where all communications with the offending admins were posted and people got to vote to block them, I'd support it more. As is, with it a black-box system where you simply have to trust MAPS... No.
Just for reference, I'm Canadian.
I will (voluntarily) cede NOTHING to the government, unless I am convinced that it will help.
If the government banned strong crypto, it wouldn't help, at all. Strong crypto already exists. When used with stegonagraphy, strong crypto can produce essentially invisible messages. This means criminals could continue to use strong crypto, but ordinary law-abiding citizens couldn't.
Thus, if I give up my right to crypto, I haven't actually helped to make the world any safer. In fact, by putting all my communications in plain-text (trusting DMCA-type laws to prevent evesdropping) I'd have made life even easier for the criminals.
There's a good article on Counterpane (www.counterpane.com/labs.html) about this very thing. He says that it makes sense to be inconvenienced by some security measures, but only if they actually provide security. If they don't make anything more secure, they're just a placebo (at best) and might be harmful.
Do you care to suggest some rights that I might choose to give up?
I'm not sure what you're getting at...
You'd agree that a litre of hydrogen at STP and a litre of helium at STP both have the same number of molecules, right?
So molecule size (ie, "4 times as massive") is irrelevant, when considering gasseous storage. Right?
Of course, I guess hydrogen would be stored as a liquid, so it's a moot point.
I don't know if you're joking, so I'll be pedantic...
If a molecule weighs four times as much, any given volume of the gas (in the same conditions) will weigh four times as much. Molecule size is (mostly) irrelevant when considering the number of molecules / volume.
Phones: Need mucho-CPU for encryption, data-handling, games, etc.
TVs: On-screen menus (Tivo/Replay built-in), Wake-on-Word (watching captions on multiple channels). Potentially decoding some Flash/Shockwave-type protocol for easy field-upgradability.
Set-top boxes: Potentially computer replacements, need enough CPU to work with a few million polygons (eventually) for high-end graphics.
Microwave ovens: How about instead of entering the desired time, if you could tell the microwave what type of food you were cooking and it could tell when it was done via surface temperature and oven-humidity? This is already possible for simple foods like popcorn and baked-potatoes.
DVDs/CDs: Same requirements as a TV, except also the ability to decode higher MPEG levels for future expansion. Also to support decent wireless networking so you can configure play-lists on a device with an interface (handheld, or desktop computer.)
Stereo: 5.1 Theatre sound decoding, etc. Audio filters.
Now, a lot of that doesn't need a general-purpose CPU. You could do it with a smaller CPU and a DSP, but DSPs cost more to develop for (if you're getting their full potential from them you've got to know a lot more about the chip and do a little ASM). Transmeta also has a possible advantage here in emulating CPUs, giving you a faster version of whatever you were using before, removing any development time that would be spent porting.
Show me where Kazaa payed Knuth for what their programmers learned from his pioneering work. Or Tannenbaum for his networking, etc.
If they cloned themselves, raised the clones in a bubble away from society, and trained them to be programmers, from scratch, then I might accept that they have no debt to public knowledge.
If they didn't do these amazing things, maybe you should realize that their precious p2p network is just a rehashing of Napster, Gnutella, FTP, HTTP, and other networking protocols and topologies. The only way they "own" what they created was the bizarre "IP" laws of the US. By any sensible system they can no-more claim to be the creators of something new than someone who republishes Shakespear in a large-type edition.
I'm not hostile towards those who run a business, just towards those who think the world owes them a living just because they do. You may have a great idea which translates into a great business, but you have no right to say I can't look at that idea and start my own business. If I can take your idea and make it better, I deserve the business you once had. There's no difference there than when you took the collection of publicly-created knowledge you'd been taught over the years and had one semi-original idea based on it. It's still a derivative work.
gIFT did exactly what they should have. They wanted to use the same protocol as Kazaa clients, to trade with them, so instead of taking an existing Kazaa client and NOPing out the ad-display code, they wrote their own. To say they aren't entitled is ridiculous.
So bring your girlfriend.
Hollywood flicks are for morons who can't handle a book, and "real" parties are for people who can't meet someone and have sex without needing to get the women drunk first.
Well, if you like those two things, you'd probably need help getting your computer running and don't have a girlfriend. Maybe a LAN party isn't for you.
Sorry.
When you get tired of the game, take the replacement CD and leave. Then return the next day and ask for a refund, with it unopened.
Patents are supposed to cover non-obvious technologies. This patent is incredibly obvious, and trivial. Even worse, it was obvious back in '92 when it was patented.
The reason TiVo didn't see the patent was likely because it was submarined... they kept it 'pending' for years, so that it would be issued publicly just before that wanted to enforce it.
TiVo patented their own method of doing this in '99, and that wouldn't have been granted if the '92 patent was available for them to see.
Face it, patents are usually crap and this is a perfect example of it. You corporate apologists have your work cut out for you here.
As people pointed out, pausing live television has been a desired feature for a long time. _I Dream of Jeannie_ supposedly had an episode where she did this, back in the early 70s.
Circular buffers are a trivial concept, I myself invented them independently in grade four, for use in an undo feature.
Assuming that all professional programmers either read about or figured out circular buffers on their own, the only "innovation" here is in applying that solution to the problem. However, as this is likely the way anyone would solve this problem, it's not very innovative.
Face it, it's a bogus patent. So are most that get mentioned on Slashdot. "We" bash most patents because peopel are free to patent shit like business models these days.
Not only has the patent office completely given up on its mandate, but patents are a broken idea to begin with. They reward the first person to register with the patent office, not necessarily the inventor. And when they do reward an inventor, they screw everyone else who developed that independently.
Furthermore, this patent appears to have been intentionally delayed so as to bring it out when the market was already using the technology, allowing the "inventor" to extort money from everyone who independently invented the technology.
In my not so humble opinion, the filer of the patent is a thief. They package up other people's ideas, wait for someone to make a useful product, and try to get the courts to award them a large percentage of it. The laws may currently allow this, but that doesn't make it a good thing.
I actually posted a bit about this a day or two ago... Someone mentioned getting together on a quake server and communicating through jumps and basic gestures. That had a few flaws, so I tried to come up with a way you could just play the game and still communicate to an observer, yet not be conspicuous.
3 112
The thread is at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21984&cid=235
But the jist of it is that you modulate your ping (at your end) and the observer factors out common ping fluctuations, to find your changes, which are based on a secret message.
Well, it's been shown you can figure out a lot of what a CPU is doing by watching power consumption (very accurately).
And by watching time-sharing you can get a fairly good idea about what other users on the computer are doing. Someone showed this being used to figure out a secret key, based on how much CPU time they got while the target was decrypting something. I imagine you'd need quite a few decryptions before you got it all, but even a hint helps the cracking.
Yes, these subtle communications channels can be very powerful.
Oh wow, that's clever.
You're the one who brought up the question of belonging here.
You're wussing out. Can't support your position so you bring in irrelevant stuff (age of account) and then resort to insults.
Have fun.
Battlefield Earth is empty of all useful content... /dev/zero produces a file full of zeros. So, it's effectively the same as a DVD rip of the movie.
/dev/zero already functions that way, but only for Battlefield Earth.
Since when does a third-party to the deal (Microsoft) get to forbid something which may be illegal? If they think I'm breaking the law (selling warezed copies) then they need to call the police, who on seeing evidence, can investigate further.
Besides, all I need to sell Windows is the CD it came on. Why should I need to keep original receipts to prove that the legit CD is legit?
You're advocating guilt until proven innocent, and allowing MS to enforce the law without bothering with a trial.
If MS thinks I'm selling a pirated copy of windows, they should buy it, and if I did, sue me. (Both for fraud as a seller, and copyright violation.) Otherwise they're out of luck.
Gotcha, by your standards, age is what it's all about. Gotta respect the old COBOL programmer, he's got skillz.
You're getting tiresome. You refuse to read and blame the views of some on everyone.
I don't specifically believe that any of those five reasons I mentioned are a good reason to treat the NYT and GPLed code different, but they are reasons I know people use.
All I have stated that I believe in, is situational ethics. Your comeback is "that's just rationalization". Feh, how unoriginal. Of course it's rationalization, because unlike you, I'm not afraid to think for myself.
I have the ability to evaluate a sitation and act as I feel is justified. I'm rational, and I rationalize. That's a GOOD thing. Only sheep think otherwise.
So does the navy... think of what they have to hide in.
There are multiple editors, and they post news items they don't necessarily agree with. It's news for nerds, not propoganda for the proles.
"Big media", your paranoia about being tracked, etc. is irrelevant.
Not at all. Those are some of the reasons people see a difference between GPL'd free software and the NYT registration. You're free to think they're identical if you want, but it just shows you can't evaluate things based on the context they're in.
I'm not even saying all or any of those reasons are valid, just that they are reasons people see a difference.
Excuse me, but if our account #'s are any indication I've been around here a lot longer than you have, so piss off.
Testy. I've also posted three times as much as you, so by my standards you're the relative newbie.
Real ethics don't work that way.
Real ethics are situational. That's the difference between murder and self-defense. Any morals worth having recognize the situational context and take it into account.
And if you think I give a flying rat's ass about the bullshit that passes for moderation around here then you've got another think coming.
The main use of moderation on Slashdot is to hide spam, crap flooding, or clueless/offtopic comments. I couldn't care less what your karma is, I merely advocate moderating down people who don't seem to understand the difference between individuals and a group. Even moreso, it's redundant. Every time there's a GPL or MS related post (very often) one or two people post something like you did, asking how Slashdot as a singular entity, can hold two conflicting views. Even if you had anything insightful to say, it's already been said.
I've actually suggested this before. It's not a bad idea, except that you'd get fragged a lot unless you found a quiet server.
If you were willing to wait a while, you could even encode a message by adding to your ping time. Every two seconds, add 20% to your ping for a one, or remove the modifier for a zero. Of course, ping times fluctuate anyways, but this is how you hide your fluctuations.
The observer figures out the best guess of 'normal' ping fluctuations, by watching all clients on the server and removing any changes common to all of them.
This final data stream would still have some errors in it, but reed-solomon redundancy would take care of that, at the expense of increasing the ammount of data that needed to be sent.
But, the good thing about this is you could enjoy a nice game of Quake at the same time, and your behaviour wouldn't look suspicious to anyone watching.
http://www.spammimic.com/index.shtml
:)
It's a site that will take a message and encode it as spam.
Really, a hidden message can be encoded into anything, pictures are just best because they're usually capable of holding a thousand words.
There's an even better way to hide data, split it (a bit at a time) between two images, so that without both, the stream is undecipherable.
Just remember, always encrypt data before using stego, and output it to binary, not text. uuencoded text would be easy to detect in a picture.