And that is one of the major problems with the world today.
The law is too complex for anyone to completely understand it, let alone a layman, whose interest in the law extends only so far as not wanting to break it and be arrested.
Any law too complex for your citizens to understand is a bad law. Any set of laws too complex to be understood is bad. Requiring people to follow laws that they can't know is bad.
Why are we in this sitation?
Most politicians have law degress and are lawyers. (Anyone got numbers on the US senate congress/senate?) We let politicians pass laws, and lawyers benefit from more, complex, laws. Anyone see the conflict of interest here?
There are many partial solutions to this, but I'm inclined to agree with Shakespeare for the most part...
If you write a program and I write a GPLed addition to it, which you accept, you must release the whole program under the GPL. You do however have other options at the same time. You can take the original program, and even write new code to replace my addition, and then you have the right to re-license it in whatever way you want.
The original work, yours + mine, we control. I offered the GPLed code, you accepted.
The new work, yours, without mine, you control.
This means that in your example, you couldn't re-release the shared program under some other license without the permission of all authors. If some had vanished, you'd be out of luck. But you could take your original contribution and start fresh.
After all, if the other authors' work was small enough you'd want to ignore their wishes and sell the code, it should be small enough for you to quickly rewrite.
So, release code, your code is always yours. Release it under the GPL and what you're doing is ensuring that nobody else can wrap it up and sell it, without your permission.
The problem is that this allows a company to control the use of the product after you've purchased it. Should Origin/EA be able to delete someone's account in Ultima Online because that person has a web page critical of the game or company?
Once we start a trend where companies can (and do) permanently disable people's ability to use a product after they sell it, where's it to stop?
There's a *much* better solution. Just don't write games with things like Railguns. There's a reason every cheater in Q2/Q3 runs for the railgun, it's an instant-hit weapon doing a huge ammount of damage. Any bot can do that, what good is that?
Bots can't properly anticipate complex movement (ie, not straight line) and put a rocket where someone is going. Bots can't lob grenades into an area you want to go. All bots can do it the simple, trivial things
If games were based more on complex skills like pathfinding through maps, using non-instant weapons, etc. then an aimbot wouldn't do anyone much good.
A client/server architecture like Q3 has stops most of the simple run-fast cheats, or god-mode stuff.
The measure of a good game would be one that nobody could write a client-side bot for (ie, one that had to operate on the same info that the server sends to the player.) If nobody can write a bot to do it well, nobody will use those bots.
But, first we need to get rid of railguns and sniper rifles, those are perfect for bots.
Of course few people pay for Linux software, because few companies make anything better than the freeware alternatives.
I saw a GUI ping program for Windows 95, it was 1.2MB and didn't do anything other than repeatedly ping an IP. But it was shareware, the author wanted $10.
Now, in an OS with a lack of real utils you can get away with charging for ping, grep, etc.
In unix, that's standard.
Linux users buy a lot of games (at least, compared to how many other things they buy) and I know a lot of people who bough WP8. Games like Q3-Arena, SoF, etc, and huge apps like WP8 are things for which freeware clones are rare.
If companies want to sell software, maybe they should write something that can't be cloned in six months by a bunch of geeks in their parents' basements.
There's a whole different spin on it if you look at it from that angle. People with proprietary OSes are like people with proprietary hardware... stuck buying overpriced crud from a few large companies. There's a reason DDR SDRAM is catching on and RDRAM isn't, one's an open commodity which you can buy from anyone cheaply, the other is hideously overpriced and comes from select companies only.
Now, RAMBUS could whine about how PC users are unwilling to pay for RAM, but the truth would be that PC users are unwilling to pay more for crap.
The real reason most privacy and encryption systems don't sell is that GPG is free, a few tweaks on IP Chains and you've got a box dropping all incoming packets from IPs it doesn't know, etc. Who needs BlackIce or ZoneAlarm?
When developers develop useful applications which can't be hacked together in a few minutes, they might sell them.
Re:What bookstore are you from?
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Star In A Jar
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· Score: 2
Not at all, it mentions many things that we have later discovered, like cities, etc.
But that just means that like all enduring works of fiction, it has a grain of truth at the center.
Overall though, yes, it's untrue.
The proof for it is that it's supposed to be the guided word of god, and yet even the old testament is internally inconsistent.
Other than that, just for the point of view of a bookmaker, what's the odds? That's just one god out of hundreds, why is it likely that it's the christian god which exists?
If it was one of the others, one of the non-exclusive gods, then the odds would be better because it could be any number of them. But the christian mythos can only be true if their god exists and no other do.
No matter which way you look at it, it's a losing proposition.
I think the key in your question is the word 'good'...
Many encoders do this (arbitrary cutoffs, etc) but they aren't designed from the same point of view as an average encoder on a PC...
The reason simple *Law encoding is so popular in telephony is that it takes very little CPU time, on embedded CPUs without an FPU. It also produces a constant-sized output. That's very handy in networking with technologies like ATM where you can reserve bandwidth.
If you have CPU time to burn, even 10% of a modern CPU, then doing a perceptual encoding of speech in realtime gets your better quality at comparable sizes. But if you're trying to do this with so little CPU as to be transparent to the primary application (usually, in this discussion, a game taking 100% of the CPU) or on a tiny 8-bit CPU with 64 bytes of RAM, FFTs (etc) aren't an option.
The reason for the hard cutoffs is that they're usually done in hardware while the signal is still analog. I believe you can get current soundcards to do something like this while recording. If you can't, the work required to seperate out the unwanted frequencies through software means you should probably do a more advanced encoding.
If you're curious though, try an 8000hz voice sample with cutoffs where Gordonjcp suggested, then if your audio program supports it, try 8bit logrithmic encoding. (Not just 8-bit linear encoding, it's much worse.) It's definately not worth encoding music in, but it's not bad for voice. (After all, the telcos use it.)
What do you do for work? I have a feeling we're both in opposite ends of the same field.
Oh yawn, can't you think of something better than beating the dead horse of child-pornography?
Child pornography is already illegal is so many ways it's funny. You can't make it (staturtory rape, exploitation, etc, etc), you can't distribute it (contributory infringement, etc).
We don't need to limit speech further, we need to actually arrest the makers of this.
And, if someone writes a pornographic story with a young character, so what? It's just words. You know, sticks and stones, etc...
IMHO we need 100% free speech. Some things you do with speech will be illegal, but the simple saying of the words shouldn't be.
Conspiring to kill someone is done with speech, but is illegal for other reasons. Inciting a riot is illegal regardless of your method, etc.
But in different context, everything said should be fine.
If the movie industry didn't get the DMCA passed, I wouldn't care about CSS or region coding at all...
We've seen that nobody in Europe, Australia, or likely, anywhere other than the US/Canada is willing to accept sub-standard movies for more money. So they buy players that don't impose restrictions.
Ditto for me and forced viewing of commercials. (Sixth Sense was the last DVD I'll ever buy)
Now, if we were free to buy the disk and then access its contents in a manner the movie industry didn't like, there wouldn't be a problem. Sure, Sony's DVD players would force this crap on you, but nobody else's would. Even if all the big ones had bought into it, someone would reverse engineer CSS and do what they wanted.
When people finally force those stinking peasants to pay for Windows 2000, we'll all be happier.
I mean, how dare they not save up their yearly wages for an average of six years, to pay for this software.
That's criminal!
Microsoft is LOSING money here! It's not like software is free to copy or anything, these EVIL PIRATES are breaking into honest GOD-FEARING stores and PILLAGING copies of Win2k for their SATANIC uses.
When we stamp this out, the world will finally be a safe place for multi-billionaries! Thank the state-approved god!
You know, Microsoft doesn't lose ANY money from 'pirates'. Those unauthorized copiers make their own copies, or buy them from someone who has.
This doesn't even cost MS a sale, unless you actually expect that someone living in a country where the yearly wage is around $500 US, for a middle-class family, it actually going to spend $300 USD for an OS.
Get real.
This whole "piracy" scare is a farce. It's all about companies wanting control over what you do with their products, not actual concern over unauthorized copying.
Remember, theft deprives the original owner of something. Duplication, authorized or not, can NEVER be theft.
The smart-link feature is enabled by default, in a product shipped by OEMs to customers with no knowledge of computers. They can't be said to have chosen this feature because it's on by default.
Junkbuster and Proximitron are employed by the end-user, to modify the copy of the web-page that they were given.
The difference is that junkbuster isn't shipped with 90% of systems... Junkbuster isn't used by MS to display MS's ads on other people's pages.
You have a right to modify your copy of a copyrighted work. Take a book and black out the offensive sections, rip out the dull chapters, etc.
The same goes with a webpage. You want to view it, you get to view it as you wish. If that means using Junkbuster, fine, if it means NetNanny which might (*&^$) out offensive words, fine.
The problem is when someone comes in and modifies party 1's page and presents it to party 2, without either of them asking for it. They're close to the distributor here, someone who isn't allowed to distribute modified copies of a copyrighted work. They're positioning IE as *the* browser, so it's not like people picked it, it's simply what was installed. The situation is much like if you ISP started modifying pages you were viewing.
We really need to distinguish between MS's tactics, those of a third-party messing around where nobody else wants it, with those of Junkbuster, which is only useful when one of the parties involved in the communication specifically invokes it.
If you don't have any cash on you, you're hooped when the ATMs are down. Very few people I know rely completely on the banks.
In the ASP world, this is like saying that everyone keeps local copies of current projects, but uses the ASP for non-critical data, backups of old projects, etc.
I doubt that this will be widely used though, security is too hard to get perfect which for most businesses, is a requirement.
Think of the banking analogy, if someone transfers $100,000 out of your account (if either of us had that to begin with...) it'll leave an audit trail. It's pretty easy to prove that you didn't do that and get your money back.
The thief might have gotten the $100k, but it's a generic $100k...
Now imagine that your data was stolen and deleted. Even if the ASP has decent backups and can restore it, your non-generic data is out there, in the hands of your competitors perhaps.
On a related note, ATM transactions only require a second or so of network time, can you imagine the problems of having to be connected the whole time you're using MS Word (for instance) in order to save your document?
I can see the ASP model offering some benefits, when used with standard systems, but in the diskless workstations that people predict...
I think it says something that many bank employees (higher-level security types) (two of my friends) do keep their money in their matress, or rather, do keep enough cash on hand to deal with a week-long bank outage. It's good enough to rely on for the little things, but you want to be able to buy food when it inevitably dies.
Sorry, I forgot I was talking to the person who proved Fermat's last theorem when she was three... Or was that only solve the traveling salesman problem in constant time... Oh, no, just an expert at audio compression, the only opinion that matters in any matter philosophical, and the first person to solve the Monty Hall problem.
I really wish you'd read the posts before you reply to them, you'd be a lot more relevant.
I never said MP3 wasn't usable, I said *MP3 ENCODERS* weren't a good bet. The MP3 encoders ARE tweaked towards music, that's what people tend to use them for, and what they are engineered to do well.
You made a comment about just finding one, tweaking it a bit, and having a great solution. The only open-source ones I've seen have been designed with "MP3s", or 128kbit music... If you used one of these you'd have a lot of tweaking to do to get decent compression from it.
It also doesn't fit the problem, as I saw it. This thread is about communication for a game. Barry White tends to perform very few concerts via Quake3 server.
While I'm at it, I think I should mention that telephone calls are compressed, usually with hard arbitrary cutoffs, and MuLaw encoding. Also, the whole point of logrithmic encoding is to have more resolution for quiet sounds, instead of the loud sounds. What you describe is exactly backwards from the way it works.
I assume though, that you find the quality of voice over the toll networks to be unbearably bad though.
You know, I did say "I think" after the numbers 500hz and 3000hz, that sounds right, but I may have misremembered. I even marked it as such. However, arbitrary cutoffs sound only marginally worse than a smoother cutoff, and usually only on specific benchmarks.
If you'd prefer a touch more CPU, then by all means, use a smooth falloff. I assumed speed was all-important because of the gaming aspect... I wouldn't want a 20% speed hit from audio encoding.
When you're doing audio compression, delaying the signal for 50 or 100ms is safe, and gives you all the context needed. I also understand about perceptive encoding, not that it's a huge technical achievment as you make it out to be.
As with the gun control thing... I think you've got an agenda and you can't see that it's not mine. I don't give a rat's ass about gun control in your country. I do however find it annoying when someone throws around a bunch of misused statistics and emotional ploys to deceive people as to the severity of the problem. If you really had a strong point, you wouldn't need to use a bunch of tricks.
And you don't really seem bitchier, you were more insulting in the other thread and just as quick to anger, without reading the post.
Don't waste your precious time on my account, if I want to have this kind of technical discussion I'll go talk with the marketing team.
This is what that company that was mentioned a few months back was doing...
We all know that if you zip a file again, it gets smaller again, but it takes exponentially more time.
Couple that with the sort of exponential speed increase you get with repeated recompilation, and you get almost zero-sized files in a fixed ammount of time.
The exponential increase I speak of, is that if you get a 22% each time, you've got 48% increase after the second pass, and 81% after the third. It just keeps getting better.
The drawback with this is that because each recompilation of the program is a different binary (or it wouldn't be faster) it takes a new memory block. This means that the ram requirements approach infinity as well. Kinda nasty.
But, the patented part of this was that the company was going to use a Ram Doubler(tm?) type technology to compress the program in RAM, as well as the file. This then gets nearly infinite compression in a little over twice the time taken for single compression (there's some overhead) and about three to five times the RAM (there's more overhead in storage) required for just a standard 1-pass 30% compression algorithm.
The neat thing is it doesn't require quantum computing or anything, it's all off-the-shelf stuff, just linked in a neat way.
This'll revolutionize the market when they release it... we think MP3s are small! An 80GB HD will offer nearly endless storage.
Speech has more redundant information that most audio signals... A large factor in speech recognition is context.
How lossy are you willing to have this?
Written english contains something like 1.6 bits of entropy per character, meaning aproximately 10 bits per word. That can be pumped into a speech synthesizer and result in *very* lossy representation yet it maintains almost 100% of the meaning. (Ignoring fine details like inflection, etc.)
The best way, from a bandwidth point of view would be to detect phonemes and transmit only those, recreating the audio on the other side. This is a 'bit' CPU heavy for realtime...
At any rate, MP3 encoders might not be the best thing to use, they're tweaked to work well on music not speech. Likely you'll create a larger file than you need. Simply mask out all frequencies below 500hz and above 3000hz (I think) and apply a simple logrithmic encoding and you'll get fairly decent compression. It's also fast.
Nice to see you still posting to Slashdot, I had thought you weren't here anymore, being that you vanished in the middle of a thread... Or, do you not check your posts (slashdot.org/users.pl) to see if you've had any responses?
In the bank analogy, how do you know if they have a door or a window? Photons from the sun bounce off of it and hit your eye in a recognizable pattern.
How would you do this on a cloudy night? A flashlight perhaps?
There's no way (asside from sending out continual broadcast messages from everyone) for a server to broadcast that it is serving something. You simply have to ask. Portscanning is how you do that. You ask if they are serving files. How about web pages? How about...
Now, you could make up some convoluted scenario where the bank had photo-cells in the windows to detect if it was night, and your flashlight, unlawfully shined into their windows, blah blah blah...
This would be like if you were scanning for someone sharing files, you check FTP, HTTP, Windows networking, etc... Now maybe someone has a misconfigured program that instead of saying 'No', crashes when asked.
But that's not your fault, you were just asking a question.
If you exploited this, by asking over and over, it'd be akin to harassment. An otherwise legal action would be forbidden by context.
Similarly, portscanning should be legal. It's the way the network works. But malicious use of portscanning, or portscanning connected to a crime, wouldn't be legal.
Actually, I often find sites by typing in an address directly.
If I want to read the news, should I click on a link from Netscape's Netcenter (The only page I could assume exists, because they give it to me by default) and try to find a link to a website that might be affiliated with CNN?
Or should I just guess at the URL and try www.cnn.com?
When I was looking up a motherboard for a friend I tried www.gigabyte.com. What if that hadn't been for the company I was looking for? Would I be a lawbreaker?
Get over it.
If someone tries to connect to standard services, that's legit. These services don't announce themselves. It's like trying to find a hotdog vendor at a sporting event, but one where they didn't dress differently than anyone else, didn't advertise, or even carry hotdogs.
But, I assume, in your world, that it'd be illegal to go around asking if people sold hot-dogs, or if they could point you to someone who did.
Yeah, explain the economics, how this is anti-trust, how the WTO should... *yawn*
But tell them that if they buy a movie they'll be forced to sit through up to ten minutes of trailers because their player won't repond to the FF or SKIP keys. Explain how the stores won't take it back even though it's obviously defective.
Ask how many times they'll sit through a movie that forces them to wait through trailers for movies they don't want.
That works! I've turned quite a few people off of DVDs.
The same thing worked with divx, just explain how the player has a huge rebate, those companies must really want to sell them... why? Because you have to pay, every time you watch that movie. Want to skip to the end to play the credits, or watch a favorite scene? Gotta cough up again. And now, divx is dead.
You can explain these things to people. But ignore the 'freedom' and 'rights' arguments. Explain the forced watching of trailers, etc.
It gets even worse for TiVo if they didn't sell you anything, because they have no right to be doing anything to your box.
But, I'm pretty sure that by their automatic downloading of demographic info every night, they entered into an implicit business relationship with you.
Either way, 'fixing' someone's device so that it doesn't work the way it did when they bought it, without their permission, is going to be illegal in many ways, depending if they planned this, etc.
> First off, I commend you on doing your part to reinforce the stereotype of gun activists as being short-tempered hotheads in the first line of your post alone. That took skill:)
Wow, that must take skill. Because, as I said, I'm not a gun owner, nor an advocate of them. I feel, living outside of the US, that I have a fairly impartial view on guns. I've fired them, I understand their power, but am not afraid of them. I also have no desire to own one.
I think you need to go back over that, I *was* trying to be offensive, but only in response to your sexist remark, and I said as much.
To answer the last question next...
I see your mistakes with statistics to be how you use some of the statistics, without mentioning the rest. You say that 1.2% of shootings are found to be justified, but you base this only on the number of number of deaths, ignoring the number of non-fatalities.
While your FBI figures don't match with what I saw in a article on this, I'll accept yours, because as I say, it's not my country and I'm not big on collecting exact numbers about other people's murder rate.
Sure, I'll come back to your 98 out of 100 issue, if you wish. "Too harsh". That means that I feel they could have been right 97 times out of 100 or less, OR that I feel their punishments are too harsh for people they do convict.
If you go over it again, I said that I believe people have a fairly strong right to self-defense. I haven't seen the US courts (in my admittedly edited foreign view) be very willing to accept self-defense pleas.
I need no hard numbers to back that up, it's a feeling. I don't think all claims of self-defense are valid, the odds against that are astronomical, but ditto in the other direction.
The claim about the swimming pool goes to show people's illogical level of emotion in this area.
- Guns have a life-saving use, swimming pools don't.
- Children are more likely to die from drowning than gunshot.
Therefore, if "Save the children" is the reasoning used, people should be going after swimming pools. The fact that they aren't indicates that, like you, they are actively hostile toward guns and gun owners, not, as I see myself, neutral.
> Saying "something is worse than this, so it is ok to have this" isn't the slighest justification. Even the tiniest bit. That is a horrible way to base arguments.
Yes, but it's a reasonable way to judge people's priorities and motivations.
As for nukes, I'm not trying to say we should have them, I was pointing out that you were comparing dissimilar circumstances.
In the guns case people already have guns, so a current mortality rate from guns indicates how likely they are to kill someone, were they generally available.
Nukes are not generally available, so the current mortality rate is not indicative of the mortality rate if people were given nukes.
As such, it's likely that you uses nukes as a boogeyman, to stir up emotional knee-jerk support for your position.
> Please point out a real error that flips over the 50-fold murder/justifiable homicide distribution.
I don't need to, I'm not claiming nobody gets killed by guns. I'm claiming you used partial statistics in a misleading way.
As a side note, I mentioned my political views on self-defense, but I didn't make any claims.
> I know statistics quite well...
I don't doubt that. Doesn't change the fact that I think you're being misleading in your application. (In fact, you are quite strongly biased here...)
> Though, of course, humans also tend to kill each other, accidentally or on purpose, far more frequently and accurately than even our closest relatives (chimpanzees [snip]
I do agree with your later arguments that they aren't great fighters, lacking tools, but that doesn't change the predilection to violence. I'm sure a chimp could use a gun if it was demonstrated, and would thus become somewhat more efficient at it.
And, that murder rate comparison you mention must neglect killing of infants, because in the program I saw on homicidal animals (inter-species killing that wasn't over a mate.) they mentioned that a significant number of chimpanzie young are killed by rival tribes, other mothers, etc.
I'm not trying to debate your point about gun control in the US, and second (?) ammendment rights. I'm trying to point out how you're using statistics (and unreasonable comparisons) to mislead.
Correct. Removing the links from this wouldn't be a bad thing, but it would probably be next to useless from a POV of stopping most snooping.
There are two threats that I see...
The first is something like Echelon. This is a centralized (sitting on a few backbones) server that records all email that passes. They'd then scan for keywords, etc.
The second is someone who wants to read YOUR email, specifically. They'll tap in at your ISP, to ensure they see all your email.
Now, stopping random snooping is a good thing, but it's not most people's biggest concern. They want to stop people from snooping directly, reasoning that if someone snoops randomly they aren't aiming to use the information directly, but if they snoop on you specifically, chances are they're malicious.
So, encrypting between the links is a good idea, and should be done eventually, but isn't IMHO a huge priority.
The thread was pulled because the administrators of the board are stockholders. (And there are rumors they get payola, cash, free TiVos, etc, for running the board.)
Not exactly an unbiased solution.
Rest assured, this is being mirrored, like DeCSS was...
What if the next version of Quake 3 disabled cheat codes, and user-made levels (in single-player, it already blocks cheat-codes in multiplayer.)
Now, let's say that you like playing low-gravity Quake 3 (a favorite among my friends, actually) and have made maps that work well with this.
So you connect to a server one day and when it does the online-authorization it also sends an update, without asking, which removes support for these things.
Would you be annoyed?
The product doesn't specifically say you can set the gravity levels, but people have heard about its customizability and bought it for this.
So now, when you try to play Q3 with your friends, you can't use the settings you like, or the maps you want.
Now, to tie this into TiVo, imagine that you can't simply stick the CD in and manually reinstall it.
Would you be annoyed?
Well, maybe not, you see to be in TiVo's pocket from some of your other posts... Stockholder by any chance?
I see that the AVSers have come back to check out the source of the/.ing...
Who cares what the original cause was, it wasn't until there was a huge outcry that they stopped being assholes about it.
TiVolutionary's actions were probably enough to uphold a fraud charge, if not extortion.
He basically said (and I know you saw it) that non-subscribers didn't matter at all to TiVo, because they aren't part of the revenue stream, thus he didn't care what happened.
Then the "non-TiVo" admins of the forum started harassing anyone who suggested that TiVo had done a bad thing. (I say that in quotes because most of admitted stockholders, and there have been supported allegations in the past that a few of them are getting payola from TiVo.)
I just read your post, where you basically said that everyone should just shutup and deal with more nag screens, because, well, um, oh just deal with it... Was that an accurate summary?
These people bought a product that didn't work without being plugged in (claims to the contrary, you can't set the time without this) and they operated it in the correct (even according to TiVo) fashion. Then TiVo changed the software and rendered the system almost useless (excessive nag screens, etc).
Take your pick.
1) The unsubscribed users aren't TiVo's customers. This means that TiVo sabotaged a device belong to someone else, sold to them by a third party.
2) These people are TiVo's customers (though indirectly) and TiVo owes them the same level of service they were promised when they purchased the products.
Either one works, though I think #2 is closer... TiVo was using the demographics info that was uploaded, and by doing so, was implicitly accepting the user's phone-call.
Take your pick, imcompotent, or criminals. I'm thinking incompotent at this point, but if they don't clean up their act pretty quickly, I'll lean toward criminal.
They *need* to offer either immediate return to 1.3-level functionality, or temporary subscriptions. To do less opens them (completely justifiably) to lawsuits.
Then they need to get heavy into the PR to convince the lifetime subscribers that they aren't next. As someone pointed out, lifetime subscribers aren't generating any revenue for TiVo either... What's to stop them from pulling this again if they aren't forced to make it up to people? (Or, if the first was an accident, from doing it deliberately this time.)
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And that is one of the major problems with the world today.
The law is too complex for anyone to completely understand it, let alone a layman, whose interest in the law extends only so far as not wanting to break it and be arrested.
Any law too complex for your citizens to understand is a bad law. Any set of laws too complex to be understood is bad. Requiring people to follow laws that they can't know is bad.
Why are we in this sitation?
Most politicians have law degress and are lawyers. (Anyone got numbers on the US senate congress/senate?) We let politicians pass laws, and lawyers benefit from more, complex, laws. Anyone see the conflict of interest here?
There are many partial solutions to this, but I'm inclined to agree with Shakespeare for the most part...
If you write a program and I write a GPLed addition to it, which you accept, you must release the whole program under the GPL. You do however have other options at the same time. You can take the original program, and even write new code to replace my addition, and then you have the right to re-license it in whatever way you want.
The original work, yours + mine, we control. I offered the GPLed code, you accepted.
The new work, yours, without mine, you control.
This means that in your example, you couldn't re-release the shared program under some other license without the permission of all authors. If some had vanished, you'd be out of luck. But you could take your original contribution and start fresh.
After all, if the other authors' work was small enough you'd want to ignore their wishes and sell the code, it should be small enough for you to quickly rewrite.
So, release code, your code is always yours. Release it under the GPL and what you're doing is ensuring that nobody else can wrap it up and sell it, without your permission.
The problem is that this allows a company to control the use of the product after you've purchased it. Should Origin/EA be able to delete someone's account in Ultima Online because that person has a web page critical of the game or company?
Once we start a trend where companies can (and do) permanently disable people's ability to use a product after they sell it, where's it to stop?
There's a *much* better solution. Just don't write games with things like Railguns. There's a reason every cheater in Q2/Q3 runs for the railgun, it's an instant-hit weapon doing a huge ammount of damage. Any bot can do that, what good is that?
Bots can't properly anticipate complex movement (ie, not straight line) and put a rocket where someone is going. Bots can't lob grenades into an area you want to go. All bots can do it the simple, trivial things
If games were based more on complex skills like pathfinding through maps, using non-instant weapons, etc. then an aimbot wouldn't do anyone much good.
A client/server architecture like Q3 has stops most of the simple run-fast cheats, or god-mode stuff.
The measure of a good game would be one that nobody could write a client-side bot for (ie, one that had to operate on the same info that the server sends to the player.) If nobody can write a bot to do it well, nobody will use those bots.
But, first we need to get rid of railguns and sniper rifles, those are perfect for bots.
Of course few people pay for Linux software, because few companies make anything better than the freeware alternatives.
I saw a GUI ping program for Windows 95, it was 1.2MB and didn't do anything other than repeatedly ping an IP. But it was shareware, the author wanted $10.
Now, in an OS with a lack of real utils you can get away with charging for ping, grep, etc.
In unix, that's standard.
Linux users buy a lot of games (at least, compared to how many other things they buy) and I know a lot of people who bough WP8. Games like Q3-Arena, SoF, etc, and huge apps like WP8 are things for which freeware clones are rare.
If companies want to sell software, maybe they should write something that can't be cloned in six months by a bunch of geeks in their parents' basements.
There's a whole different spin on it if you look at it from that angle. People with proprietary OSes are like people with proprietary hardware... stuck buying overpriced crud from a few large companies. There's a reason DDR SDRAM is catching on and RDRAM isn't, one's an open commodity which you can buy from anyone cheaply, the other is hideously overpriced and comes from select companies only.
Now, RAMBUS could whine about how PC users are unwilling to pay for RAM, but the truth would be that PC users are unwilling to pay more for crap.
The real reason most privacy and encryption systems don't sell is that GPG is free, a few tweaks on IP Chains and you've got a box dropping all incoming packets from IPs it doesn't know, etc. Who needs BlackIce or ZoneAlarm?
When developers develop useful applications which can't be hacked together in a few minutes, they might sell them.
Not at all, it mentions many things that we have later discovered, like cities, etc.
But that just means that like all enduring works of fiction, it has a grain of truth at the center.
Overall though, yes, it's untrue.
The proof for it is that it's supposed to be the guided word of god, and yet even the old testament is internally inconsistent.
Other than that, just for the point of view of a bookmaker, what's the odds? That's just one god out of hundreds, why is it likely that it's the christian god which exists?
If it was one of the others, one of the non-exclusive gods, then the odds would be better because it could be any number of them. But the christian mythos can only be true if their god exists and no other do.
No matter which way you look at it, it's a losing proposition.
I think the key in your question is the word 'good'...
Many encoders do this (arbitrary cutoffs, etc) but they aren't designed from the same point of view as an average encoder on a PC...
The reason simple *Law encoding is so popular in telephony is that it takes very little CPU time, on embedded CPUs without an FPU. It also produces a constant-sized output. That's very handy in networking with technologies like ATM where you can reserve bandwidth.
If you have CPU time to burn, even 10% of a modern CPU, then doing a perceptual encoding of speech in realtime gets your better quality at comparable sizes. But if you're trying to do this with so little CPU as to be transparent to the primary application (usually, in this discussion, a game taking 100% of the CPU) or on a tiny 8-bit CPU with 64 bytes of RAM, FFTs (etc) aren't an option.
The reason for the hard cutoffs is that they're usually done in hardware while the signal is still analog. I believe you can get current soundcards to do something like this while recording. If you can't, the work required to seperate out the unwanted frequencies through software means you should probably do a more advanced encoding.
If you're curious though, try an 8000hz voice sample with cutoffs where Gordonjcp suggested, then if your audio program supports it, try 8bit logrithmic encoding. (Not just 8-bit linear encoding, it's much worse.) It's definately not worth encoding music in, but it's not bad for voice. (After all, the telcos use it.)
What do you do for work? I have a feeling we're both in opposite ends of the same field.
Oh yawn, can't you think of something better than beating the dead horse of child-pornography?
Child pornography is already illegal is so many ways it's funny. You can't make it (staturtory rape, exploitation, etc, etc), you can't distribute it (contributory infringement, etc).
We don't need to limit speech further, we need to actually arrest the makers of this.
And, if someone writes a pornographic story with a young character, so what? It's just words. You know, sticks and stones, etc...
IMHO we need 100% free speech. Some things you do with speech will be illegal, but the simple saying of the words shouldn't be.
Conspiring to kill someone is done with speech, but is illegal for other reasons. Inciting a riot is illegal regardless of your method, etc.
But in different context, everything said should be fine.
If the movie industry didn't get the DMCA passed, I wouldn't care about CSS or region coding at all...
We've seen that nobody in Europe, Australia, or likely, anywhere other than the US/Canada is willing to accept sub-standard movies for more money. So they buy players that don't impose restrictions.
Ditto for me and forced viewing of commercials. (Sixth Sense was the last DVD I'll ever buy)
Now, if we were free to buy the disk and then access its contents in a manner the movie industry didn't like, there wouldn't be a problem. Sure, Sony's DVD players would force this crap on you, but nobody else's would. Even if all the big ones had bought into it, someone would reverse engineer CSS and do what they wanted.
It's the laws forbidding this that I hate.
And no actual recorded content...
At least with a standard PVR or digital VCR you've got your shows even if you cancel the service at some point.
(Well, unless you've got a TiVo, where they fraudulently disable the device when you cancel their listings service.)
When people finally force those stinking peasants to pay for Windows 2000, we'll all be happier.
I mean, how dare they not save up their yearly wages for an average of six years, to pay for this software.
That's criminal!
Microsoft is LOSING money here! It's not like software is free to copy or anything, these EVIL PIRATES are breaking into honest GOD-FEARING stores and PILLAGING copies of Win2k for their SATANIC uses.
When we stamp this out, the world will finally be a safe place for multi-billionaries! Thank the state-approved god!
You know, Microsoft doesn't lose ANY money from 'pirates'. Those unauthorized copiers make their own copies, or buy them from someone who has.
This doesn't even cost MS a sale, unless you actually expect that someone living in a country where the yearly wage is around $500 US, for a middle-class family, it actually going to spend $300 USD for an OS.
Get real.
This whole "piracy" scare is a farce. It's all about companies wanting control over what you do with their products, not actual concern over unauthorized copying.
Remember, theft deprives the original owner of something. Duplication, authorized or not, can NEVER be theft.
The smart-link feature is enabled by default, in a product shipped by OEMs to customers with no knowledge of computers. They can't be said to have chosen this feature because it's on by default.
Junkbuster and Proximitron are employed by the end-user, to modify the copy of the web-page that they were given.
The difference is that junkbuster isn't shipped with 90% of systems... Junkbuster isn't used by MS to display MS's ads on other people's pages.
You have a right to modify your copy of a copyrighted work. Take a book and black out the offensive sections, rip out the dull chapters, etc.
The same goes with a webpage. You want to view it, you get to view it as you wish. If that means using Junkbuster, fine, if it means NetNanny which might (*&^$) out offensive words, fine.
The problem is when someone comes in and modifies party 1's page and presents it to party 2, without either of them asking for it. They're close to the distributor here, someone who isn't allowed to distribute modified copies of a copyrighted work. They're positioning IE as *the* browser, so it's not like people picked it, it's simply what was installed. The situation is much like if you ISP started modifying pages you were viewing.
We really need to distinguish between MS's tactics, those of a third-party messing around where nobody else wants it, with those of Junkbuster, which is only useful when one of the parties involved in the communication specifically invokes it.
If you don't have any cash on you, you're hooped when the ATMs are down. Very few people I know rely completely on the banks.
In the ASP world, this is like saying that everyone keeps local copies of current projects, but uses the ASP for non-critical data, backups of old projects, etc.
I doubt that this will be widely used though, security is too hard to get perfect which for most businesses, is a requirement.
Think of the banking analogy, if someone transfers $100,000 out of your account (if either of us had that to begin with...) it'll leave an audit trail. It's pretty easy to prove that you didn't do that and get your money back.
The thief might have gotten the $100k, but it's a generic $100k...
Now imagine that your data was stolen and deleted. Even if the ASP has decent backups and can restore it, your non-generic data is out there, in the hands of your competitors perhaps.
On a related note, ATM transactions only require a second or so of network time, can you imagine the problems of having to be connected the whole time you're using MS Word (for instance) in order to save your document?
I can see the ASP model offering some benefits, when used with standard systems, but in the diskless workstations that people predict...
I think it says something that many bank employees (higher-level security types) (two of my friends) do keep their money in their matress, or rather, do keep enough cash on hand to deal with a week-long bank outage. It's good enough to rely on for the little things, but you want to be able to buy food when it inevitably dies.
Sorry, I forgot I was talking to the person who proved Fermat's last theorem when she was three... Or was that only solve the traveling salesman problem in constant time... Oh, no, just an expert at audio compression, the only opinion that matters in any matter philosophical, and the first person to solve the Monty Hall problem.
I really wish you'd read the posts before you reply to them, you'd be a lot more relevant.
I never said MP3 wasn't usable, I said *MP3 ENCODERS* weren't a good bet. The MP3 encoders ARE tweaked towards music, that's what people tend to use them for, and what they are engineered to do well.
You made a comment about just finding one, tweaking it a bit, and having a great solution. The only open-source ones I've seen have been designed with "MP3s", or 128kbit music... If you used one of these you'd have a lot of tweaking to do to get decent compression from it.
It also doesn't fit the problem, as I saw it. This thread is about communication for a game. Barry White tends to perform very few concerts via Quake3 server.
While I'm at it, I think I should mention that telephone calls are compressed, usually with hard arbitrary cutoffs, and MuLaw encoding. Also, the whole point of logrithmic encoding is to have more resolution for quiet sounds, instead of the loud sounds. What you describe is exactly backwards from the way it works.
I assume though, that you find the quality of voice over the toll networks to be unbearably bad though.
You know, I did say "I think" after the numbers 500hz and 3000hz, that sounds right, but I may have misremembered. I even marked it as such. However, arbitrary cutoffs sound only marginally worse than a smoother cutoff, and usually only on specific benchmarks.
If you'd prefer a touch more CPU, then by all means, use a smooth falloff. I assumed speed was all-important because of the gaming aspect... I wouldn't want a 20% speed hit from audio encoding.
When you're doing audio compression, delaying the signal for 50 or 100ms is safe, and gives you all the context needed. I also understand about perceptive encoding, not that it's a huge technical achievment as you make it out to be.
As with the gun control thing... I think you've got an agenda and you can't see that it's not mine. I don't give a rat's ass about gun control in your country. I do however find it annoying when someone throws around a bunch of misused statistics and emotional ploys to deceive people as to the severity of the problem. If you really had a strong point, you wouldn't need to use a bunch of tricks.
And you don't really seem bitchier, you were more insulting in the other thread and just as quick to anger, without reading the post.
Don't waste your precious time on my account, if I want to have this kind of technical discussion I'll go talk with the marketing team.
Exactly.
This is what that company that was mentioned a few months back was doing...
We all know that if you zip a file again, it gets smaller again, but it takes exponentially more time.
Couple that with the sort of exponential speed increase you get with repeated recompilation, and you get almost zero-sized files in a fixed ammount of time.
The exponential increase I speak of, is that if you get a 22% each time, you've got 48% increase after the second pass, and 81% after the third. It just keeps getting better.
The drawback with this is that because each recompilation of the program is a different binary (or it wouldn't be faster) it takes a new memory block. This means that the ram requirements approach infinity as well. Kinda nasty.
But, the patented part of this was that the company was going to use a Ram Doubler(tm?) type technology to compress the program in RAM, as well as the file. This then gets nearly infinite compression in a little over twice the time taken for single compression (there's some overhead) and about three to five times the RAM (there's more overhead in storage) required for just a standard 1-pass 30% compression algorithm.
The neat thing is it doesn't require quantum computing or anything, it's all off-the-shelf stuff, just linked in a neat way.
This'll revolutionize the market when they release it... we think MP3s are small! An 80GB HD will offer nearly endless storage.
Speech has more redundant information that most audio signals... A large factor in speech recognition is context.
How lossy are you willing to have this?
Written english contains something like 1.6 bits of entropy per character, meaning aproximately 10 bits per word. That can be pumped into a speech synthesizer and result in *very* lossy representation yet it maintains almost 100% of the meaning. (Ignoring fine details like inflection, etc.)
The best way, from a bandwidth point of view would be to detect phonemes and transmit only those, recreating the audio on the other side. This is a 'bit' CPU heavy for realtime...
At any rate, MP3 encoders might not be the best thing to use, they're tweaked to work well on music not speech. Likely you'll create a larger file than you need. Simply mask out all frequencies below 500hz and above 3000hz (I think) and apply a simple logrithmic encoding and you'll get fairly decent compression. It's also fast.
Nice to see you still posting to Slashdot, I had thought you weren't here anymore, being that you vanished in the middle of a thread... Or, do you not check your posts (slashdot.org/users.pl) to see if you've had any responses?
Port scanning IS passive.
...
In the bank analogy, how do you know if they have a door or a window? Photons from the sun bounce off of it and hit your eye in a recognizable pattern.
How would you do this on a cloudy night? A flashlight perhaps?
There's no way (asside from sending out continual broadcast messages from everyone) for a server to broadcast that it is serving something. You simply have to ask. Portscanning is how you do that. You ask if they are serving files. How about web pages? How about
Now, you could make up some convoluted scenario where the bank had photo-cells in the windows to detect if it was night, and your flashlight, unlawfully shined into their windows, blah blah blah...
This would be like if you were scanning for someone sharing files, you check FTP, HTTP, Windows networking, etc... Now maybe someone has a misconfigured program that instead of saying 'No', crashes when asked.
But that's not your fault, you were just asking a question.
If you exploited this, by asking over and over, it'd be akin to harassment. An otherwise legal action would be forbidden by context.
Similarly, portscanning should be legal. It's the way the network works. But malicious use of portscanning, or portscanning connected to a crime, wouldn't be legal.
Actually, I often find sites by typing in an address directly.
If I want to read the news, should I click on a link from Netscape's Netcenter (The only page I could assume exists, because they give it to me by default) and try to find a link to a website that might be affiliated with CNN?
Or should I just guess at the URL and try www.cnn.com?
When I was looking up a motherboard for a friend I tried www.gigabyte.com. What if that hadn't been for the company I was looking for? Would I be a lawbreaker?
Get over it.
If someone tries to connect to standard services, that's legit. These services don't announce themselves. It's like trying to find a hotdog vendor at a sporting event, but one where they didn't dress differently than anyone else, didn't advertise, or even carry hotdogs.
But, I assume, in your world, that it'd be illegal to go around asking if people sold hot-dogs, or if they could point you to someone who did.
Yeah, explain the economics, how this is anti-trust, how the WTO should ... *yawn*
But tell them that if they buy a movie they'll be forced to sit through up to ten minutes of trailers because their player won't repond to the FF or SKIP keys. Explain how the stores won't take it back even though it's obviously defective.
Ask how many times they'll sit through a movie that forces them to wait through trailers for movies they don't want.
That works! I've turned quite a few people off of DVDs.
The same thing worked with divx, just explain how the player has a huge rebate, those companies must really want to sell them... why? Because you have to pay, every time you watch that movie. Want to skip to the end to play the credits, or watch a favorite scene? Gotta cough up again. And now, divx is dead.
You can explain these things to people. But ignore the 'freedom' and 'rights' arguments. Explain the forced watching of trailers, etc.
It gets even worse for TiVo if they didn't sell you anything, because they have no right to be doing anything to your box.
But, I'm pretty sure that by their automatic downloading of demographic info every night, they entered into an implicit business relationship with you.
Either way, 'fixing' someone's device so that it doesn't work the way it did when they bought it, without their permission, is going to be illegal in many ways, depending if they planned this, etc.
> First off, I commend you on doing your part to reinforce the stereotype of gun activists as being short-tempered hotheads in the first line of your post alone. That took skill :)
Wow, that must take skill. Because, as I said, I'm not a gun owner, nor an advocate of them. I feel, living outside of the US, that I have a fairly impartial view on guns. I've fired them, I understand their power, but am not afraid of them. I also have no desire to own one.
I think you need to go back over that, I *was* trying to be offensive, but only in response to your sexist remark, and I said as much.
To answer the last question next...
I see your mistakes with statistics to be how you use some of the statistics, without mentioning the rest. You say that 1.2% of shootings are found to be justified, but you base this only on the number of number of deaths, ignoring the number of non-fatalities.
While your FBI figures don't match with what I saw in a article on this, I'll accept yours, because as I say, it's not my country and I'm not big on collecting exact numbers about other people's murder rate.
Sure, I'll come back to your 98 out of 100 issue, if you wish. "Too harsh". That means that I feel they could have been right 97 times out of 100 or less, OR that I feel their punishments are too harsh for people they do convict.
If you go over it again, I said that I believe people have a fairly strong right to self-defense. I haven't seen the US courts (in my admittedly edited foreign view) be very willing to accept self-defense pleas.
I need no hard numbers to back that up, it's a feeling. I don't think all claims of self-defense are valid, the odds against that are astronomical, but ditto in the other direction.
The claim about the swimming pool goes to show people's illogical level of emotion in this area.
- Guns have a life-saving use, swimming pools don't.
- Children are more likely to die from drowning than gunshot.
Therefore, if "Save the children" is the reasoning used, people should be going after swimming pools. The fact that they aren't indicates that, like you, they are actively hostile toward guns and gun owners, not, as I see myself, neutral.
> Saying "something is worse than this, so it is ok to have this" isn't the slighest justification. Even the tiniest bit. That is a horrible way to base arguments.
Yes, but it's a reasonable way to judge people's priorities and motivations.
As for nukes, I'm not trying to say we should have them, I was pointing out that you were comparing dissimilar circumstances.
In the guns case people already have guns, so a current mortality rate from guns indicates how likely they are to kill someone, were they generally available.
Nukes are not generally available, so the current mortality rate is not indicative of the mortality rate if people were given nukes.
As such, it's likely that you uses nukes as a boogeyman, to stir up emotional knee-jerk support for your position.
> Please point out a real error that flips over the 50-fold murder/justifiable homicide distribution.
I don't need to, I'm not claiming nobody gets killed by guns. I'm claiming you used partial statistics in a misleading way.
As a side note, I mentioned my political views on self-defense, but I didn't make any claims.
> I know statistics quite well...
I don't doubt that. Doesn't change the fact that I think you're being misleading in your application. (In fact, you are quite strongly biased here...)
> Though, of course, humans also tend to kill each other, accidentally or on purpose, far more frequently and accurately than even our closest relatives (chimpanzees [snip]
I do agree with your later arguments that they aren't great fighters, lacking tools, but that doesn't change the predilection to violence. I'm sure a chimp could use a gun if it was demonstrated, and would thus become somewhat more efficient at it.
And, that murder rate comparison you mention must neglect killing of infants, because in the program I saw on homicidal animals (inter-species killing that wasn't over a mate.) they mentioned that a significant number of chimpanzie young are killed by rival tribes, other mothers, etc.
I'm not trying to debate your point about gun control in the US, and second (?) ammendment rights. I'm trying to point out how you're using statistics (and unreasonable comparisons) to mislead.
Correct. Removing the links from this wouldn't be a bad thing, but it would probably be next to useless from a POV of stopping most snooping.
There are two threats that I see...
The first is something like Echelon. This is a centralized (sitting on a few backbones) server that records all email that passes. They'd then scan for keywords, etc.
The second is someone who wants to read YOUR email, specifically. They'll tap in at your ISP, to ensure they see all your email.
Now, stopping random snooping is a good thing, but it's not most people's biggest concern. They want to stop people from snooping directly, reasoning that if someone snoops randomly they aren't aiming to use the information directly, but if they snoop on you specifically, chances are they're malicious.
So, encrypting between the links is a good idea, and should be done eventually, but isn't IMHO a huge priority.
The thread was pulled because the administrators of the board are stockholders. (And there are rumors they get payola, cash, free TiVos, etc, for running the board.)
Not exactly an unbiased solution.
Rest assured, this is being mirrored, like DeCSS was...
What if the next version of Quake 3 disabled cheat codes, and user-made levels (in single-player, it already blocks cheat-codes in multiplayer.)
Now, let's say that you like playing low-gravity Quake 3 (a favorite among my friends, actually) and have made maps that work well with this.
So you connect to a server one day and when it does the online-authorization it also sends an update, without asking, which removes support for these things.
Would you be annoyed?
The product doesn't specifically say you can set the gravity levels, but people have heard about its customizability and bought it for this.
So now, when you try to play Q3 with your friends, you can't use the settings you like, or the maps you want.
Now, to tie this into TiVo, imagine that you can't simply stick the CD in and manually reinstall it.
Would you be annoyed?
Well, maybe not, you see to be in TiVo's pocket from some of your other posts... Stockholder by any chance?
I see that the AVSers have come back to check out the source of the /.ing...
Who cares what the original cause was, it wasn't until there was a huge outcry that they stopped being assholes about it.
TiVolutionary's actions were probably enough to uphold a fraud charge, if not extortion.
He basically said (and I know you saw it) that non-subscribers didn't matter at all to TiVo, because they aren't part of the revenue stream, thus he didn't care what happened.
Then the "non-TiVo" admins of the forum started harassing anyone who suggested that TiVo had done a bad thing. (I say that in quotes because most of admitted stockholders, and there have been supported allegations in the past that a few of them are getting payola from TiVo.)
I just read your post, where you basically said that everyone should just shutup and deal with more nag screens, because, well, um, oh just deal with it... Was that an accurate summary?
These people bought a product that didn't work without being plugged in (claims to the contrary, you can't set the time without this) and they operated it in the correct (even according to TiVo) fashion. Then TiVo changed the software and rendered the system almost useless (excessive nag screens, etc).
Take your pick.
1) The unsubscribed users aren't TiVo's customers. This means that TiVo sabotaged a device belong to someone else, sold to them by a third party.
2) These people are TiVo's customers (though indirectly) and TiVo owes them the same level of service they were promised when they purchased the products.
Either one works, though I think #2 is closer... TiVo was using the demographics info that was uploaded, and by doing so, was implicitly accepting the user's phone-call.
Take your pick, imcompotent, or criminals. I'm thinking incompotent at this point, but if they don't clean up their act pretty quickly, I'll lean toward criminal.
They *need* to offer either immediate return to 1.3-level functionality, or temporary subscriptions. To do less opens them (completely justifiably) to lawsuits.
Then they need to get heavy into the PR to convince the lifetime subscribers that they aren't next. As someone pointed out, lifetime subscribers aren't generating any revenue for TiVo either... What's to stop them from pulling this again if they aren't forced to make it up to people? (Or, if the first was an accident, from doing it deliberately this time.)