If I remember and it was some time ago that I installed Kazaa-lite, actually installing it is an infrigment of Kazaa's copyright. It blocks spyware and browser highjacking pop ups and Kazaa dont like it.
I believe that you are incorrect as Kazaa is open-source and what they "like" has no bearing on copyright. Whether or not a Kazaa-Lite user is infringing in the manner that you claim, it is none of your business. You don't own copyright to Kazaa. You don't own the user's computer. You don't pay for his Internet connection. Your job isn't at risk for violating the no-filesharing policy at his work.
So Dont complain that it might put users in violation, installing it is a violation.
I'll complain if I want to. The two things have nothing to do with one another. The RIAA is not going to sue some college kid out of his life's savings for violating Kazaa's copyright. An ISP is not going to terminate a user's broadband connection for violating Kazaa's copyright (but they sure will if the RIAA says that the user is trading copyrighted MP3s). There is simply no comparison between (allegedly) violating Kazaa's copyright and having your personal and private files, possibly with credit card numbers, medical information, and bank accounts, made available for download without your permission
I installed the new version of Kazaa-lite and it apparently turned filesharing on even though I had disabled it previously. (Note: I say "apparently" because I did not check the setting immediately prior to the installation and it is theoretically possible that some other process had turned it on.) This was done despite the claim on the website that "You can just install this on top of a current Kazaa Lite installation. That way all your settings will be remembered."
While people can debate the ethics of not sharing, how it affects the viability of P2P networks, and so forth, it should still be an individual choice.
Turning on filesharing without the explicit permission of the user could put the user in violation of the policy at their ISP or their work. It could put them in violation of federal, state, and local laws. It could open up a big security hole, causing the user to share files that they never intended to share. This is not something that should be done without the user's knowledge and permission.
I am far more knowlegeable and intelligent than you are. Your ignorance about logical fallacies was laughable (assuming that you are the same writer -- since you are too inconsiderate to post under a user name).
The Righteous Might of Jesus Christ shall deliver to you a smackdown, sir!!! A RIGHTEOUS SMACKDOWN for your ignorance!
So now we're combine religious beliefs and professional wrestling terminology? My, you are sophisticated and informed! I guess I should not be surprised given the correlation between limited education and strong religious beliefs (you will note that the Bible belt is not exactly filled with Ivy League universities).
Your analogy would be on even more shaky ground, since you technically only own the sound captured on the vinyl. If the digital format is of a higher audio quality, you don't have the rights to that extra fidelity. However, you are free to capture the sound from the vinyl in a digital format yourself. Or that's at least the way it works here.
I cannot speak for your country, but in the U.S., it has been drummed into our heads that we don't "own" anything other than the physical medium on which the music is recorded. We certainly don't own any rights in the music. What we are essentially buying is a license to listen to the music.
What torques me is that the record companies want to sell us the same license over an over. They sold it to us when we bought the LP. They want to sell it to us when we buy the CD. They want to sell it to us when we buy the music on a cassette. They want to sell it to us again when our CD becomes damaged.
I do not buy the argument that I owe extra for better fidelity. DVDs are higher quality than VHS and, in most cases, are cheaper, too.
How does your organization decide what cases to prosecute?
For example:
A private citizen reports to the DoJ that a poem that they wrote is displayed on a web site without permission.
Walt Disney reports to the DoJ that the another web site is displaying images of Mickey Mouse without permission.
If you only have the manpower to take one of the two cases, do you prosecute the poem copyright infringement on the grounds that the individual is unlikely to have the funds to hire attorneys for a civil prosecution? Or do you prosecute Disney's alleged infringement case and, if so, why?
If a person owns a vinyl record, would downloading (via peer-to-peer filesharing networks) the exact same recording and performance in a digital format be considered "fair use" or would it, instead, be a violation of copyright laws?
You are very good at spouting off names of logical fallacies, yet you do not understand them. I read your tirade against the other person and you were flat wrong in your classifications of his statements -- over and over.
In fact, it was you, who started with the morally and intellectually bankrupt debating when you wrote:
Wow, way to show your own anti-Christian bias there, bucko. I think that pretty well invalidates your arguments.
That was Circumstantial Ad Hominem, a fallacy in which one attempts to attack a claim by asserting that the other person is making the claim out of self interest or bias. While a person's self interests or bias will provide them with motives to make certain claims, the claims stand or fall on their own. A person's religious or political beliefs do not affect the truth or falsity of the claim. You are obviously strongly religious. Should we dismiss all of your claims about the existence of God because of your bias?
Then, let's top it off with a Failure to Assert:
I will admit that christianity is a peaceful and beautiful religion, in its theory.
That was not a "failure to assert." He asserted that, in theory, Christianity is "a peaceful and beautiful religion." As evidenced by The Crusades, the Inquisitions, and the countless people tortured and killed in the name of Christianity, its practice and theory diverge more than a little.
Now, let's Change the Subject, from modern scientific advances, to ancient, unrelated culture events!
Stop distorting and lying. You did not ask for modern scientific advances. You challenged him to show you "one remarkable scientific advance that came from outside Christendom.[sic]" He did that very effectively and also showed advances outside of the sciences.
Now, let's move on to the Appeal to False Authority
Wrong again. An appeal to authority would be if he were claiming that the Reverend, because of his position, should automatically be considered correct. That is clearly not what he did.
Next, how about the Appeal to Anonymous Authority! "People listen?" I'm sure they do!
Again, you obviously don't know anything about the logical fallacies about which you write. An "appeal to anonymous authority" would be one in which the writer claimed that the beliefs of unnamed person's should be considered proof of the validity of those beliefs. For example, if he wrote "the Pope is a pedophile -- many people believe that", it would be an appeal to anonymous authority. If he wrote "Rev. Graham is an important, mainstream figure who many people view as a spiritual leader", he need not name the people in order for the argument to hold water.
I won't waste my time tearing apart the remainder of your attack on the other person, but I wanted you, and everyone else, to see that your claims are without merit.
You seem to think that prosperity and religion are unrelated. I contend that they are not. In the middle ages and the renaissance, Europe ruled, because the Europeans had the favor of the Lord with them, for they alone kept the Faith.
The "Lord" must have truly been impressed by The Crusades and The Inquisitions. If that kind of behavior doesn't curry favor, what does?
Why don't you look at the "prosperity" in Africa and much of South America where Christian missionaries did their work? Now look at the richest nation (per-capita) in the world. It's an Islamic one.
Those who doubt Christ reap failure.
I don't subscribe to your primitive, superstitious beliefs. I am a modern man. I don't believe in invisible, all-powerful beings that oversee everything -- and for which no concrete proof exists. It's a bunch of bunk put together to control ignorant peasants almost two thousand years ago and people like you still fall for it. Get a spine. Take responsibility for your own life, accept that you will die some day and that there is not some "afterlife" in which you will go to "heaven", and start behaving like a rational human being. This is a web-site for people with a belief in science, not the occult.
And please take your ill-informed Christian bigotry elsewhere.
Look, you show me one remarkable scientific advance that came from outside Christendom. One. Go on. Have at it.
Stonehenge showed a remarkable knowledge of astronomy. The Chinese were able to predict eclipses and invented gunpowder. Einstein, an atheist, was one of the most remarkable minds in recent history. Charles Darwin advanced our understanding of evolution, and he was, at best, agnostic. Thomas Edison, while not a pure scientist, was a great inventor and an atheist. Isaac Asimov, Stephen Hawking, and Benjamin Franklin are all either agnostic or atheist.
Your problem is that you mistake wealth and religion. How many scientific advances have come from areas converted to Christianity by missionaries? Have you seen a lot of great scientific work suddenly coming from Christians in poor South American countries?
Science comes from the educated and education comes from wealth. Had Europe and North American been primarily Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, some other faith, or atheist, their contribution to science would have been the same.
Then the feds should take legal action against Apple and Chrysler because they each paid yearly salaries of $1 to their CEOs (Steve Jobs and Lee Iacocca, respectively).
It sounds like you don't know how to properly configure the OS.
I agree completely. Whether someone likes BSD or not, its just assinine to assume that 20-minute-plus times to copy a 17MB file are normal on a PIII system. It's pretty damned obvious that BSD does not have slow file I/O when you consider that BSD variants are the OSs of choice for major hosting providers, massive commercial databases, Yahoo!, etc.
BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Since BSD is free, please tell us what you have found that is cheaper. I'm sure that we would all like to get paid to take some other OS, because that's the only way that one could be cheaper.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a BSD box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes.
Did it ever occur to you that someone has hosed the BSD installation that you are using? No variant of BSD takes 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file on an 800mhz PIII unless someone has truly screwed something up.
If everyone uses them--sure, for awhile it will still waste all the bandwidth but the response rates that are currently high enough to justify it will be so low no company would pay the money to spam and the bandwidth issue will go away.
The vast majority of the users still run unpatched versions of Windows 95 and Windows 98. The chance of them configuring and using Bayesian filtering on a new mail client are about as great their chances for discovering a cure for cancer. Spammers don't care about the 1% that effectively use filtering. They want the other 99% that don't and that actually believe some herbal concoction will fix their limp dicks.
I just think that this approach will be more effective than trying to get a bunch of non-technical politicians to craft effective legislation which can't really touch the offshore companies anyway.
I don't see a lot of spam that's trying to get me to send money to some overseas firm. What I do see is a lot of spam that's commissioned by U.S. spammers and is sent through overseas mail servers. Make it a crime to send, or cause the sending of, unsolicited commercial e-mail and you can arrest the spammers rather than some third-word dupe who is sending the stuff for them. If Alan Ralsky contracts with some Brazillian ISP to send 1,000,0000 e-mails, then put him in prison and let him be some guy's bitch. End of the spam problem.
When someone wants to restrict freedom, they have the burden of proof.
So I am free to concoct some kind of alleged cancer drug and sell it? If I were to do so, would the burden of proof be on those who wanted it pulled from the market?
I gave you good evidence that the logging industry is doing damage. You claim that it is localized. No, it is not. While they did not provide EOS images for the entire Pacific Northwest, they provided representative images and asserted that the damage was widespread. When reputable NASA scientists make the assertion, that's as good as proof when it's weighed against the grossly biased claims of the logging industry.
Hopefully, the Romanian X Prize team will do better than Mr. Coanda.
But so what if they do? They are not proposing a radically new and cheaper technology to boost payloads into orbit. It's just another liquid-propellant rocket. They won't be putting a man into orbit, much less on the moon. I wish them luck, but it's not revolutionizing space. It just disproves the idea that private firms are prevented by some world government from launching space missions. If they are successful, they will have achieved something that the U.S. and Soviet governments achieved about 40 years earlier.
The Liftport people seem to have successfully raised their first million in a stock offering (damn, I missed it) but will be raising another $5M next year. I have no doubt that that issue will also be oversubscribed.
Pets.com, Segway (the goofy scooter company), and even companies purporting to have created perpetual motion have all received investor funding. That's no proof of the validity of their concepts -- as the Dot-Com crash has so vividly shown.
You provide some evidence and that's good but it's local in nature and doesn't really prove what you claim.
And you have provided only flawed evidence in the form of a tree count to support yours. I'm sure that I could find more, but what's the point? If you really wanted to know whether logging helps or hurts the environment, you could do the research, too.
We don't have people starving in the streets much but we do have schools that turn out illiterate high school graduates. There private competition is offered and yet again, the left argues against reform, trying to stand in the schoolhouse door to keep people trapped in schools that don't educate them.
No, we argue in favor of improving the schools through the collection of adequate taxes to attract good teachers and administrators, and to buy needed textbooks and equipment.
Your side advocates a voucher system that pays far less than the cost of tuition to a good private school. I'll just bullet-point some of the flaws:
* If you take 1/3 of the kids out of a public school, the cost to run that school does not go down by 1/3. You can't hire 2/3 of a school nurse, 2/3 of a school janitor, 2/3 of a principal, 2/3 of a wood shop teacher, or 2/3 of a music teacher. The heating and AC costs won't go down by 1/3, either. Neither will building maintenance, lighting, etc. So the remaining students would get a raw deal.
* The Republicans are the ones who want to continually cut taxes that pay for schools, leaving many teachers in subsidized housing and schools wanting for everything from modern textbooks to building maintenance. You starve the public schools for money and then claim that the result proves that we need vouchers.
* Vouchers would be inadequate to pay the tuition to a good private school. Many poorer parents would not be able to make up the difference. So the voucher would end up being a hand-out to wealthy parents who can damned well afford to send their kids to private school anyway.
* If you gut the schools of all but the poor kids, then performance in those schools will go down further. The kids who are there will not have children of educated, well-to-do parents.
* Most private schools do not have school buses. Most poor families don't have spare cars and time to transport kids to school.
Tax dollars should not be funding religious services. I don't want my tax dollars paying for your kids to have religious beliefs drilled into their heads by Baptists, Mormons, Catholics, Wiccans, Pagans, Satanists, or any other religious group. You want that done? Do it at your own expense when the kids are not in school.
Republicans would handily win elections if everybody was in the middle class. Democrats would win elections if everybody was either very poor or very rich.
That is one of the most idiotic things that I've ever heard. The middle class has suffered horribly under recent Republican administrations. There are thousands of reputable sources to back up that statement. Under Republicans, the rich have gotten far richer, the middle class has been lost many of its members to the poor, and the situation of the poor has only gotten worse. Clinton won because he captured the middle class vote. Right now, we have CEOs with multi-million dollar salaries laying off middle-class U.S. workers and handing the jobs over to people in third-world countries. The CEOs aren't out of work. They aren't hurting for money. It's the middle class that is.
Finally, about that space elevator, we have a situation where all sorts of neat things are coming out and demanding capital. The space elevator is but one of them. The smaller that pool of capital, the more of those neat things will stay undeveloped, unexploited.
In no country has the private sector landed a man on the moon. They have not orbited a man around Earth. They have not built a space station. Ambitious projects like the space elevator are done with t
You complain about my optimism and guessing but you guess yourself when you assume that standing board feet numbers would prove your position right. You are responsible for gathering actual data to support your side of the debate.
I assume that I would be proven right for an obvious reason: The average age of trees felled by the lumber industry is considerably greater than the average age of trees that they have planted. I also am not blind and can see satellite images. Here's evidence to support my contention:
You made the statement: "But you ignore that the US has more trees now than when the Indians had exclusive run of the place." And I explained why I ignored it in clear, rational terms.
This is how proper policy is done, not with assumptions and whining when your opponents don't do your research for you.
There is a difference between not doing research and purposely publishing misleading numbers as the logging industry has done.
Imagine if your logic was applied to drug companies. They would be allowed to sell anything that they wanted and would be allowed to suppress research that showed that their products were harmful. It would be the responsibility of the consumer to prove that a drug was harmful before it was removed from the market. Insane.
I gave ground on standing board feet (and asked for evidence, which doesn't seem to be available), where's your similar flexibility? Be fair.
I have never questioned the value of a space elevator. I would like nothing more than to see one in action and would have preferred that Bush had invested money in that rather than in a war justified by apparently invisible "Weapons of Mass Destruction. If I've left you with the impression that I don't believe that a space elevator would be valuable, then I have done a disservice to our debate.
The reality is that the greenhouse effects that Kyoto is aimed at, even in the current worst case scenarios, are going to show up over the very long term, 50 years out. That's way past where chaos takes over and makes a complete hash of any predictions.
Chaos theory does not overrule long-term trends. Chaos theory makes it impossible to predict the exact temperature on January 12th of next year, but we can still predict that the average temperature then will be lower then than it is now.
The bet that the free market faithful is putting is that human inventiveness will find us a solution for the environmental problems coming down the road and we need to unleash that creative force by maximizing growth and incenting people to work hard and create as much capital as possible.
That's not my bet. Look at Canada. In order to be more competitive in the logging industry, they have no legislative equivalent to our Endangered Species Act. They also have less environmental legislation that impacts their logging industry. Their stumpage fees are much lower than those in the U.S. There will always be countries that have near-term needs for revenue that will override environmental concerns.
I happen to think that the grow quick and innovate out of our troubles will end up with us wealthier, wiser, and happier. You seem to disagree and want a slower growth world where Malthus has a much wider role in planning.
I would characterize it as me being cautious and skeptical and you being willing to risk far too much on unproven theory. It's that "faith" thing again. I don't go on spending sprees because I believe I will get a high-paying contract -- even if I am almost sure. I wait until I get the contract and then adjust my spending accordingly. I'm the same way with social programs, the environment, taxes, etc. I'm not about to yank the social program rug out from under millions of Americans based on the unproven assertion that private charities will be able and willing to take up the slack.
You can't claim that the number of trees is bogus and the real measure is standing board feet when standing board feet numbers aren't kept by anybody and are thus unmeasurable.
They are measurable. The logging industry knows those numbers and chooses not to report them because it would make clear the devastation to the environment.
Like so many environmentalist scare stories/statistics, it evaporates on closer inspection.
Bull. I just completely discredited the notion of assessing environmental impact by counting trees without regard to size. Why is it my responsibility to fund studies to come up with numbers that the logging industry should provide?
I'm a fair guy and would be willing to change my mind with actual evidence but this is just unacceptably weak to be designated evidence.
You've made up your mind based on numbers that you now know are flawed.
Suppose I cut down 500 mature redwoods, oaks, and cedars and then plant 700 sapling pine trees. Do we have to assume that I've done no environmental damage because I choose not to report a meaningful number and, instead, just give a tree count?
We're going to need every $ we can get to manage the transition that's coming, both out of oil (which big oil has signalled by being quite happy with GWB's push for hydrogen) and into space resource extraction, generation, and manufacturing.
Big oil is "quite happy" with GWB's push for hydrogen power because it poses no threat (see my earlier explanation about the reasons why). They would be equally happy with a proposal for cars powered by carrier pigeons. They are opposed to anything that threatens to actually reduce consumption. That's why they, and their boys in the White House, fight against attempts to set fuel economy standards for SUVs and light trucks.
Considering the astonishing progress made in the last year (both in manufacturing and reducing the price to manufacture), a great deal of it in the last 6 months, you will forgive me for not quenching my optimism in dark negativism.
Try quenching your optimism in realism. Basing environmental policy on an Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novel (yes, I read the book when it first came out) is foolhardy at best. There are many hurdles to overcome before a space elevator could be made to work. And there may be show-stoppers that mean it never happens. If it happens, then plan policy around it rather than making environmental policy that could be disastrous if it does not. It's like saying "I think that terraforming Mars will make it habitable, so we're going to get rid of all pollution regulations on Earth today and then move to Mars when it's ready."
Maybe didn't make myself clear... 2 PCI Network cards + the onboard = 3 in total.
I probably just failed to read carefully enough. Sorry.
Think INTERNET, LAN and DMZ.
Why not route DMZ by IP rather than separate interface?
and I agree it uses a little bit of CPU, but then so do 90% of modems nowadays.
That's why I won't use Winmodems either.
Another product that you might want to be aware of: 3COM makes a dual-port NIC. It's pricey, but quite nice. Intel makes a competing product, but I'd rather go with the 3COM.
Considering that I need to continue to use my existing 2 PCI network cards (Intel EtherExpress Pro's), at least one PCI RAID card (onboard RAID would be used as well), possibly a PCI TV card, I wouldn't want to have to use up another for a Soundblaster card when I can just use the onboard audio.
You would be much better off with a motherboard that had a built-in Ethernet controller so that you only needed a single PCI network card. That has the added advantage of giving you different hardware for each network connection. When you have two identical Ethernet cards, it's often unclear which card is controlled by which instance of the driver. If you have an Intel EtherExpress on a card and a Realtek RTL8139C controller on the motherboard, it's obvious which driver the software refers to. (By the way, I recommend either using a NIC based on the Realtek chip mentioned above or, if you need something higher-end, a 3COM 3C905 series card. The Intel EtherExpress does not really outperform the inexpensive NICs nor does it reduce CPU load significantly. The 3COM card is significantly better than the Intel when comparing CPU utilization.)
Then you could use the PCI slot for a good soundcard like a Turtle Beach. While motherboard sound is very good, it's seldom as good as a really good soundcard and it often uses a lot more CPU and RAM resources. Frankly, you are a lot more likely to be completely satisfied with an on-board NIC than with on-board sound.
First, let me thank you for admitting that you misread my message regarding Hitler/Catholicism. Hopefully that fully explains the remarks about Stalin's atheism and we can put that behind us, agreeing that the actions of any one man are no way to evaluate an entire belief system, whether theist or atheist.
On trees, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just ask for documentation. I googled standing board feet and didn't find much anything pro or con so far but I didn't go much beyond page 3 of the google stats (normally, I don't have to).
I wish that I could provide meaningful documentation on the amount of board feet of lumber standing, but that's something that the logging industry doesn't release to the public. Instead, they count "trees." And that means that they clear-cut a mature, multi-species forest and replant fast-growing, single-species saplings in a higher tree/acre density and claim that there are "more trees." I know from talking to scientists that what I say is true, but I cannot prove it and can only ask that you treat the lumber industry statistics with proper skepticism.
On comparative advantage, you're making a great error. We have plenty of oil in this country.
According to whom? All of the numbers that I've seen show that the amount of oil still buried underground in the U.S. is only a fraction of what we need.
Every country starts out at the bottom of the economic ladder and doesn't give a damn about pollution. As they grow wealthy they start caring.
Not all of the world's peoples have the same values and I think that it is a stretch to assume that someone in Bangladesh will become concerned about pollution just because they have money. Japan is a wealthy nation, yet they still pursue whaling despite the environmental devastation it has caused.
There *is* no other solution than economic growth and wealth creation.
Sure there is: Economic sanctions against big polluters and stiff tariffs on goods imported from nations that pollute excessively.
We'll all end up trading with each other in a healthy system and as low cost sources of material are used up we'll go progressively up the ladder to higher cost sources until the declining cost of space transport hits that key point where the low-cost source is the asteroid belt, the moon, mars, or some other celestial body and we're pretty well set for several centuries thereafter.
Having worked in the satellite industry, I don't foresee cost-effective space-based mining. The current cost to boost a satellite into low Earth orbit (LEO) is about $5,000 per pound using the Space Shuttle, an Ariane 44L, Atlas 2AS, or a Delta 2 (the launch vehicle choice depends on the size and weight of the satellite, among other factors). I'd love to see a breakthrough that cut that figure to $50/pound, but I wouldn't bet on it.
This resource shortage that's got you sick to death is a short term problem. With the progress on carbon nanotubes accellerating unbelievably fast, I expect space extraction will become a reality in my lifetime and yours (they're currently projecting about 20 years from now). We just have to grow our economy as fast as possible until then so there will be enough capital to manage that great transition.
While that's a rosy picture of the future, I want to turn your attention to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. When that film was released in 1967, scientists and lay people alike thought that it presented a realistic view of man's future 35 years hence. The idea of everyone having videophones, there being giant space stations, commercial trips into space, and grand, manned investigations of the solar system just seemed "right" given the progress we had made. Alas, it never came to fruition. I sure don't want to find out that we've used up the Earth's resources and poisoned the land, air, and sea based on an unfulfilled promise.
Re:Very cool idea, but WAYY too expensive...
on
Duct Tape Goes Minature
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You misunderstood my point. I am not refering to the strength of the backing material, I am refering to the strength of the glue. It bonds much stronger than any other reasonably priced tape.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. For future reference, "tape" refers to the flexible strip itself, which is why we have non-adhesive forms of tape like cassette tape, Digital Audio Tape (DAT), and ticker tape.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember and it was some time ago that I installed Kazaa-lite, actually installing it is an infrigment of Kazaa's copyright. It blocks spyware and browser highjacking pop ups and Kazaa dont like it.
I believe that you are incorrect as Kazaa is open-source and what they "like" has no bearing on copyright. Whether or not a Kazaa-Lite user is infringing in the manner that you claim, it is none of your business. You don't own copyright to Kazaa. You don't own the user's computer. You don't pay for his Internet connection. Your job isn't at risk for violating the no-filesharing policy at his work.
So Dont complain that it might put users in violation, installing it is a violation.
I'll complain if I want to. The two things have nothing to do with one another. The RIAA is not going to sue some college kid out of his life's savings for violating Kazaa's copyright. An ISP is not going to terminate a user's broadband connection for violating Kazaa's copyright (but they sure will if the RIAA says that the user is trading copyrighted MP3s). There is simply no comparison between (allegedly) violating Kazaa's copyright and having your personal and private files, possibly with credit card numbers, medical information, and bank accounts, made available for download without your permission
I installed the new version of Kazaa-lite and it apparently turned filesharing on even though I had disabled it previously. (Note: I say "apparently" because I did not check the setting immediately prior to the installation and it is theoretically possible that some other process had turned it on.) This was done despite the claim on the website that "You can just install this on top of a current Kazaa Lite installation. That way all your settings will be remembered."
While people can debate the ethics of not sharing, how it affects the viability of P2P networks, and so forth, it should still be an individual choice.
Turning on filesharing without the explicit permission of the user could put the user in violation of the policy at their ISP or their work. It could put them in violation of federal, state, and local laws. It could open up a big security hole, causing the user to share files that they never intended to share. This is not something that should be done without the user's knowledge and permission.
Wow, you don't know a damn thing, do you?
I am far more knowlegeable and intelligent than you are. Your ignorance about logical fallacies was laughable (assuming that you are the same writer -- since you are too inconsiderate to post under a user name).
The Righteous Might of Jesus Christ shall deliver to you a smackdown, sir!!! A RIGHTEOUS SMACKDOWN for your ignorance!
So now we're combine religious beliefs and professional wrestling terminology? My, you are sophisticated and informed! I guess I should not be surprised given the correlation between limited education and strong religious beliefs (you will note that the Bible belt is not exactly filled with Ivy League universities).
Your analogy would be on even more shaky ground, since you technically only own the sound captured on the vinyl. If the digital format is of a higher audio quality, you don't have the rights to that extra fidelity. However, you are free to capture the sound from the vinyl in a digital format yourself. Or that's at least the way it works here.
I cannot speak for your country, but in the U.S., it has been drummed into our heads that we don't "own" anything other than the physical medium on which the music is recorded. We certainly don't own any rights in the music. What we are essentially buying is a license to listen to the music.
What torques me is that the record companies want to sell us the same license over an over. They sold it to us when we bought the LP. They want to sell it to us when we buy the CD. They want to sell it to us when we buy the music on a cassette. They want to sell it to us again when our CD becomes damaged.
I do not buy the argument that I owe extra for better fidelity. DVDs are higher quality than VHS and, in most cases, are cheaper, too.
How does your organization decide what cases to prosecute?
For example:
A private citizen reports to the DoJ that a poem that they wrote is displayed on a web site without permission.
Walt Disney reports to the DoJ that the another web site is displaying images of Mickey Mouse without permission.
If you only have the manpower to take one of the two cases, do you prosecute the poem copyright infringement on the grounds that the individual is unlikely to have the funds to hire attorneys for a civil prosecution? Or do you prosecute Disney's alleged infringement case and, if so, why?
If a person owns a vinyl record, would downloading (via peer-to-peer filesharing networks) the exact same recording and performance in a digital format be considered "fair use" or would it, instead, be a violation of copyright laws?
Have fun in hell, buddy! Be sure to bring your sun screen!
That's the problem with being an atheist. I have no belief in an afterlife when I can say "I told you so!"
You are very good at spouting off names of logical fallacies, yet you do not understand them. I read your tirade against the other person and you were flat wrong in your classifications of his statements -- over and over.
In fact, it was you, who started with the morally and intellectually bankrupt debating when you wrote:
Wow, way to show your own anti-Christian bias there, bucko. I think that pretty well invalidates your arguments.
That was Circumstantial Ad Hominem, a fallacy in which one attempts to attack a claim by asserting that the other person is making the claim out of self interest or bias. While a person's self interests or bias will provide them with motives to make certain claims, the claims stand or fall on their own. A person's religious or political beliefs do not affect the truth or falsity of the claim. You are obviously strongly religious. Should we dismiss all of your claims about the existence of God because of your bias?
Then, let's top it off with a Failure to Assert:
I will admit that christianity is a peaceful and beautiful religion, in its theory.
That was not a "failure to assert." He asserted that, in theory, Christianity is "a peaceful and beautiful religion." As evidenced by The Crusades, the Inquisitions, and the countless people tortured and killed in the name of Christianity, its practice and theory diverge more than a little.
Now, let's Change the Subject, from modern scientific advances, to ancient, unrelated culture events!
Stop distorting and lying. You did not ask for modern scientific advances. You challenged him to show you "one remarkable scientific advance that came from outside Christendom.[sic]" He did that very effectively and also showed advances outside of the sciences.
Now, let's move on to the Appeal to False Authority
Wrong again. An appeal to authority would be if he were claiming that the Reverend, because of his position, should automatically be considered correct. That is clearly not what he did.
Next, how about the Appeal to Anonymous Authority! "People listen?" I'm sure they do!
Again, you obviously don't know anything about the logical fallacies about which you write. An "appeal to anonymous authority" would be one in which the writer claimed that the beliefs of unnamed person's should be considered proof of the validity of those beliefs. For example, if he wrote "the Pope is a pedophile -- many people believe that", it would be an appeal to anonymous authority. If he wrote "Rev. Graham is an important, mainstream figure who many people view as a spiritual leader", he need not name the people in order for the argument to hold water.
I won't waste my time tearing apart the remainder of your attack on the other person, but I wanted you, and everyone else, to see that your claims are without merit.
You seem to think that prosperity and religion are unrelated. I contend that they are not. In the middle ages and the renaissance, Europe ruled, because the Europeans had the favor of the Lord with them, for they alone kept the Faith.
The "Lord" must have truly been impressed by The Crusades and The Inquisitions. If that kind of behavior doesn't curry favor, what does?
Why don't you look at the "prosperity" in Africa and much of South America where Christian missionaries did their work? Now look at the richest nation (per-capita) in the world. It's an Islamic one.
Those who doubt Christ reap failure.
I don't subscribe to your primitive, superstitious beliefs. I am a modern man. I don't believe in invisible, all-powerful beings that oversee everything -- and for which no concrete proof exists. It's a bunch of bunk put together to control ignorant peasants almost two thousand years ago and people like you still fall for it. Get a spine. Take responsibility for your own life, accept that you will die some day and that there is not some "afterlife" in which you will go to "heaven", and start behaving like a rational human being. This is a web-site for people with a belief in science, not the occult.
And please take your ill-informed Christian bigotry elsewhere.
Look, you show me one remarkable scientific advance that came from outside Christendom. One. Go on. Have at it.
Stonehenge showed a remarkable knowledge of astronomy. The Chinese were able to predict eclipses and invented gunpowder. Einstein, an atheist, was one of the most remarkable minds in recent history. Charles Darwin advanced our understanding of evolution, and he was, at best, agnostic. Thomas Edison, while not a pure scientist, was a great inventor and an atheist. Isaac Asimov, Stephen Hawking, and Benjamin Franklin are all either agnostic or atheist.
Your problem is that you mistake wealth and religion. How many scientific advances have come from areas converted to Christianity by missionaries? Have you seen a lot of great scientific work suddenly coming from Christians in poor South American countries?
Science comes from the educated and education comes from wealth. Had Europe and North American been primarily Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, some other faith, or atheist, their contribution to science would have been the same.
Really? Where can I find information about these rules?
So, make the person the CEO/DJ.
Minimum wage is much more than $1 per year.
Then the feds should take legal action against Apple and Chrysler because they each paid yearly salaries of $1 to their CEOs (Steve Jobs and Lee Iacocca, respectively).
I don't read the Mac stories on Slashdot. Why not be more helpful and include a link to such a troll instead of being rude and insulting?
Since you were so "kind" as to point out that this is a variant on a Mac troll, I took the time to find a link to just such a message:
Here's the exact same troll substituting OS-X and Mac hardware=.
Next time, try to behave in a more civil and polite manner.
It sounds like you don't know how to properly configure the OS.
I agree completely. Whether someone likes BSD or not, its just assinine to assume that 20-minute-plus times to copy a 17MB file are normal on a PIII system. It's pretty damned obvious that BSD does not have slow file I/O when you consider that BSD variants are the OSs of choice for major hosting providers, massive commercial databases, Yahoo!, etc.
BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Since BSD is free, please tell us what you have found that is cheaper. I'm sure that we would all like to get paid to take some other OS, because that's the only way that one could be cheaper.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a BSD box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes.
Did it ever occur to you that someone has hosed the BSD installation that you are using? No variant of BSD takes 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file on an 800mhz PIII unless someone has truly screwed something up.
If everyone uses them--sure, for awhile it will still waste all the bandwidth but the response rates that are currently high enough to justify it will be so low no company would pay the money to spam and the bandwidth issue will go away.
The vast majority of the users still run unpatched versions of Windows 95 and Windows 98. The chance of them configuring and using Bayesian filtering on a new mail client are about as great their chances for discovering a cure for cancer. Spammers don't care about the 1% that effectively use filtering. They want the other 99% that don't and that actually believe some herbal concoction will fix their limp dicks.
I just think that this approach will be more effective than trying to get a bunch of non-technical politicians to craft effective legislation which can't really touch the offshore companies anyway.
I don't see a lot of spam that's trying to get me to send money to some overseas firm. What I do see is a lot of spam that's commissioned by U.S. spammers and is sent through overseas mail servers. Make it a crime to send, or cause the sending of, unsolicited commercial e-mail and you can arrest the spammers rather than some third-word dupe who is sending the stuff for them. If Alan Ralsky contracts with some Brazillian ISP to send 1,000,0000 e-mails, then put him in prison and let him be some guy's bitch. End of the spam problem.
When someone wants to restrict freedom, they have the burden of proof.
So I am free to concoct some kind of alleged cancer drug and sell it? If I were to do so, would the burden of proof be on those who wanted it pulled from the market?
I gave you good evidence that the logging industry is doing damage. You claim that it is localized. No, it is not. While they did not provide EOS images for the entire Pacific Northwest, they provided representative images and asserted that the damage was widespread. When reputable NASA scientists make the assertion, that's as good as proof when it's weighed against the grossly biased claims of the logging industry.
Hopefully, the Romanian X Prize team will do better than Mr. Coanda.
But so what if they do? They are not proposing a radically new and cheaper technology to boost payloads into orbit. It's just another liquid-propellant rocket. They won't be putting a man into orbit, much less on the moon. I wish them luck, but it's not revolutionizing space. It just disproves the idea that private firms are prevented by some world government from launching space missions. If they are successful, they will have achieved something that the U.S. and Soviet governments achieved about 40 years earlier.
The Liftport people seem to have successfully raised their first million in a stock offering (damn, I missed it) but will be raising another $5M next year. I have no doubt that that issue will also be oversubscribed.
Pets.com, Segway (the goofy scooter company), and even companies purporting to have created perpetual motion have all received investor funding. That's no proof of the validity of their concepts -- as the Dot-Com crash has so vividly shown.
You provide some evidence and that's good but it's local in nature and doesn't really prove what you claim.
And you have provided only flawed evidence in the form of a tree count to support yours. I'm sure that I could find more, but what's the point? If you really wanted to know whether logging helps or hurts the environment, you could do the research, too.
We don't have people starving in the streets much but we do have schools that turn out illiterate high school graduates. There private competition is offered and yet again, the left argues against reform, trying to stand in the schoolhouse door to keep people trapped in schools that don't educate them.
No, we argue in favor of improving the schools through the collection of adequate taxes to attract good teachers and administrators, and to buy needed textbooks and equipment.
Your side advocates a voucher system that pays far less than the cost of tuition to a good private school. I'll just bullet-point some of the flaws:
* If you take 1/3 of the kids out of a public school, the cost to run that school does not go down by 1/3. You can't hire 2/3 of a school nurse, 2/3 of a school janitor, 2/3 of a principal, 2/3 of a wood shop teacher, or 2/3 of a music teacher. The heating and AC costs won't go down by 1/3, either. Neither will building maintenance, lighting, etc. So the remaining students would get a raw deal.
* The Republicans are the ones who want to continually cut taxes that pay for schools, leaving many teachers in subsidized housing and schools wanting for everything from modern textbooks to building maintenance. You starve the public schools for money and then claim that the result proves that we need vouchers.
* Vouchers would be inadequate to pay the tuition to a good private school. Many poorer parents would not be able to make up the difference. So the voucher would end up being a hand-out to wealthy parents who can damned well afford to send their kids to private school anyway.
* If you gut the schools of all but the poor kids, then performance in those schools will go down further. The kids who are there will not have children of educated, well-to-do parents.
* Most private schools do not have school buses. Most poor families don't have spare cars and time to transport kids to school.
Tax dollars should not be funding religious services. I don't want my tax dollars paying for your kids to have religious beliefs drilled into their heads by Baptists, Mormons, Catholics, Wiccans, Pagans, Satanists, or any other religious group. You want that done? Do it at your own expense when the kids are not in school.
Republicans would handily win elections if everybody was in the middle class. Democrats would win elections if everybody was either very poor or very rich.
That is one of the most idiotic things that I've ever heard. The middle class has suffered horribly under recent Republican administrations. There are thousands of reputable sources to back up that statement. Under Republicans, the rich have gotten far richer, the middle class has been lost many of its members to the poor, and the situation of the poor has only gotten worse. Clinton won because he captured the middle class vote. Right now, we have CEOs with multi-million dollar salaries laying off middle-class U.S. workers and handing the jobs over to people in third-world countries. The CEOs aren't out of work. They aren't hurting for money. It's the middle class that is.
Finally, about that space elevator, we have a situation where all sorts of neat things are coming out and demanding capital. The space elevator is but one of them. The smaller that pool of capital, the more of those neat things will stay undeveloped, unexploited.
In no country has the private sector landed a man on the moon. They have not orbited a man around Earth. They have not built a space station. Ambitious projects like the space elevator are done with t
You complain about my optimism and guessing but you guess yourself when you assume that standing board feet numbers would prove your position right. You are responsible for gathering actual data to support your side of the debate.
I assume that I would be proven right for an obvious reason: The average age of trees felled by the lumber industry is considerably greater than the average age of trees that they have planted. I also am not blind and can see satellite images. Here's evidence to support my contention:
NASA EOS web page.
You made the statement: "But you ignore that the US has more trees now than when the Indians had exclusive run of the place." And I explained why I ignored it in clear, rational terms.
This is how proper policy is done, not with assumptions and whining when your opponents don't do your research for you.
There is a difference between not doing research and purposely publishing misleading numbers as the logging industry has done.
Imagine if your logic was applied to drug companies. They would be allowed to sell anything that they wanted and would be allowed to suppress research that showed that their products were harmful. It would be the responsibility of the consumer to prove that a drug was harmful before it was removed from the market. Insane.
I gave ground on standing board feet (and asked for evidence, which doesn't seem to be available), where's your similar flexibility? Be fair.
I have never questioned the value of a space elevator. I would like nothing more than to see one in action and would have preferred that Bush had invested money in that rather than in a war justified by apparently invisible "Weapons of Mass Destruction. If I've left you with the impression that I don't believe that a space elevator would be valuable, then I have done a disservice to our debate.
The reality is that the greenhouse effects that Kyoto is aimed at, even in the current worst case scenarios, are going to show up over the very long term, 50 years out. That's way past where chaos takes over and makes a complete hash of any predictions.
Chaos theory does not overrule long-term trends. Chaos theory makes it impossible to predict the exact temperature on January 12th of next year, but we can still predict that the average temperature then will be lower then than it is now.
The bet that the free market faithful is putting is that human inventiveness will find us a solution for the environmental problems coming down the road and we need to unleash that creative force by maximizing growth and incenting people to work hard and create as much capital as possible.
That's not my bet. Look at Canada. In order to be more competitive in the logging industry, they have no legislative equivalent to our Endangered Species Act. They also have less environmental legislation that impacts their logging industry. Their stumpage fees are much lower than those in the U.S. There will always be countries that have near-term needs for revenue that will override environmental concerns.
I happen to think that the grow quick and innovate out of our troubles will end up with us wealthier, wiser, and happier. You seem to disagree and want a slower growth world where Malthus has a much wider role in planning.
I would characterize it as me being cautious and skeptical and you being willing to risk far too much on unproven theory. It's that "faith" thing again. I don't go on spending sprees because I believe I will get a high-paying contract -- even if I am almost sure. I wait until I get the contract and then adjust my spending accordingly. I'm the same way with social programs, the environment, taxes, etc. I'm not about to yank the social program rug out from under millions of Americans based on the unproven assertion that private charities will be able and willing to take up the slack.
You can't claim that the number of trees is bogus and the real measure is standing board feet when standing board feet numbers aren't kept by anybody and are thus unmeasurable.
They are measurable. The logging industry knows those numbers and chooses not to report them because it would make clear the devastation to the environment.
Like so many environmentalist scare stories/statistics, it evaporates on closer inspection.
Bull. I just completely discredited the notion of assessing environmental impact by counting trees without regard to size. Why is it my responsibility to fund studies to come up with numbers that the logging industry should provide?
I'm a fair guy and would be willing to change my mind with actual evidence but this is just unacceptably weak to be designated evidence.
You've made up your mind based on numbers that you now know are flawed.
Suppose I cut down 500 mature redwoods, oaks, and cedars and then plant 700 sapling pine trees. Do we have to assume that I've done no environmental damage because I choose not to report a meaningful number and, instead, just give a tree count?
We're going to need every $ we can get to manage the transition that's coming, both out of oil (which big oil has signalled by being quite happy with GWB's push for hydrogen) and into space resource extraction, generation, and manufacturing.
Big oil is "quite happy" with GWB's push for hydrogen power because it poses no threat (see my earlier explanation about the reasons why). They would be equally happy with a proposal for cars powered by carrier pigeons. They are opposed to anything that threatens to actually reduce consumption. That's why they, and their boys in the White House, fight against attempts to set fuel economy standards for SUVs and light trucks.
Considering the astonishing progress made in the last year (both in manufacturing and reducing the price to manufacture), a great deal of it in the last 6 months, you will forgive me for not quenching my optimism in dark negativism.
Try quenching your optimism in realism. Basing environmental policy on an Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novel (yes, I read the book when it first came out) is foolhardy at best. There are many hurdles to overcome before a space elevator could be made to work. And there may be show-stoppers that mean it never happens. If it happens, then plan policy around it rather than making environmental policy that could be disastrous if it does not. It's like saying "I think that terraforming Mars will make it habitable, so we're going to get rid of all pollution regulations on Earth today and then move to Mars when it's ready."
If a machine on the DMZ is hacked, the hacker will then have full access to machines that are supposed to be firewalled from the DMZ,
Good point. I was just considering it from the gaming perspective rather than from a security perspective.
Maybe didn't make myself clear... 2 PCI Network cards + the onboard = 3 in total.
I probably just failed to read carefully enough. Sorry.
Think INTERNET, LAN and DMZ.
Why not route DMZ by IP rather than separate interface?
and I agree it uses a little bit of CPU, but then so do 90% of modems nowadays.
That's why I won't use Winmodems either.
Another product that you might want to be aware of: 3COM makes a dual-port NIC. It's pricey, but quite nice. Intel makes a competing product, but I'd rather go with the 3COM.
Considering that I need to continue to use my existing 2 PCI network cards (Intel EtherExpress Pro's), at least one PCI RAID card (onboard RAID would be used as well), possibly a PCI TV card, I wouldn't want to have to use up another for a Soundblaster card when I can just use the onboard audio.
You would be much better off with a motherboard that had a built-in Ethernet controller so that you only needed a single PCI network card. That has the added advantage of giving you different hardware for each network connection. When you have two identical Ethernet cards, it's often unclear which card is controlled by which instance of the driver. If you have an Intel EtherExpress on a card and a Realtek RTL8139C controller on the motherboard, it's obvious which driver the software refers to. (By the way, I recommend either using a NIC based on the Realtek chip mentioned above or, if you need something higher-end, a 3COM 3C905 series card. The Intel EtherExpress does not really outperform the inexpensive NICs nor does it reduce CPU load significantly. The 3COM card is significantly better than the Intel when comparing CPU utilization.)
Then you could use the PCI slot for a good soundcard like a Turtle Beach. While motherboard sound is very good, it's seldom as good as a really good soundcard and it often uses a lot more CPU and RAM resources. Frankly, you are a lot more likely to be completely satisfied with an on-board NIC than with on-board sound.
First, let me thank you for admitting that you misread my message regarding Hitler/Catholicism. Hopefully that fully explains the remarks about Stalin's atheism and we can put that behind us, agreeing that the actions of any one man are no way to evaluate an entire belief system, whether theist or atheist.
On trees, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just ask for documentation. I googled standing board feet and didn't find much anything pro or con so far but I didn't go much beyond page 3 of the google stats (normally, I don't have to).
I wish that I could provide meaningful documentation on the amount of board feet of lumber standing, but that's something that the logging industry doesn't release to the public. Instead, they count "trees." And that means that they clear-cut a mature, multi-species forest and replant fast-growing, single-species saplings in a higher tree/acre density and claim that there are "more trees." I know from talking to scientists that what I say is true, but I cannot prove it and can only ask that you treat the lumber industry statistics with proper skepticism.
On comparative advantage, you're making a great error. We have plenty of oil in this country.
According to whom? All of the numbers that I've seen show that the amount of oil still buried underground in the U.S. is only a fraction of what we need.
Every country starts out at the bottom of the economic ladder and doesn't give a damn about pollution. As they grow wealthy they start caring.
Not all of the world's peoples have the same values and I think that it is a stretch to assume that someone in Bangladesh will become concerned about pollution just because they have money. Japan is a wealthy nation, yet they still pursue whaling despite the environmental devastation it has caused.
There *is* no other solution than economic growth and wealth creation.
Sure there is: Economic sanctions against big polluters and stiff tariffs on goods imported from nations that pollute excessively.
We'll all end up trading with each other in a healthy system and as low cost sources of material are used up we'll go progressively up the ladder to higher cost sources until the declining cost of space transport hits that key point where the low-cost source is the asteroid belt, the moon, mars, or some other celestial body and we're pretty well set for several centuries thereafter.
Having worked in the satellite industry, I don't foresee cost-effective space-based mining. The current cost to boost a satellite into low Earth orbit (LEO) is about $5,000 per pound using the Space Shuttle, an Ariane 44L, Atlas 2AS, or a Delta 2 (the launch vehicle choice depends on the size and weight of the satellite, among other factors). I'd love to see a breakthrough that cut that figure to $50/pound, but I wouldn't bet on it.
This resource shortage that's got you sick to death is a short term problem. With the progress on carbon nanotubes accellerating unbelievably fast, I expect space extraction will become a reality in my lifetime and yours (they're currently projecting about 20 years from now). We just have to grow our economy as fast as possible until then so there will be enough capital to manage that great transition.
While that's a rosy picture of the future, I want to turn your attention to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. When that film was released in 1967, scientists and lay people alike thought that it presented a realistic view of man's future 35 years hence. The idea of everyone having videophones, there being giant space stations, commercial trips into space, and grand, manned investigations of the solar system just seemed "right" given the progress we had made. Alas, it never came to fruition. I sure don't want to find out that we've used up the Earth's resources and poisoned the land, air, and sea based on an unfulfilled promise.
You misunderstood my point. I am not refering to the strength of the backing material, I am refering to the strength of the glue. It bonds much stronger than any other reasonably priced tape.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. For future reference, "tape" refers to the flexible strip itself, which is why we have non-adhesive forms of tape like cassette tape, Digital Audio Tape (DAT), and ticker tape.