it's not moral to punish the innocent to
get at the guilty
Historically, a UDP benefits the
innocent-at-the-offending-provider
(aside from a temporary iconvenience)
just as much as it benefits the rest
of the net. And, as far as I can
recall, no UDP has ever lasted longer
than a week, so we don't exactly talk
about a long-term problem here.
Or, to put it in a different (more
familiar to the modern, non-usenet-oriented
world) light, consider how much
legit users in.tw,.kr,.ru, and
recently.il suffer as a result of
their ISP's sloth... If we had an
email equivalent of the UDP (EDP?),
perhaps we wouldn't all have to
block those addresses by default,
no doubt to the great relief of
non-spammers in those regions.
As an aside... DAMN! Someone fix
Slashdot! I've typed this same
blob in about five times so far,
because I keep getting logged out,
my messages dumped (blank screen
loads), and bizarre error message.
Aurgh!
I had wondered this myself, though
no one else seems to have commented
on it (too many Dr Evil refernces
to get in many facts, I guess).
I have, sitting over in the pile
I call my "useless CD collection",
an original v1.0 "Caldera Network
Desktop" Linux release. By adding
their own "proprietary" code
to the Linux world, how can they
possibly blame IBM for it?
If not outright frivolous, they need
to start by looking at their own
sub-companies before going after other
legit folks still in business.
Too bad, too. I used to consider SCO
a decent company. Unfortunately for
them, their business model simply
ceased to exist. Far better to have
gone out gracefully with people thinking
good of them, than to spew out their
final breath with the world damning
them... Think "Amiga" vs... well...
SCO.;-)
Maybe you could elaborate on your thoughts
to deal with this point.
Unfortunately, what I had in mind would
probably never happen, because it would
involve a radical (well, not that
radical, but certainly "significant")
change in the way ALL providers charge
their customers.
Currently, as you point out, a given
ISP has to pay for the traffic they
send and receive. This causes
the entire issue under consideration,
the possibility of having "traffic"
that a user neither knows about nor
wants (ie, Slammer sucking up your
bandwidth even if you have all the
proper patches installed and a good
firewall). If all companies
(including tier-1 providers) billed
only for traffic sent, then the
problem of "who pays for received
traffic" doesn't exist, because it
has no cost.
The biggest problem I see with such
an idea comes from the typical
heavily asymmetric broadband usage
patterns. However, below a certain
usage limit, this usually comes at a
fixed price per month anyway, so may
not have all that much impact on my
ideas above.
Why not order or buy a box copy of
your favorite linux distro
Of Linux's bigger selling points, one
involves the idea that you DON'T need
to buy it to legally use it. And why
should we? Kudos to RedHat for finding
a way to make a profit off Linux, but
really, 99% of the "product" they sell
came from people who VOLUNTEERED their
time and coding skills... And they did
so for a community (or just because they
needed a program to do a given task, and
didn't see a reason not to share), not
for RedHat to pick up and sell.
For an analogy, pick your favorite hobby.
Make something wonderful based on that
hobby. Now give it to me, so I can
sell it. Would you still suggest people
should flock to the stores to support
me in my attempts to profit from your
work? Yes, I realize RedHat and Mandrake
and others have contributed to the Open
Source world (well, Mandrake far more than
RH), but that doesn't mean I want their
additions enough to pay them for it.
Personally, my favorite distributions
(Slackware and Debian) come as close to
purist, non-corporate works of open
source as you can get.
It's a hell of a lot cheaper than
buying windows XP
Oh, sure, like people actually buy
Microsoft products? Perhaps companies,
but... I can count on one hand the
number of people I know with legit
purchased Windows installations. Hell,
Microsoft should THANK the Linux
community for so drastically reducing
Windows piracy. Giving poor students
a legal alternative means they don't
need to steal Windows. And yes, I
know more than 5 people. Two hands'
worth, at least;-)
As it stands now I pay for any bandwidth
used regardless of how or why it was used.
It would be much better if those charges
could be passed along to the person
responsible for abusing your bandwidth,
but how that could be enforced is beyond
me.
To pass the cost to the person sending
the attack, we just need to focus entirely
on outbound traffic rather than inbound.
Simple 'nuff.
However, I find it disturbing that no one
has mentioned the ability to pay
for an unexpected enormous traffic spike.
In the past, most sites capable of
"accidentally" sucking up a few TB had
either a large corporation or a university
behind them. More and more private
individuals coloc at datacenters with
nice fat pipes these days, however, and
even a bill for a few hundred dollars would
seriously hurt them.
So when they bill comes in for USD$20k
on a $9.99/month web hosting service, does
it seem even remotely reasonable to expect
Joe Sixpack to pay that much for his "beer
of the week comparison" site that averages
10 visitors a day? I would say absolutely
not, but I agree the money has to come
from *somewhere*.
Personally, I think ALL ISPs with a
bandwidth cap should have a default
policy of "shut it down when they go
over, unless specifically requested
not to" (possibly requiring an escrow
account if requested not to, and still
shutting it down if that runs out).
That would prevent this from ever
turning into a problem. And,
while that may hurt their income a
little (since small-scale bandwith
excesses bring in big, yet reasonable,
bucks), any enormous excesses (like the
$20k I gave as an example) the ISP
wouldn't end up having to eat when
Joe declares bankruptcy and looses
everything due to the worm-of-the-week
drinking his beer-of-the-week.
As far as the courts are concerned, there
are already well established prcedures to
follow if someone defaults on a 30 day
account. Stopping someone's business so it
is impossible for them to remedy the breach
is not one of them.
Yup... They call it "reposession" in the
physical-goods world. If I don't pay my
car loan, they will come and take my car
back, regardless of my requiring it to
get to work to "remedy the breach".
Let me change the situation slightly...
Let's say I sell an app to company-X, who
does pay me, but they re-sell it (against
our contract) to company-Y. If I have the
ability to disable company-Y's installation
of it, would I still have some liability
for their loss of business?
Probably, just because our courts consider
businesses as FAR more important than we
mere humans. In any case, let 'em sue me.
They'll spend more in legal fees than they
could ever possibly recover from me, and
perhaps I'd get the satisfaction of driving
them into insolvency. Ah, such a cheerful
thought. Pyrrhus may have lost everything,
but he still "won".;-)
If someone who did work for me ever tried
to pull something like this, they would never
do work for me again.
Um... Duh?
Someone who did this to you would not have
gotten paid. Thus, I have very little doubt
that they would *NOT* work for you ever again,
but that would result from *THEIR* choice,
not yours. People do not generally like to
work without getting paid.
"Aww, c'mon man, PLEASE let me spend another
six months coding for you, only to have the
check bounce!"
People have been sucessfully sued for this practice.
Successfully sued on what grounds? "The
software we stole doesn't work"?
A contract has two parts - If one party
fails to fulfill their obligations, I had
the understanding that the other party had
no obligation to fulfil their side either.
If that does not hold true, why would ANYONE
pay for ANYTHING? "Yup, you just ship me
that nice new PC, I'll send a check tomorrow".
Bwa-hahaha. Time to upgrade to a quad
Sparc-III, yup yup yup.
Though, I will readily admit that law does
not equal logic, and no doubt you can indeed
point me to cases won on this very issue.
I expect, however, that they would at least
have some extenuating circumstances, such as
the customer losing half a million transations
just because the software disabled itself.
(For which reason we should always add the
ever popular "The author bears no responsibility
for financial losses or damages resulting from
the use of this program by the customer", or
something to that extent).
it was a variable name for a public key,
not a backdoor or anything like that.
I would like you to go perform a simple
experiment.
Write a "Hello World" program, where you
have a static character array named "Fred"
containing the string "Hello World" which
you pass to printf.
Compile it.
Now, search the executable for "Hello World".
You find it, right? Now search for "Fred".
Funny, you get no matches. Doesn't that seem
odd, considering MS's claim?
Doesn't it also seem odd that, in the context
in which "NSAKey" existed, it fit perfectly
in a data area containing identically-formatted
key data?
read bruce schenier's column on it
Okay. Does the following quote sound familiar?
"Two, that it is actually an NSA key. If the NSA
is going to use Microsoft products for classified
traffic, they're going to install their own
cryptography. They're not going to want to show
it to anyone, not even Microsoft. They are going
to want to sign their own modules. So the backup
key could also be an NSA internal key, so that
they could install strong cryptography on Microsoft
products for their own internal use."
It would appear that Bruce did NOT claim the
key only existed as a coincidence... He said
it *might* result as a coincidence, or it might
result from the NSA wanting to *improve* the
available security for their own use (and,
presumeably, to hell with the win95-using
masses who fund the NSA through taxes). These
do not describe the same situation.
Arguably, though, the "improved" security
argument seems no less offensive to the
privacy-minded. Why? Becuse, if the NSA
saw a need to use super-secret-spiffy encryption
for their *own* traffic, they did so due to
the inherent weakness of the default crypto
available (which I doubt many people would
disagree with in hindsight).
So they didn't *need* a backdoor for
everyone else, they needed a *lock* on
the wide-open-barn-door for their
own use.
The author has a very clear pro-Loebner
bias that he doesn't even try to conceal.
His hostility towards Minsky, Dennett, and
the rest of the established academic community
is so blatant (and unfounded) that it's
embarrassing to read.
While I will agree with your asserion
of a pro-Loebner bias, the embarrassment
rests firmly with the Gods-o'-AI that
Loebner has made look like fools.
Even if you ignore all the peripheral
circumstances, this comes down to one
issue only - If everyone hates Loebner,
they all have the option of ignoring
him. A wealthy eccentric offering real
US cash for a sci-fi-esque goal does NO
harm whatsoever to the field.
However, I do find it somewhat interesting
the way AI has divided into different camps,
separated into decision making processes (DS),
and overt system behavior (MS, "mimetics
sciences"). As much as DS has to offer
computer science in general, no amount of
grandstanding and assertion by the "experts"
can hide the fact that, fundamentally, they
no longer have anything to do with AI-proper.
So if they dislike the label... Not a problem.
Their work doesn't involve it anyway, just
a sort of "natural" approach to design and
analysis of algorithms. If they can live with
that fact, that they've completely abandoned
the goals they started with, I'll gladly
call them "decision scientists". But I
won't stop hoping that real AI
researchers will eventually make something
that acts passably human.
I personally feel (and suspect many geeks who
grew up on Neuromancer, 2001, and countless
other staples of sci-fi do as well), that
"real" AI means "able to fake humanity well
enough to convince a real human". If Minsky
et al don't believe that, fine, they can do
their own thing (which, ironically enough,
they want to *deprive* the other camp of that
same right). But going out of their way to
denounce a contest... Who should feel
ashamed of themselves?
Last I heard, water causes a much stronger
greenhouse effect than CO2.
So the fact that the ice caps consist of
water rather than solid CO2 means nothing
but GOOD!
Not only do we have something even more
useful for trapping heat (if we could melt
it), but we have something that Earth-based
life requires quite a lot of to survive.
Strange, some of the conclusions people come
to when the find that a pet project needs
a slight tweak.
IMO, I see it as a much bigger problem that
Mars lacks a strong, relatively-stable
magnetic field. If we hope one day to
live there, we don't *need* to bother
making its atmosphere human-friendly,
because we'd need to live a few hundred
feet underground anyway to survive the
constant bombardment of the surface by
"hard" radiation.
Now, for a personal oddball idea, one of
the science projects from the ex-Columbia
inspired me. Insects need only a small
fraction of the oxygen of mammals, far
less water, and can survive even a hard
vaccuum and fairly high levels of background
radiation. The experiment with "ants in space",
as covered on Slashdot a couple weeks ago,
led me to wonder, why don't we just
ship a few dozen different insect colonies
to Mars and let *them* terraform it? Ants
apparently do much better in lower gravity,
they "farm" aphids and fungus (of which some
strains could conceivably survive on the
chemical-energy-bearing soil on mars, thus
providing food for the ants), they clean
their own microenvironment... Perfect
for what we need. Let the little guys build
up Mars' biosphere for a few decades, then
other introduced organisms would have
a much better chance for survival.
While slightly less scary, not a
whole lot. The military (national guard
during a state of non-emergency) still
detained her, for refusing to submit to
an illegal search of her posessions ("Our
Policy" does not equal "legal", no matter
how much a given corporation tries to blur
that fact).
But, I will admit that I evidently had
accepted facts from an unreliable
source. Bad me! (not sarcasm).
One of the previous generation's best video
game companies has decided to do... Pachinko?
The stupid game which consists of "invert bucket
of ball-bearings over machine, watch them drip
through, every third bucket or so win a colored
ping-pong ball that you can trade for crappy
chucky-cheese-esque prizes"?
Nope. This proves it. I have finally
lost any sense of contact with the world
whatsoever. Time to wander off into the
woods and live on skinned squirrels and
assorted tubers. You folks have just
gotten WAY too sureal for my liking.
And here I considered myself something
of an eccentric. Heh. I can't possibly
compete with how cracked reality seems.
On November 1
Green Party USA activist Nancy Oden was
prevented from boarding a plane to Chicago at the Bangor,
Maine International Airport and temporarily detained on
orders of military personnel stationed at the airport.
Below is an account of what happened by Nancy Oden
herself.
"Privacy is essential to the exercise of
free speech, free thought, and free
association. The courts have established a
First Amendment right to receive information
in a publicly funded library. Further, the
courts have upheld the right to privacy based
on the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.
Many states provide guarantees of privacy
in their constitutions and statute law.
Numerous decisions in case law have defined
and extended rights to privacy."
It includes references (four for that paragraph
alone), if you want to argue with any specific
point.
Arrested and sent to Cuba, no. Greatly
inconvenienced to no gain for anyone,
yes. The leader of the Green party in my
state cannot currently fly because of thinly
veiled attempts to silence political
dissent. Along with several hundred (that
we know of) similarly harmless people
who have no means of getting off the
transportation blacklist created entirely
through illegal and due-process-denying
means.
What great conveniences and freedoms
have you personally given up because of
John Ashcroft?
Shall I go over the bill of rights
one at a time? Let's see... Privacy,
speech, religion, secure in my home,
search and seizure, state's rights,
using military for domestic law enforcement...
And those just from off the top of my head.
I could dig deeper.
but at least Ashcroft hasn't been
murdering entire religous sects and
pointing machine guns at innocent 6
year olds.
True enough. Reno seems to have made
that sufficiently unpopular that Ashcroft
hasn't (yet) dared continue her work.
Oh, and quit with the damn *stars*
around words. You look like a damn fool.
Ah, good ol' ad hominem, the last resort
of those with no better point to make. Yes,
I agree, I should use actual HTML tags in
this medium. Having used USENET long before
the web came around, however, I have an old
habit that has proven difficult to break. To
go so far as saying it makes me look like a
fool, however? I doubt it.
please tell Tom Daschle to stop suggesting
that we are not protected from terrorists if
you don't want the government to be able to
do anything about it.
We don't *NEED* protection from terrorists,
and the measures enacted so far have done
*nothing* but strip us of the very
conveniences and freedoms we would like
to protect.
You might point out that we have had no
real acts of domestic terrorism since
September 2001. True. But how often did
we experience such attacks *prior* to the
WTC attack? And, even if we *did* expect
something since that time, why would anyone
bother? Ever seen the Twilight Zone episode
"The Monsters are Coming to Maple Street"?
That about covers it.
As much as I hate the "if we don't blah, the
terrorists have already won", our attourney
general, and the OHS, and TIA, all *embody*
the ultimate goals of any potential terrorists.
Why should *real* terrorists waste their time
and effort doing what we will willingly,
even beggingly, do to ourselves? Personally,
I'd rather risk a quick death less likely
than getting struck by lightning, than have
the afforementioned whack-jobs supposedly
"protecting" us make a long and sedate life
not worth living. But then, I don't consider
myself a sheep. If you like having Ashcroft
herd you into a nice "secure" detention
cells, by all means beg for more. But leave
me the hell out of your plans.
Yup I can see it now... ignorant justice
in action:....and as you can the heuristic
dectection of the compiled machine code
results in clear similarities....
Heh, you beat me to it.
Actually, though, I had something more along
the lines of Microsoft suing Linus... "Look,
your honor... See all those "if"s and "for"s,
and how he quite blatantly follows the same
(purely stylistic, of course) habit of
*closing* all the parenthesis he opens?
Clear infringement!"
EuroTV and Streetmap are trying to use
legal tactics to tackle technical problems.
Soon the Big Fish will use the ultimate
technical tactic...they own the devices
and the lend them to us...
I don't mean this as elitist or
anything, but...
Good.
*Let* the media conglomerates serve all their
precanned crap via a single totally controlled
TV-like device, and get the hell off the
internet... Perhaps we can go back to content
for its own sake, rather than content to make
a buck from an uncooperative audience and then
pissing and moaning when people try to block
out what they never wanted in the first place;
back to relative obscurity wherein we didn't
have laws passed specifically to stop the
actions of a tiny minority of people
because the mindless hordes discovered they
could take advantage of those activities to
commit minor crimes on a massive scale. Give
me a distributed mesh network of open WAPs
all run by private individuals, with no
corporate presence whatsoever, and I'll
say goodbye to mass media forever.
Currently I watch exactly one half hour of TV
per week - South Park. And even that has
started getting stale. The only commercial
web-sites I regularly visit (not counting
sites like Slashdot, who have commercial
backing but all their content comes from
totally uncompensated contributors) include
those that serve certain very specific
types of information, such as Google,
Weather.com, or Yahoo news. And if I had
to pay a small fee to use those, I would
do so (providing I could get *just* those
sites and ad-free, rather than the way cable
companies package channels so I have to pay
$50/mo more just for sports channels that
I have literally never watched and *STILL*
have 15 minutes of ads per hour). Personally,
I wouldn't even *have* cable, except it would
cost me just as much to get broadband internet
without the TV feed (five dollars difference,
actually).
Unfortunately, I don't see my idea of
the optimal outcome of this as likely.
The current trends seem to have us moving
toward no such thing as a general-purpose
PC, totally precanned media content with
no control whatsoever over it, and
"perfect" tracking of our media-using
habits to make sure we get a legally
mandated fair share of ads.
So overall, I guess I agree with you.
But it depresses the hell out of me.
but they can dictate whether you get the
content or not
Yes, they can. They have the option of not
putting it on a public webserver in the
first place. Beyond that, they have no
control over who sees it and how. They can
use various technological measures to try
to control access, but short of forcing
some form of user authentication via a
secure proprietary client, the ad-blockers
and scrapers *WILL* win.
If they are getting no ad impressions,
then they are getting no money.
This statement seems a common way of viewing
these issues (Ad blocking, scraping,
whatever). However, realize that they don't
have a "right" to make money just because
they offer otherwise-free content online.
They offer that content in the *HOPE* of
making money, but that comes with no
guarantees. And yes, I go to the kitchen
during commercials, or change the station,
or fast-forward.
I see the problem as involving how offensive
these sites make the ads. I find Flash and
Shockwave ads so offensive (and, I find that
they often crash my browser - the huge
offensive Flash ad currently on the Onion,
for example, crashes my browser every time)
that I simply browse with them disabled.
Pop(up/under) ads bother me enough that I
have the "dom.disable_open_during_load"
preference set to completely block them.
In comparison, the small, unintrusive text
ad in the upper left of K5's front page
doesn't bother me at all, and I've even
*clicked* on it a few times.
Companies (not just advertisers, but those
who serve such ads) need to realize that
more annoying ads do make an impression -
a strongly negative one. If I want their
products, *I'll* seek *them* out. If they
detract from my web browsing experience,
I will specifically make a point of seeking
out their *competitors* if I need something
they offer.
In case any marketing folks read this,
I'll mention the last ad I *DID* watch -
The one with the
hamster and rabbit from Blockbuster.
Why? Because I found the ad
sufficiently amusing to watch, on
its own merits. Important point
there. It didn't annoy me, and it had
value all by itself. *THAT* makes a
positive impression on a potential
customer. I don't even know what the
hampster and rabbit talked about, but it
doesn't matter, I remember that "Blockbuster
amused me for 30 seconds". Making me waste
a few minutes to figure out how to filter
out your crap does *not* make a good
impression. I will remember "X10 pissed
me off for 30 seconds, let's visit Logitech's
cam offerings instead".
Hmm, normally I would ignore a comment like
that, but between it and getting modded as
flamebait, I have to ask (and hope you'll
respond), why do you say that?
I tend to use sarcasm a bit heavily, but I
though it clear enough I meant that post
(at least the second half) as largely
humorous.
My qualifications I described
accurately... Didn't mean to brag, just
establishing that I do have some credibility
when it comes to IT.
The comment about "Hamburger U", well, they
actually *DO* call it that, and believe it
or not, many people consider it one of the
better business schools in the country.
As for not finding a job reflecting on my
personality, I get along rather well with
people... Just not many jobs to apply for.
Of the 20+ I've applied for (in IT) in the
past half year, I've gotten callbacks on
five (I doubt you can attribute my social
skills to not getting jobs that never bothered
contacting me)... Two I lacked a critical
skill for (MS SQL, and they wouldn't accept
PostgreSQL or MySQL as a substitute), one
used the "overqualified" line I've grown to
hate (from the far-more-than-20 non-tech
jobs I've applied for in the same time), and
two I actually interviewed for and *got*,
sorta, but they chose "not to fill the
position at this time" (one laid off a
third of its staff a month later).
So as much as everyone keeps telling me "If
you have the skills, you can still get a tech
job", I'd like to see them prove it. Perhaps
if I lived in metro Boston or New York. But
I don't.
I have a 2-year degree, a brace of 4-year
degrees, and as many Linux certs (LCP and LCA),
as well as 8 years experience as a firmware
engineer, and still can't get a tech job.
Oh, wait, did the article forget to mention
that McDonald's has started accepting an RHCE
in place of sending management candidates to
Hamburger U? Silly me. Must have missed
that.
Either that, or RedHat will hire them as
instructors to spread their certs-in-HS
program to other places. LinuxGruven,
anyone?
As one commentor already pointed out,
this would make me *drop* whatever
service I already had if I couldn't disable
such location-specific spam.
Did this really need asking? And on
Slashdot? C'mon, you may as well ask
if we would support Hillary Rosen for
president (well, over Dubya, perhaps [G]).
The Slashdot crowd largely likes privacy,
and *particularly* dislikes government or
corporate sponsored intrusion on their
personal space. Would we pay for this?
We'd abuse the hell out of it to make it
totally unuseable, more likely - I for one
can think of a nice script to enumerate
every single arcsecond on Earth, meaning
every 101ft a person walks, they'd get
another message saying "you are here".;-)
Slashdot Mirror
it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty
.tw, .kr, .ru, and
recently .il suffer as a result of
their ISP's sloth... If we had an
email equivalent of the UDP (EDP?),
perhaps we wouldn't all have to
block those addresses by default,
no doubt to the great relief of
non-spammers in those regions.
Historically, a UDP benefits the innocent-at-the-offending-provider (aside from a temporary iconvenience) just as much as it benefits the rest of the net. And, as far as I can recall, no UDP has ever lasted longer than a week, so we don't exactly talk about a long-term problem here.
Or, to put it in a different (more familiar to the modern, non-usenet-oriented world) light, consider how much legit users in
As an aside... DAMN! Someone fix Slashdot! I've typed this same blob in about five times so far, because I keep getting logged out, my messages dumped (blank screen loads), and bizarre error message. Aurgh!
I had wondered this myself, though no one else seems to have commented on it (too many Dr Evil refernces to get in many facts, I guess).
;-)
I have, sitting over in the pile I call my "useless CD collection", an original v1.0 "Caldera Network Desktop" Linux release. By adding their own "proprietary" code to the Linux world, how can they possibly blame IBM for it?
If not outright frivolous, they need to start by looking at their own sub-companies before going after other legit folks still in business.
Too bad, too. I used to consider SCO a decent company. Unfortunately for them, their business model simply ceased to exist. Far better to have gone out gracefully with people thinking good of them, than to spew out their final breath with the world damning them... Think "Amiga" vs... well... SCO.
Maybe you could elaborate on your thoughts to deal with this point.
Unfortunately, what I had in mind would probably never happen, because it would involve a radical (well, not that radical, but certainly "significant") change in the way ALL providers charge their customers.
Currently, as you point out, a given ISP has to pay for the traffic they send and receive. This causes the entire issue under consideration, the possibility of having "traffic" that a user neither knows about nor wants (ie, Slammer sucking up your bandwidth even if you have all the proper patches installed and a good firewall). If all companies (including tier-1 providers) billed only for traffic sent, then the problem of "who pays for received traffic" doesn't exist, because it has no cost.
The biggest problem I see with such an idea comes from the typical heavily asymmetric broadband usage patterns. However, below a certain usage limit, this usually comes at a fixed price per month anyway, so may not have all that much impact on my ideas above.
Why not order or buy a box copy of your favorite linux distro
;-)
Of Linux's bigger selling points, one involves the idea that you DON'T need to buy it to legally use it. And why should we? Kudos to RedHat for finding a way to make a profit off Linux, but really, 99% of the "product" they sell came from people who VOLUNTEERED their time and coding skills... And they did so for a community (or just because they needed a program to do a given task, and didn't see a reason not to share), not for RedHat to pick up and sell.
For an analogy, pick your favorite hobby. Make something wonderful based on that hobby. Now give it to me, so I can sell it. Would you still suggest people should flock to the stores to support me in my attempts to profit from your work? Yes, I realize RedHat and Mandrake and others have contributed to the Open Source world (well, Mandrake far more than RH), but that doesn't mean I want their additions enough to pay them for it. Personally, my favorite distributions (Slackware and Debian) come as close to purist, non-corporate works of open source as you can get.
It's a hell of a lot cheaper than buying windows XP
Oh, sure, like people actually buy Microsoft products? Perhaps companies, but... I can count on one hand the number of people I know with legit purchased Windows installations. Hell, Microsoft should THANK the Linux community for so drastically reducing Windows piracy. Giving poor students a legal alternative means they don't need to steal Windows. And yes, I know more than 5 people. Two hands' worth, at least
As it stands now I pay for any bandwidth used regardless of how or why it was used. It would be much better if those charges could be passed along to the person responsible for abusing your bandwidth, but how that could be enforced is beyond me.
To pass the cost to the person sending the attack, we just need to focus entirely on outbound traffic rather than inbound. Simple 'nuff.
However, I find it disturbing that no one has mentioned the ability to pay for an unexpected enormous traffic spike. In the past, most sites capable of "accidentally" sucking up a few TB had either a large corporation or a university behind them. More and more private individuals coloc at datacenters with nice fat pipes these days, however, and even a bill for a few hundred dollars would seriously hurt them.
So when they bill comes in for USD$20k on a $9.99/month web hosting service, does it seem even remotely reasonable to expect Joe Sixpack to pay that much for his "beer of the week comparison" site that averages 10 visitors a day? I would say absolutely not, but I agree the money has to come from *somewhere*.
Personally, I think ALL ISPs with a bandwidth cap should have a default policy of "shut it down when they go over, unless specifically requested not to" (possibly requiring an escrow account if requested not to, and still shutting it down if that runs out). That would prevent this from ever turning into a problem. And, while that may hurt their income a little (since small-scale bandwith excesses bring in big, yet reasonable, bucks), any enormous excesses (like the $20k I gave as an example) the ISP wouldn't end up having to eat when Joe declares bankruptcy and looses everything due to the worm-of-the-week drinking his beer-of-the-week.
As far as the courts are concerned, there are already well established prcedures to follow if someone defaults on a 30 day account. Stopping someone's business so it is impossible for them to remedy the breach is not one of them.
;-)
Yup... They call it "reposession" in the physical-goods world. If I don't pay my car loan, they will come and take my car back, regardless of my requiring it to get to work to "remedy the breach".
Let me change the situation slightly...
Let's say I sell an app to company-X, who does pay me, but they re-sell it (against our contract) to company-Y. If I have the ability to disable company-Y's installation of it, would I still have some liability for their loss of business?
Probably, just because our courts consider businesses as FAR more important than we mere humans. In any case, let 'em sue me. They'll spend more in legal fees than they could ever possibly recover from me, and perhaps I'd get the satisfaction of driving them into insolvency. Ah, such a cheerful thought. Pyrrhus may have lost everything, but he still "won".
If someone who did work for me ever tried to pull something like this, they would never do work for me again.
Um... Duh?
Someone who did this to you would not have gotten paid. Thus, I have very little doubt that they would *NOT* work for you ever again, but that would result from *THEIR* choice, not yours. People do not generally like to work without getting paid.
"Aww, c'mon man, PLEASE let me spend another six months coding for you, only to have the check bounce!"
People have been sucessfully sued for this practice.
Successfully sued on what grounds? "The software we stole doesn't work"?
A contract has two parts - If one party fails to fulfill their obligations, I had the understanding that the other party had no obligation to fulfil their side either.
If that does not hold true, why would ANYONE pay for ANYTHING? "Yup, you just ship me that nice new PC, I'll send a check tomorrow". Bwa-hahaha. Time to upgrade to a quad Sparc-III, yup yup yup.
Though, I will readily admit that law does not equal logic, and no doubt you can indeed point me to cases won on this very issue. I expect, however, that they would at least have some extenuating circumstances, such as the customer losing half a million transations just because the software disabled itself. (For which reason we should always add the ever popular "The author bears no responsibility for financial losses or damages resulting from the use of this program by the customer", or something to that extent).
it was a variable name for a public key, not a backdoor or anything like that.
I would like you to go perform a simple experiment.
Write a "Hello World" program, where you have a static character array named "Fred" containing the string "Hello World" which you pass to printf.
Compile it.
Now, search the executable for "Hello World". You find it, right? Now search for "Fred". Funny, you get no matches. Doesn't that seem odd, considering MS's claim?
Doesn't it also seem odd that, in the context in which "NSAKey" existed, it fit perfectly in a data area containing identically-formatted key data?
read bruce schenier's column on it
Okay. Does the following quote sound familiar?
"Two, that it is actually an NSA key. If the NSA is going to use Microsoft products for classified traffic, they're going to install their own cryptography. They're not going to want to show it to anyone, not even Microsoft. They are going to want to sign their own modules. So the backup key could also be an NSA internal key, so that they could install strong cryptography on Microsoft products for their own internal use."
It would appear that Bruce did NOT claim the key only existed as a coincidence... He said it *might* result as a coincidence, or it might result from the NSA wanting to *improve* the available security for their own use (and, presumeably, to hell with the win95-using masses who fund the NSA through taxes). These do not describe the same situation.
Arguably, though, the "improved" security argument seems no less offensive to the privacy-minded. Why? Becuse, if the NSA saw a need to use super-secret-spiffy encryption for their *own* traffic, they did so due to the inherent weakness of the default crypto available (which I doubt many people would disagree with in hindsight).
So they didn't *need* a backdoor for everyone else, they needed a *lock* on the wide-open-barn-door for their own use.
The author has a very clear pro-Loebner bias that he doesn't even try to conceal. His hostility towards Minsky, Dennett, and the rest of the established academic community is so blatant (and unfounded) that it's embarrassing to read.
While I will agree with your asserion of a pro-Loebner bias, the embarrassment rests firmly with the Gods-o'-AI that Loebner has made look like fools.
Even if you ignore all the peripheral circumstances, this comes down to one issue only - If everyone hates Loebner, they all have the option of ignoring him. A wealthy eccentric offering real US cash for a sci-fi-esque goal does NO harm whatsoever to the field.
However, I do find it somewhat interesting the way AI has divided into different camps, separated into decision making processes (DS), and overt system behavior (MS, "mimetics sciences"). As much as DS has to offer computer science in general, no amount of grandstanding and assertion by the "experts" can hide the fact that, fundamentally, they no longer have anything to do with AI-proper. So if they dislike the label... Not a problem. Their work doesn't involve it anyway, just a sort of "natural" approach to design and analysis of algorithms. If they can live with that fact, that they've completely abandoned the goals they started with, I'll gladly call them "decision scientists". But I won't stop hoping that real AI researchers will eventually make something that acts passably human.
I personally feel (and suspect many geeks who grew up on Neuromancer, 2001, and countless other staples of sci-fi do as well), that "real" AI means "able to fake humanity well enough to convince a real human". If Minsky et al don't believe that, fine, they can do their own thing (which, ironically enough, they want to *deprive* the other camp of that same right). But going out of their way to denounce a contest... Who should feel ashamed of themselves?
Last I heard, water causes a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2.
So the fact that the ice caps consist of water rather than solid CO2 means nothing but GOOD!
Not only do we have something even more useful for trapping heat (if we could melt it), but we have something that Earth-based life requires quite a lot of to survive.
Strange, some of the conclusions people come to when the find that a pet project needs a slight tweak.
IMO, I see it as a much bigger problem that Mars lacks a strong, relatively-stable magnetic field. If we hope one day to live there, we don't *need* to bother making its atmosphere human-friendly, because we'd need to live a few hundred feet underground anyway to survive the constant bombardment of the surface by "hard" radiation.
Now, for a personal oddball idea, one of the science projects from the ex-Columbia inspired me. Insects need only a small fraction of the oxygen of mammals, far less water, and can survive even a hard vaccuum and fairly high levels of background radiation. The experiment with "ants in space", as covered on Slashdot a couple weeks ago, led me to wonder, why don't we just ship a few dozen different insect colonies to Mars and let *them* terraform it? Ants apparently do much better in lower gravity, they "farm" aphids and fungus (of which some strains could conceivably survive on the chemical-energy-bearing soil on mars, thus providing food for the ants), they clean their own microenvironment... Perfect for what we need. Let the little guys build up Mars' biosphere for a few decades, then other introduced organisms would have a much better chance for survival.
By the way, you might want to check your facts
While slightly less scary, not a whole lot. The military (national guard during a state of non-emergency) still detained her, for refusing to submit to an illegal search of her posessions ("Our Policy" does not equal "legal", no matter how much a given corporation tries to blur that fact).
But, I will admit that I evidently had accepted facts from an unreliable source. Bad me! (not sarcasm).
Pachinko...
Pachinko?
One of the previous generation's best video game companies has decided to do... Pachinko?
The stupid game which consists of "invert bucket of ball-bearings over machine, watch them drip through, every third bucket or so win a colored ping-pong ball that you can trade for crappy chucky-cheese-esque prizes"?
Nope. This proves it. I have finally lost any sense of contact with the world whatsoever. Time to wander off into the woods and live on skinned squirrels and assorted tubers. You folks have just gotten WAY too sureal for my liking.
And here I considered myself something of an eccentric. Heh. I can't possibly compete with how cracked reality seems.
I'll quote the first paragraph:
Does that answer your specific questions?
Show me in the Bill of Rights were you are guaranteed a right to privacy. (Hint: its not in the Bill of Rights)
From the American Library Association:
"Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association. The courts have established a First Amendment right to receive information in a publicly funded library. Further, the courts have upheld the right to privacy based on the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Many states provide guarantees of privacy in their constitutions and statute law. Numerous decisions in case law have defined and extended rights to privacy."
It includes references (four for that paragraph alone), if you want to argue with any specific point.
Do you know anybody who has?
Arrested and sent to Cuba, no. Greatly inconvenienced to no gain for anyone, yes. The leader of the Green party in my state cannot currently fly because of thinly veiled attempts to silence political dissent. Along with several hundred (that we know of) similarly harmless people who have no means of getting off the transportation blacklist created entirely through illegal and due-process-denying means.
What great conveniences and freedoms have you personally given up because of John Ashcroft?
Shall I go over the bill of rights one at a time? Let's see... Privacy, speech, religion, secure in my home, search and seizure, state's rights, using military for domestic law enforcement... And those just from off the top of my head. I could dig deeper.
but at least Ashcroft hasn't been murdering entire religous sects and pointing machine guns at innocent 6 year olds.
True enough. Reno seems to have made that sufficiently unpopular that Ashcroft hasn't (yet) dared continue her work.
Oh, and quit with the damn *stars* around words. You look like a damn fool.
Ah, good ol' ad hominem, the last resort of those with no better point to make. Yes, I agree, I should use actual HTML tags in this medium. Having used USENET long before the web came around, however, I have an old habit that has proven difficult to break. To go so far as saying it makes me look like a fool, however? I doubt it.
please tell Tom Daschle to stop suggesting that we are not protected from terrorists if you don't want the government to be able to do anything about it.
We don't *NEED* protection from terrorists, and the measures enacted so far have done *nothing* but strip us of the very conveniences and freedoms we would like to protect.
You might point out that we have had no real acts of domestic terrorism since September 2001. True. But how often did we experience such attacks *prior* to the WTC attack? And, even if we *did* expect something since that time, why would anyone bother? Ever seen the Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Coming to Maple Street"? That about covers it.
As much as I hate the "if we don't blah, the terrorists have already won", our attourney general, and the OHS, and TIA, all *embody* the ultimate goals of any potential terrorists. Why should *real* terrorists waste their time and effort doing what we will willingly, even beggingly, do to ourselves? Personally, I'd rather risk a quick death less likely than getting struck by lightning, than have the afforementioned whack-jobs supposedly "protecting" us make a long and sedate life not worth living. But then, I don't consider myself a sheep. If you like having Ashcroft herd you into a nice "secure" detention cells, by all means beg for more. But leave me the hell out of your plans.
Yay! The good guys finally win one.
Suck on that, herr Ashcroft...
The president pardoned Timothy McVeigh.
And Congress voted that we should side with Hitler after all.
And NASA decided to listen to its safety panel rather than dismiss them for saying Columbia shouldn't fly.
Bread and fucking circuses.
Yup I can see it now... ignorant justice in action: ....and as you can the heuristic
dectection of the compiled machine code
results in clear similarities....
Heh, you beat me to it.
Actually, though, I had something more along the lines of Microsoft suing Linus... "Look, your honor... See all those "if"s and "for"s, and how he quite blatantly follows the same (purely stylistic, of course) habit of *closing* all the parenthesis he opens? Clear infringement!"
EuroTV and Streetmap are trying to use legal tactics to tackle technical problems. Soon the Big Fish will use the ultimate technical tactic...they own the devices and the lend them to us...
I don't mean this as elitist or anything, but...
Good.
*Let* the media conglomerates serve all their precanned crap via a single totally controlled TV-like device, and get the hell off the internet... Perhaps we can go back to content for its own sake, rather than content to make a buck from an uncooperative audience and then pissing and moaning when people try to block out what they never wanted in the first place; back to relative obscurity wherein we didn't have laws passed specifically to stop the actions of a tiny minority of people because the mindless hordes discovered they could take advantage of those activities to commit minor crimes on a massive scale. Give me a distributed mesh network of open WAPs all run by private individuals, with no corporate presence whatsoever, and I'll say goodbye to mass media forever.
Currently I watch exactly one half hour of TV per week - South Park. And even that has started getting stale. The only commercial web-sites I regularly visit (not counting sites like Slashdot, who have commercial backing but all their content comes from totally uncompensated contributors) include those that serve certain very specific types of information, such as Google, Weather.com, or Yahoo news. And if I had to pay a small fee to use those, I would do so (providing I could get *just* those sites and ad-free, rather than the way cable companies package channels so I have to pay $50/mo more just for sports channels that I have literally never watched and *STILL* have 15 minutes of ads per hour). Personally, I wouldn't even *have* cable, except it would cost me just as much to get broadband internet without the TV feed (five dollars difference, actually).
Unfortunately, I don't see my idea of the optimal outcome of this as likely. The current trends seem to have us moving toward no such thing as a general-purpose PC, totally precanned media content with no control whatsoever over it, and "perfect" tracking of our media-using habits to make sure we get a legally mandated fair share of ads.
So overall, I guess I agree with you. But it depresses the hell out of me.
but they can dictate whether you get the content or not
Yes, they can. They have the option of not putting it on a public webserver in the first place. Beyond that, they have no control over who sees it and how. They can use various technological measures to try to control access, but short of forcing some form of user authentication via a secure proprietary client, the ad-blockers and scrapers *WILL* win.
If they are getting no ad impressions, then they are getting no money.
This statement seems a common way of viewing these issues (Ad blocking, scraping, whatever). However, realize that they don't have a "right" to make money just because they offer otherwise-free content online. They offer that content in the *HOPE* of making money, but that comes with no guarantees. And yes, I go to the kitchen during commercials, or change the station, or fast-forward.
I see the problem as involving how offensive these sites make the ads. I find Flash and Shockwave ads so offensive (and, I find that they often crash my browser - the huge offensive Flash ad currently on the Onion, for example, crashes my browser every time) that I simply browse with them disabled. Pop(up/under) ads bother me enough that I have the "dom.disable_open_during_load" preference set to completely block them. In comparison, the small, unintrusive text ad in the upper left of K5's front page doesn't bother me at all, and I've even *clicked* on it a few times.
Companies (not just advertisers, but those who serve such ads) need to realize that more annoying ads do make an impression - a strongly negative one. If I want their products, *I'll* seek *them* out. If they detract from my web browsing experience, I will specifically make a point of seeking out their *competitors* if I need something they offer.
In case any marketing folks read this, I'll mention the last ad I *DID* watch - The one with the hamster and rabbit from Blockbuster. Why? Because I found the ad sufficiently amusing to watch, on its own merits. Important point there. It didn't annoy me, and it had value all by itself. *THAT* makes a positive impression on a potential customer. I don't even know what the hampster and rabbit talked about, but it doesn't matter, I remember that "Blockbuster amused me for 30 seconds". Making me waste a few minutes to figure out how to filter out your crap does *not* make a good impression. I will remember "X10 pissed me off for 30 seconds, let's visit Logitech's cam offerings instead".
You sound like an arrogant prick.
Hmm, normally I would ignore a comment like that, but between it and getting modded as flamebait, I have to ask (and hope you'll respond), why do you say that?
I tend to use sarcasm a bit heavily, but I though it clear enough I meant that post (at least the second half) as largely humorous.
My qualifications I described accurately... Didn't mean to brag, just establishing that I do have some credibility when it comes to IT.
The comment about "Hamburger U", well, they actually *DO* call it that, and believe it or not, many people consider it one of the better business schools in the country.
As for not finding a job reflecting on my personality, I get along rather well with people... Just not many jobs to apply for. Of the 20+ I've applied for (in IT) in the past half year, I've gotten callbacks on five (I doubt you can attribute my social skills to not getting jobs that never bothered contacting me)... Two I lacked a critical skill for (MS SQL, and they wouldn't accept PostgreSQL or MySQL as a substitute), one used the "overqualified" line I've grown to hate (from the far-more-than-20 non-tech jobs I've applied for in the same time), and two I actually interviewed for and *got*, sorta, but they chose "not to fill the position at this time" (one laid off a third of its staff a month later).
So as much as everyone keeps telling me "If you have the skills, you can still get a tech job", I'd like to see them prove it. Perhaps if I lived in metro Boston or New York. But I don't.
30k out of HS with a RHCE? Yeah, smoke some more.
I have a 2-year degree, a brace of 4-year degrees, and as many Linux certs (LCP and LCA), as well as 8 years experience as a firmware engineer, and still can't get a tech job.
Oh, wait, did the article forget to mention that McDonald's has started accepting an RHCE in place of sending management candidates to Hamburger U? Silly me. Must have missed that.
Either that, or RedHat will hire them as instructors to spread their certs-in-HS program to other places. LinuxGruven, anyone?
As one commentor already pointed out, this would make me *drop* whatever service I already had if I couldn't disable such location-specific spam.
;-)
Did this really need asking? And on Slashdot? C'mon, you may as well ask if we would support Hillary Rosen for president (well, over Dubya, perhaps [G]).
The Slashdot crowd largely likes privacy, and *particularly* dislikes government or corporate sponsored intrusion on their personal space. Would we pay for this? We'd abuse the hell out of it to make it totally unuseable, more likely - I for one can think of a nice script to enumerate every single arcsecond on Earth, meaning every 101ft a person walks, they'd get another message saying "you are here".