Suppose you think you have an idea which is way ahead of its time, and requires maybe a
couple of centuries to be useful. And suppose an asteroid wipes out life on Earth in 35 years
from now.
Well, another solution would be to make sure no asteroids hit the earth:)
There's people working on the problem of tracing "dangerous" objects and calculating the probability of impact.... Have a look at this site to know more (note: it's very technical, but there are links).
Work on your trolling some more, this is too blatant.
Anyway....
The Internet is primarily a source of porn for maladjusted socially inept males. It has a
secondary use as an information resource, but let us not forget, over 74% of downloads and
over 80% of net traffic is porn related.
After reading this stats for the n-th time I got hold of some proxy data (kindly posted by a netadmin) and checked all the top sites to build some stats myself. Porn sites are at the same level of software download sites, at approx 1/3 traffic. The rest 1/3 is generic stuff like checking mail on hotmail, walt disney, or other.
I could answer that freedom only works when it removes the freedom to remove the freedom:), otherwise it'd be an unstable freedom.
Apart this crap, the GPL idea is very simple: you have to pay for the software you use when you create "add-ons" to GPL programs. The price you have to pay is to provide to the creators of the original programs the source of your add-ons, to pay back for the privilege of using their source.
Don't think that with GPL you "got the source for free", you didn't.
...switch to the another virtual desktop.
Annoyed by the sound? No touble to make sure that the sound card modules "happen" not to load at that time...
1. Entering computer information networks involved with national affairs, national defense or advanced technology; Entering is enough to be an offense. Wow, I wonder what the Eu/Us military would do if they found you entering their network...
2. Spreading slander and rumors or publicizing harmful information on the Internet; Ah, here it's much more limited. It's "illegal" only if you do it on someone who has more money than you.
3. Stealing or disclosing state, intelligence or military secrets through the Internet; Again, something extremely legal around here world....
4. Inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination or sabotaging national unity through the Internet; Ok, I must admit we don't have any trouble with sabotaging national unity....
5. Organizing a cult and keeping in touch with cult members, or undermining the enforcement
of state laws and regulations through the Internet; You can organize a cult here, but try to have it meddle with the laws and you'll see how legal it is.
6. Selling fake or substandard products, or advertising goods and services in a deceitful way through the Internet; Illegal quite everywhere...
7. Damaging the reputation of a business or a commodity through the Internet; This is the same as above. Except here it's likely they'll have more money, so stay clear.
8. Infringing upon the intellectual property of others through the Internet; Can you say "DMCA"?
9. Fabricating false information affecting securities and futures trading or otherwise disturbing the financial order through the Internet; As soon as someone bigger than you gets hit, check point 7.
10. Setting up pornographic Web sites or Web pages, providing access to pornographic Web sites, or spreading pornographic books, movies, video products and photos on the Internet; Legal here.
11. Insulting or defaming other people on the Internet; Repetita iuvant. It's the 3rd time they write this....
12. Illegally intercepting, altering or deleting others' e-mail or data, infringing upon citizens' freedom and confidentiality of communication, and Illegal here as well, unless you're the government.
13. Committing theft, fraud and atrocities through the Internet. I'd like to see where this is legal....
Ok, we have learned that the difference between China and us is that we can create cults, undermine the national unity and distribute porn.
It's wonderful to see how the great democracies are more advanced than China.....
:)
Re:Couldn't compete with MS...
on
Indrema No More
·
· Score: 1
Open source programmers may put out some damn fine quality code, but they can't hype to
save their lives.
Oh, i donno about that. The linux hype machine is effective enough that:
It's not the open source *programmers* doing this, but all the companies which are using open source software to make money.
If most/all IP were under compulsory licenses... well, you wouldn't have to worry about AOL-Time Warner withholding all of their programming from other cable networks, and you wouldn't worry about Pfizer withholding all of their medicines from knock-off producers. Sounds great doesn't it? But like all things that foster competition in the delivery of IP, it reduces the strength of the Innovator's half of the copyright/patent bargain... and any time you WEAKEN that half, you WEAKEN the encouragement to innovate.
I wonder how long we will keep hearing this crap of "no patent/copyright => no innovation". Apart from the fact that I've read an interesting study on the effect of patenting of software (resulting in basically no increased R&D investments), I know a lot of people working in research at Universities (e.g. myself). It's not like my salary will go up if I invent anything, but this does not prevent me (or any of them) do to our best to "innovate" (a verb which deserves being erased from any dictionary, BTW).
From what US media shows me Europe has lots of rampant car chases through downtown and
riots at soccer games (yes, I know the media isn't painting a true picture).
We in Europe get the idea that in the US it's mostly drug dealing, people running around with guns, schools shootings and money and lawyers
deciding everything.
Ah, and don't forget kids and innocents fried on the electric chair....
By comparing with what you say I'd guess that things must not be very different between Europe and the USA, it's (as usual) the media publishing only the shocking news and forgetting about all the rest.... Wherever you look, most of the citizens are honest workers, but it's always the killers who get the press coverage.....
In this case hardware/software makers are joining because they have an interest. And legislators will join in also. So consumers will have to gobble it as usual. remember that the life of the average computer is three years. When Joe Consumer buys his new 7GHz computer with 800Tb harddrive, the only hardware available will implement copy protection, unless you believe that Joe Consumer will build himself a beowulf cluster just to escape AOL Time Warner
What is important is what Andre was/is fighting for in the ATA specs: the copyright protection must NOT BE MANDATORY, but always optional. If it becomes mandatory then it's game over, as any independent artist will not be able to distribute
his productions (unless he pays royalties to hw manifacturers). If the DRM systems remains optional, then the market can evolve: if you look at MP3.COM, the artists there would be more than happy to see a "secure PC" around, since it'll incentive the distribution of their material.
Right now everybody pirates on Napster, but when you must pay-per-play, or no piracy is possible, the "free" (as in FSF) music will become much more attractive to people. Those bands will become known and they'll be able to estabilish the new market paragidm (and that paradigm works, at least by looking at the $ made by some artists on MP3.COM).
(indidentally, a DRM becoming mandatory would kill linux, which is something I don't see IBM doing in the future).
Geez people, if we could point an URL underground it would be enough to post it on slashdot to dig a hole so deep you'd see the sky of the opposite hemisphere....
Anyone mirrored the www.gri.org/laser link? It's not that it crawls, just getting the HTML is near-impossible, all images are broken (it also complains about my browser)...no way I can get to the "cool video clip"....
Thanks (and think of all the karma you'll get posting a mirror!:)
Together with the more recent DMCA, the use of copyright law that Sci. has made in the past shows that something is wrong.
Some time ago (say 2-3 years) I shocked a couple of my friends saying that we should actually thank Sci. for exposing a loophole in Copyright law. That law has never been meant to be used to squash free speech, and the fact that they were doing exacly that indicates that some reform is needed to limit the possible abuses.
I hope that the copyright/DMCA will be reshaped in the future, and that limits are put on "both sides" of the copyrighted works. If abuse of copyright law's "fair use" is to be sanctioned (as with Napster) then the same must happen when the same law is used by the author to threaten any free speech (Sci. method to deal with "enemies") - "fair use" again, but from the other side.
For me this is a fairly clear answer to the question "is programming an art?"
It definitely is.
I bow to the superior skill of the author of those 526 bytes. I've saved it even if I don't own a DVD reader (and I don't plan buying one), just to open up the file at times and contemplate it.
Maybe one day I'll see the light.
All this sounds like a wonderful idea, I just hope it doesn't get hijacked into a moral justification for massive law-mandated Internet filtering.
I fear that the major labels probably have enough money for this...
[[ I admit I tried Napster for the first time a couple of days ago (even if I followed all the copyright discussion from the start), and it's really a killer. I'd be ready to pay a fee for unrestricted usage. Just throw in md5sums to verify file integrity and I'm ready to pay up to 50FF/month without even *thinking* about it. ]]
It seems to me that the emergence of linux as the only serious competitor for Windows on the desktop shows how too strong is Microsoft's position. I mean, in a sane market, it's possible for a competitor to provide a product with a price tag, but is it happening on desktop OSs? Only linux survived for the reason that it does not require a positive balance at the end of the year, and this is because no corporation is paying for its developement (the hardware people who contribute do it to add value to their products).
The only "alternative" is MacOS, which with version X is moving towards the linux approach (Apple kept only the interface, the kernel is open source) to keep costs down, but once again it's like linux drivers developement: its purpose is to add value to Apple hardware.
Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Microsoft holding a monopoly in OS market, what is wrong is that they use it to gain an unfair advantage in other fields. Undocumented system calls and deliberate incompatibilities (ask the wine people) indicate not that Microsoft has power, but that it's using it to eliminate competitors, for example in the "office suite" field, where anything non-Microsoft runs even worse than the Micrcsoft stuff....
Competition in the software market exists only where interoperability is guaranteed by open, stable and defined-by-public-discussion standards. As soon as a "standard" is closed the way is invariably death (product disappears) or domination (competitors cannot interoperate with market leader and are driven underground). Even wondered why so many "clones" of the same app exist on linux? This is why I think that the only real solution to the "Microsoft problem" is not breaking it up but requiring a disclosure of API and file formats. (BTW the "problem" is not just with Microsoft - Netscape came crying for justice after Microsoft squashed them, but they had tried the very same thing with netscape HTML "extensions").
Call me "communist" if you want, but a law saying that you get copyright protection for your software only if you disclose your file formats to the public would be extremely beneficial to competition. It would also be extremely logical: what goes in those files is MY data and I should be able to recover it no matter what. (This would also fit nicely with a "modification" I'd like to see in the DMCA-like laws, i.e. that you get either technological OR legal protection: if you encrypt everything then you give up the legal protection - if someone cracks it you're fucked. Something of the type "if you kill user's rights you lose your own rights as well").
Ok, now end of dream and back to a world where mail attachments are in Word format because everyone assumes I use word....:(
WARNING This BETA has the potential to mis- recognize the drive geometry on systems with VIAApollo Pro or KT133 Chipsets and WD drives greaterthan 8.4Gb in size.
I'm running mandrake 7.2, most filesystems ReiserFS, and I've tried kernels 2.4.0, 2.4.1 and 2.4.2. I also have a MSI mb equipped with one of those chipsets. There's something going wrong, but definitely NOT with hd geometry recognition (BTW it was fixed in 2.4.2, I think). I've had the auto-tuning of HDs at startup screwing something with DMA config, resulting in my 20GB Seagate disk killing the system with dma_intr errors.
The solution is to shut down all "automatic" tuning and starting rc.sysinit with hdparm settings which configure the disk correctly.
I've had hdparm report the auto-config which kills the system and it's the same as the one I put (-d 1 -X66), but if I do it manually it runs fine.... go figure.
The problem I have now is that the disk is supposed to support udma4, but trying to set anything beyond udma2 results in a nice message saying it's not supported, even if looking at the source in drivers/ide/via6xxxx.c says it should go up to udma5. I've tried to force ide1=ata66 but the only difference is a warning message....
I'm clearly missing something, but since I don't need udma66 I've stopped investigating the issue...
Overall, if you're scared of developement stuff you shouldn't be running the stuff released 1 week earlier:)
Why all these new wonderful technologies with embedded-ultra-secure (ok, maybe) copy control systems are NEVER proposed to store personal/sensitive data? I don't give a damn about RIAA's music, I don't even WANT to copy it.
What I'd like would be to have my personal/medical/private/whatever data on devices which do NOT allow copy without my consent. If you want to do marketing stats, you ask me for the key and pay the privilege. If you "happen" to have a copy of my medical records, I want to be sure that I authorized you to do it. Why it's always "their" data which gets protected and never "mine"?
(hmmm... since privacy online is the current political trend maybe I should point this out to some politician?)
CRC checks won't work...simply because every MP3 encoder works with a different algorithm, producing slightly different results -
not to mention CD audio rippers that produce quantitatively and qualitatively different source files.
The aim of the CRC check is not to say that it's well-encoded, but just to say "it's an exact mirror of that one". Napster offical servers should contain high quality MP3s, but they may run slow (heavy load). With CRCs I can search for song X, see the CRC from the official (slow) server and then download it from the guy next door (running at 1Mbps).
It's a good idea, and they could use this "service" to charge some more (say $5 for "basic", $10 for basic+access to central server CRC values).
I hope they succeed in making money and showing that this is a workable business model. It'll kill off all the CPRM crap we've been seeing around.
How could we get the general public involved and fighting on the anti-CPRM side? DVD is encrypted, (was) not copiable, but still a lot of people buys it because "it's better", what could be a "user-level" example of why CPRM is bad?
Stephen King ONLY made $120,000??? Thats a real shame considering how much quality probably went into
"the plant". Let me guess, its about a plant that becomes powerful and evil after a comet passes close to the
earth.
I didn't read (or pay) for it, so I don't know. I also don't know why S.King did that half-assed attempt at using the Street performer protocol.
Not only he failed to provide a full product, but he based continuation on a percentage of people paying, instead of total money earned and, worst of all, stopped in the middle. I wonder if he did this just to prove that the Street P.P. does not work....
I'm quite positive that if he had done things properly (offering a complete work, basing creation of next one on received money >= prefixed goal) it would have worked just fine. Then we could argue that it only worked because S.King is already well-known (which would be probably true...).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, another solution would be to make sure no asteroids hit the earth :)
There's people working on the problem of tracing "dangerous" objects and calculating the probability of impact.... Have a look at this site to know more (note: it's very technical, but there are links).
Anyway....
The Internet is primarily a source of porn for maladjusted socially inept males. It has a secondary use as an information resource, but let us not forget, over 74% of downloads and over 80% of net traffic is porn related.
After reading this stats for the n-th time I got hold of some proxy data (kindly posted by a netadmin) and checked all the top sites to build some stats myself. Porn sites are at the same level of software download sites, at approx 1/3 traffic. The rest 1/3 is generic stuff like checking mail on hotmail, walt disney, or other.
I could answer that freedom only works when it removes the freedom to remove the freedom :), otherwise it'd be an unstable freedom.
Apart this crap, the GPL idea is very simple: you have to pay for the software you use when you create "add-ons" to GPL programs. The price you have to pay is to provide to the creators of the original programs the source of your add-ons, to pay back for the privilege of using their source.
Don't think that with GPL you "got the source for free", you didn't.
Annoyed by the sound? No touble to make sure that the sound card modules "happen" not to load at that time...
In short, it'll not work.
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=3, Troll=4, Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Informative=2, Funny=9, Overrated=3, Total=23.
I mean....it's insane :)
Entering is enough to be an offense. Wow, I wonder what the Eu/Us military would do if they found you entering their network...
Ah, here it's much more limited. It's "illegal" only if you do it on someone who has more money than you.
Again, something extremely legal around here world....
Ok, I must admit we don't have any trouble with sabotaging national unity....
You can organize a cult here, but try to have it meddle with the laws and you'll see how legal it is.
Illegal quite everywhere...
This is the same as above. Except here it's likely they'll have more money, so stay clear.
Can you say "DMCA"?
As soon as someone bigger than you gets hit, check point 7.
Legal here.
Repetita iuvant. It's the 3rd time they write this....
Illegal here as well, unless you're the government.
I'd like to see where this is legal....
Ok, we have learned that the difference between China and us is that we can create cults, undermine the national unity and distribute porn.
It's wonderful to see how the great democracies are more advanced than China.....
Oh, i donno about that. The linux hype machine is effective enough that:
It's not the open source *programmers* doing this, but all the companies which are using open source software to make money.
I wonder how long we will keep hearing this crap of "no patent/copyright => no innovation". Apart from the fact that I've read an interesting study on the effect of patenting of software (resulting in basically no increased R&D investments), I know a lot of people working in research at Universities (e.g. myself). It's not like my salary will go up if I invent anything, but this does not prevent me (or any of them) do to our best to "innovate" (a verb which deserves being erased from any dictionary, BTW).
We in Europe get the idea that in the US it's mostly drug dealing, people running around with guns, schools shootings and money and lawyers deciding everything.
Ah, and don't forget kids and innocents fried on the electric chair....
By comparing with what you say I'd guess that things must not be very different between Europe and the USA, it's (as usual) the media publishing only the shocking news and forgetting about all the rest.... Wherever you look, most of the citizens are honest workers, but it's always the killers who get the press coverage.....
What is important is what Andre was/is fighting for in the ATA specs: the copyright protection must NOT BE MANDATORY, but always optional. If it becomes mandatory then it's game over, as any independent artist will not be able to distribute his productions (unless he pays royalties to hw manifacturers). If the DRM systems remains optional, then the market can evolve: if you look at MP3.COM, the artists there would be more than happy to see a "secure PC" around, since it'll incentive the distribution of their material. Right now everybody pirates on Napster, but when you must pay-per-play, or no piracy is possible, the "free" (as in FSF) music will become much more attractive to people. Those bands will become known and they'll be able to estabilish the new market paragidm (and that paradigm works, at least by looking at the $ made by some artists on MP3.COM).
(indidentally, a DRM becoming mandatory would kill linux, which is something I don't see IBM doing in the future).
Anyone mirrored the www.gri.org/laser link? It's not that it crawls, just getting the HTML is near-impossible, all images are broken (it also complains about my browser)...no way I can get to the "cool video clip"....
Thanks (and think of all the karma you'll get posting a mirror! :)
Some time ago (say 2-3 years) I shocked a couple of my friends saying that we should actually thank Sci. for exposing a loophole in Copyright law. That law has never been meant to be used to squash free speech, and the fact that they were doing exacly that indicates that some reform is needed to limit the possible abuses.
I hope that the copyright/DMCA will be reshaped in the future, and that limits are put on "both sides" of the copyrighted works. If abuse of copyright law's "fair use" is to be sanctioned (as with Napster) then the same must happen when the same law is used by the author to threaten any free speech (Sci. method to deal with "enemies") - "fair use" again, but from the other side.
It definitely is.
I bow to the superior skill of the author of those 526 bytes. I've saved it even if I don't own a DVD reader (and I don't plan buying one), just to open up the file at times and contemplate it.
Maybe one day I'll see the light.
I fear that the major labels probably have enough money for this...
[[ I admit I tried Napster for the first time a couple of days ago (even if I followed all the copyright discussion from the start), and it's really a killer. I'd be ready to pay a fee for unrestricted usage. Just throw in md5sums to verify file integrity and I'm ready to pay up to 50FF/month without even *thinking* about it. ]]
The only "alternative" is MacOS, which with version X is moving towards the linux approach (Apple kept only the interface, the kernel is open source) to keep costs down, but once again it's like linux drivers developement: its purpose is to add value to Apple hardware.
Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Microsoft holding a monopoly in OS market, what is wrong is that they use it to gain an unfair advantage in other fields. Undocumented system calls and deliberate incompatibilities (ask the wine people) indicate not that Microsoft has power, but that it's using it to eliminate competitors, for example in the "office suite" field, where anything non-Microsoft runs even worse than the Micrcsoft stuff....
Competition in the software market exists only where interoperability is guaranteed by open, stable and defined-by-public-discussion standards. As soon as a "standard" is closed the way is invariably death (product disappears) or domination (competitors cannot interoperate with market leader and are driven underground). Even wondered why so many "clones" of the same app exist on linux? This is why I think that the only real solution to the "Microsoft problem" is not breaking it up but requiring a disclosure of API and file formats. (BTW the "problem" is not just with Microsoft - Netscape came crying for justice after Microsoft squashed them, but they had tried the very same thing with netscape HTML "extensions").
Call me "communist" if you want, but a law saying that you get copyright protection for your software only if you disclose your file formats to the public would be extremely beneficial to competition. It would also be extremely logical: what goes in those files is MY data and I should be able to recover it no matter what. (This would also fit nicely with a "modification" I'd like to see in the DMCA-like laws, i.e. that you get either technological OR legal protection: if you encrypt everything then you give up the legal protection - if someone cracks it you're fucked. Something of the type "if you kill user's rights you lose your own rights as well").
Ok, now end of dream and back to a world where mail attachments are in Word format because everyone assumes I use word.... :(
I'm running mandrake 7.2, most filesystems ReiserFS, and I've tried kernels 2.4.0, 2.4.1 and 2.4.2. I also have a MSI mb equipped with one of those chipsets. There's something going wrong, but definitely NOT with hd geometry recognition (BTW it was fixed in 2.4.2, I think). I've had the auto-tuning of HDs at startup screwing something with DMA config, resulting in my 20GB Seagate disk killing the system with dma_intr errors. The solution is to shut down all "automatic" tuning and starting rc.sysinit with hdparm settings which configure the disk correctly.
I've had hdparm report the auto-config which kills the system and it's the same as the one I put (-d 1 -X66), but if I do it manually it runs fine.... go figure.
The problem I have now is that the disk is supposed to support udma4, but trying to set anything beyond udma2 results in a nice message saying it's not supported, even if looking at the source in drivers/ide/via6xxxx.c says it should go up to udma5. I've tried to force ide1=ata66 but the only difference is a warning message.... I'm clearly missing something, but since I don't need udma66 I've stopped investigating the issue...
Overall, if you're scared of developement stuff you shouldn't be running the stuff released 1 week earlier :)
What I'd like would be to have my personal/medical/private/whatever data on devices which do NOT allow copy without my consent. If you want to do marketing stats, you ask me for the key and pay the privilege. If you "happen" to have a copy of my medical records, I want to be sure that I authorized you to do it. Why it's always "their" data which gets protected and never "mine"?
(hmmm... since privacy online is the current political trend maybe I should point this out to some politician?)
2001-03-19 14:07:25 (uh, rejected? "Please don't use so many caps"? Where does that script see ANY caps in the above numbers?)
The aim of the CRC check is not to say that it's well-encoded, but just to say "it's an exact mirror of that one". Napster offical servers should contain high quality MP3s, but they may run slow (heavy load). With CRCs I can search for song X, see the CRC from the official (slow) server and then download it from the guy next door (running at 1Mbps).
It's a good idea, and they could use this "service" to charge some more (say $5 for "basic", $10 for basic+access to central server CRC values).
I hope they succeed in making money and showing that this is a workable business model. It'll kill off all the CPRM crap we've been seeing around.
How could we get the general public involved and fighting on the anti-CPRM side? DVD is encrypted, (was) not copiable, but still a lot of people buys it because "it's better", what could be a "user-level" example of why CPRM is bad?
I didn't read (or pay) for it, so I don't know. I also don't know why S.King did that half-assed attempt at using the Street performer protocol. Not only he failed to provide a full product, but he based continuation on a percentage of people paying, instead of total money earned and, worst of all, stopped in the middle. I wonder if he did this just to prove that the Street P.P. does not work....
I'm quite positive that if he had done things properly (offering a complete work, basing creation of next one on received money >= prefixed goal) it would have worked just fine. Then we could argue that it only worked because S.King is already well-known (which would be probably true...).