Seems to me that a crime that's considered serious enough to get you up to 3 years in prison would rate a fine of more than $1000. I don't understand how these amounts are set but I would expect both the jail term and the fine to be proportional to the offense.
Speaking of the crime, could we stop calling everything "theft" please? This is a product of recording industry PR that was meant to recast the hazy concept if infringement in black and white terms. Once you define something as theft it puts the other side in the position of trying to say that stealing should be legal. If we're going to discuss whether unauthorized wireless access should be legal or not, let's talk about it for what it is. As crimes go, it would be closer to trespassing than to theft. In fact, accessing an unsecured wireless router is kind of like walking on a rug that somebody has rolled out into the street. But putting it in the same category as breaking into a house and stealing a TV makes it a lot easier to get the public to accept legislation.
The article is about someone saying why we need one. I agree that we need a secure scheme that provides both authentication and anonymity as appropriate. Without a proposed scheme in front of us there's no way to answer the/. headline's question, "Will it work?" So stand by for a thread full of rants about privacy and big government.
D&D has really had a strong positive impact on my life. It gave me a new perspective on cooperation, meeting challenges, sharing responsibility. Possibly most of all, the game has helped me develop an attitude that with enough determination any problem can be solved. Often the key is to think of a problem as an animate thing and understand its point of view. What does it want? How dangerous is it? Where is its weak point? What's the worst thing that could happen to it, and can I make that happen? Do I even have to worry about it or will it just go away by itself?
The aspect of the game that has always impressed me the most is the way I remember game experiences. Not in terms of people sitting around a table with books, dice and graph paper, but in game world terms. I vividly recall a battle with an enraged minotaur whose treasure we had stolen, who had trailed us out of his maze and caught up with us just as we were engaging some other baddies. Episodes like this are detailed visual memories, even though they never happened and I never actually saw any of them. For me that's always been the real magic of D&D.
My slashdot nickname is the name of a 7th-level wizard character of mine who died back in the 80s. He was going to be an intellectual type of wizard, but after acquiring a powerful dagger and getting a pseudodragon for a familiar he became a very gung-ho and formidable combat mage. When he got killed due to random chance, well, that was the way it was. We all have to go some time. I understand and accept that as a part of my own real life. I'm sure Gary did too.
Musicians rarely get paid royalties. On paper they do, but only after deducting all the costs of production, manufacturing, distribution, accounting, you name it. Only a few highly visible musicians like Madonna ever see any actual money from record sales. That's why the recording industry's "protecting the artists" mantra is just smoke. Musicians make a living by performing. Records give them exposure, which translates to better gigs with higher ticket prices.
Record companies benefit when you buy. Musicians benefit when you listen.
Do phone companies get a cut of any business deals made over the phone? No. Do UPS and FedEx get a share of the goods they ship? No. Do ISPs and carriers have a claim on the value of web content? No.
Moving bits around entitles network providers to their monthly fee and that's all. People have been carrying, packing and storing other people's things for centuries. The fact that it's the Internet doesn't add any new complicated twists. The plumber has never had the right to use your bathtub.
That's pretty much the attitude I've had since I started playing AD&D in the late 70s. It was an imperfect system back then, and it's bound to continue being one no matter how many versions they release. That's why every AD&D player I've ever known has made creative use of house rules. My group likes magic, so there's more magic. We don't like fiddling with material spell components, so there aren't any. We use a mana point system for magic. And so forth... Wherever we have found holes in the original system, we have adopted conventions of our own. Our games have always been fun and we've never had any player/DM drama, nobody storming out of a game session. Maybe our group has been lucky, but somehow the deficiencies in the age-old system have never posed serious difficulty. I have bought several 2nd and 3rd edition books out of curiosity, but at some point you realize have all the information you need and enough expertise to make up whatever isn't there.
I wish NASA would put more effort into developing gaseous core nuclear rocket engines. There was a nuclear engine project in the late 60s using a solid core reactor, but gaseous core reactors have not been thoroughly explored. Whereas solid reactors melt above about 3500C, a "light bulb" type of reactor consisting of a hollow quartz bulb with a cloud of gaseous nuclear fuel confined in the center could operate at 25000 C, radiating in the ultraviolet range instead of heat per se. In an engine based on this type of reactor, hydrogen flowing past the outside of the bulb would be superheated and expelled as rocket exhaust. No chemical combustion, no radioactive emissions, just heat transfer.
Check out this interesting article, part 10 of a series, about a hypothetical design for a non-polluting, 100% reusable nuclear rocket based on the Saturn V form factor. Using existing engineering apart from the gaseous core reactor, it could lift 1000 tons of payload into orbit (6 times the capacity of the proposed single-use Ares 5 cargo rocket, and 30 times that of the shuttle), and then return 1000 tons of cargo to a powered vertical landing. No expendable fuel tanks, no solid booster recovery, just a big old Flash Gordon style rocketship. This is heavy lifting power that could take up a space hotel or moon base in one shot. It could power enormous ships to Mars in 3 months, not merely to explore but to colonize, carrying hundreds of people at a time, hundreds of tons of equipment and supplies, and highly effective radiation shielding.
I know it's the "N" word, but this rocket wouldn't be a nuclear disaster waiting to happen. If such a ship crashed or exploded and released its entire nuclear fuel load into the atmosphere, the nuclides released would be 1% of what came out of a single 1950s bomb test (and there were many of those).
Teleportation isn't the only thing that messes with our preconceptions about "self." Suppose you got into a time machine and traveled back 1 minute, then got out and watched your original self get in and vanish. Did you really "travel" back through time, or are you a copy of your original self that was destroyed in the time machine? For that matter, does the you who goes to sleep at night survive to wake up in the morning, or is your personality essentially rebooted when you lose consciousness, creating a different you?
Well the writers are just playing with these ideas in a stimulating way. They only have to get it right to the extent that most readers understand the reality. Back in the days when the early explorers were coming to America, Europe was abuzz with tales of exotic creatures, natives and treasures to be found here. Imagine the strange visions that would have been created if movies had existed then.
In the same light, when will forum posters unionize? The content for sites like Slashdot and Fark is written almost entirely by volunteers, yet it's that discussion content that brings readers to the sites to click on the ads or pay for subscriptions. According to the common logic of today they deserve a share of the profits.
I question the whole idea that people have an inherent right to be paid when something they did turns out to have value because of the efforts of someone else. A great actor can stand on the street corner acting all day and might make a few bucks from passersby. If other people put that acting on film, distribute it to thousands of theaters and advertise it, THEN it becomes worth a lot of money, but only as a component of that whole package.
People doing any kind of creative work owe it to themselves to decide how they want to market their work. Do they want to sell it outright and let go of it, do they want to license it out, do they want to go through all the hassle of self-producing it so they have total control and keep all the profits, or what? Nobody is chained to a keyboard. But once they make that decision they shouldn't come back later and complain.
The word at MS is that he gave an admin an unfavorable review after a broken-off love affair. It was the review, not the affair, that violated company policy. I haven't heard anything about another VP being involved except on the web.
Another provision of the Bono Act was that the copyrights on all sound recordings made before 1972 were extended to the year 2067. This encompasses the entire Golden Age of Radio and a wealth of other early recordings, even those that had already been in the public domain for years. Wax cylinder recordings made by Thomas Edison in the 1890s are now back under copyright until 2067. I have yet to see a single coherent argument for the public benefit of doing this.
Virus writer or not, I think letting anybody conduct business activity of any kind from prison is a bad idea. It defeats the meaning of punishment. A person in prison should simply be unavailable for all business purposes. They should have to appoint someone as caretaker of their assets while they are in jail, similar to what presidents in office must do.
I think people will eventually get rid of the iTunes, but not overnight. The DRM-free services are competing directly with the major labels, and the market will eventually decide which survives. Record companies currently have the advantage of controlling almost all well-known music, but that advantage will decrease as more musicians achieve popularity without them. My guess is that record companies will eventually become vendors of oldies whose rights they control, but that's a huge catalog. Thanks to Congress, music copyrights now last for 95 years, and the rights on all sound recordings made before 1972 were extended to 2067. So even if all musicians completely abandon their pursuit of recording contracts tomorrow, record companies will still have plenty of product to sell until almost everyone who is in the music business today is long dead.
Makes me wonder if the writer is even aware that wireless exists.
A number of companies have been trying to sell wireless networks for rural ISPs but haven't made much headway in the market. I don't get it. The systems are non-line-of-sight and the price and bandwidth are competetive. If I were putting together a rural network, wireless would be my first choice.
I fear you will be out of luck, because insurance companies will use the least common denominator. High-BMI Americans who are obese far outnumber the high-BMI ones who work out. On the other hand, high-stress Type A people tend to be on the slim side, but they're prone to early heart attacks. So what's fair? And how much do you want to pay the insurance industry to exhaustively assess everybody's true risk level?
I totally agree, and I can think of two reasons other than simple altruism:
1. Almost anything you do affects your health risk and life expectancy -- the amount of sleep you get, the distance you commute to work, how good your social life is, etc. Unless insurance companies profile and monitor everybody's behavior to the Nth degree, the system is never really going to be fair. Things like smoking and traffic violations seem like simple, obvious reasons for differential insurance rates, but the grey areas vastly outnumber the black and white. People are quick to say, "Why should I pay for somebody who isn't as healthy and skinny as I am?" But the guy next door whose cholesterol is even lower than theirs and flosses his teeth more often than they do could say the same thing about them. The answer is the same as why people should pay for the public school system even if they don't have kids. We all benefit from living in a country with free public education, and we all benefit from obese McDonald's addicts who work and pay taxes to keep the highways repaired and the tofu trucks running.
2. As with long distance rates, the cost of metering and billing doesn't pay for itself. Making the system more complicated increases the overhead and decreases the value. You would think insurance companies would be wise to this, but it took many decades for phone companies to start offering flat rates, and insurance companies are even more anal than phone companies. Examples of needless overhead abound. The cost of complying with our income tax system is estimated somewhere between $200 billion and $500 billion a year. In addition to the IRS there's an army of clerks, accountants, lawyers, bankers, computer programmers and other people whose whole careers revolve around performing the mechanics of paying or avoiding taxes. People have to start realizing that life will actually end up costing less if we let go of the illusion that accounting is free.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that a crime that's considered serious enough to get you up to 3 years in prison would rate a fine of more than $1000. I don't understand how these amounts are set but I would expect both the jail term and the fine to be proportional to the offense.
Speaking of the crime, could we stop calling everything "theft" please? This is a product of recording industry PR that was meant to recast the hazy concept if infringement in black and white terms. Once you define something as theft it puts the other side in the position of trying to say that stealing should be legal. If we're going to discuss whether unauthorized wireless access should be legal or not, let's talk about it for what it is. As crimes go, it would be closer to trespassing than to theft. In fact, accessing an unsecured wireless router is kind of like walking on a rug that somebody has rolled out into the street. But putting it in the same category as breaking into a house and stealing a TV makes it a lot easier to get the public to accept legislation.
The article is about someone saying why we need one. I agree that we need a secure scheme that provides both authentication and anonymity as appropriate. Without a proposed scheme in front of us there's no way to answer the /. headline's question, "Will it work?" So stand by for a thread full of rants about privacy and big government.
We've got millions of highly vivid simulations!
D&D has really had a strong positive impact on my life. It gave me a new perspective on cooperation, meeting challenges, sharing responsibility. Possibly most of all, the game has helped me develop an attitude that with enough determination any problem can be solved. Often the key is to think of a problem as an animate thing and understand its point of view. What does it want? How dangerous is it? Where is its weak point? What's the worst thing that could happen to it, and can I make that happen? Do I even have to worry about it or will it just go away by itself?
The aspect of the game that has always impressed me the most is the way I remember game experiences. Not in terms of people sitting around a table with books, dice and graph paper, but in game world terms. I vividly recall a battle with an enraged minotaur whose treasure we had stolen, who had trailed us out of his maze and caught up with us just as we were engaging some other baddies. Episodes like this are detailed visual memories, even though they never happened and I never actually saw any of them. For me that's always been the real magic of D&D.
My slashdot nickname is the name of a 7th-level wizard character of mine who died back in the 80s. He was going to be an intellectual type of wizard, but after acquiring a powerful dagger and getting a pseudodragon for a familiar he became a very gung-ho and formidable combat mage. When he got killed due to random chance, well, that was the way it was. We all have to go some time. I understand and accept that as a part of my own real life. I'm sure Gary did too.
How about withholding money from schools that have too many robberies, assaults, parking tickets and overdue library books?
Musicians rarely get paid royalties. On paper they do, but only after deducting all the costs of production, manufacturing, distribution, accounting, you name it. Only a few highly visible musicians like Madonna ever see any actual money from record sales. That's why the recording industry's "protecting the artists" mantra is just smoke. Musicians make a living by performing. Records give them exposure, which translates to better gigs with higher ticket prices.
Record companies benefit when you buy.
Musicians benefit when you listen.
"Schellenberg has been making his primary living with AntiGravity for seven years through sales almost entirely on the web"
Makes his living selling toy rockets on the web. Who can read that without a trace of envy?
Do phone companies get a cut of any business deals made over the phone?
No.
Do UPS and FedEx get a share of the goods they ship?
No.
Do ISPs and carriers have a claim on the value of web content?
No.
Moving bits around entitles network providers to their monthly fee and that's all. People have been carrying, packing and storing other people's things for centuries. The fact that it's the Internet doesn't add any new complicated twists. The plumber has never had the right to use your bathtub.
Want D&D to run smoothly again?
Go back to whichever system you were using when it ran smoothly before. Beats buying more books.
That's pretty much the attitude I've had since I started playing AD&D in the late 70s. It was an imperfect system back then, and it's bound to continue being one no matter how many versions they release. That's why every AD&D player I've ever known has made creative use of house rules. My group likes magic, so there's more magic. We don't like fiddling with material spell components, so there aren't any. We use a mana point system for magic. And so forth... Wherever we have found holes in the original system, we have adopted conventions of our own. Our games have always been fun and we've never had any player/DM drama, nobody storming out of a game session. Maybe our group has been lucky, but somehow the deficiencies in the age-old system have never posed serious difficulty. I have bought several 2nd and 3rd edition books out of curiosity, but at some point you realize have all the information you need and enough expertise to make up whatever isn't there.
I wish NASA would put more effort into developing gaseous core nuclear rocket engines. There was a nuclear engine project in the late 60s using a solid core reactor, but gaseous core reactors have not been thoroughly explored. Whereas solid reactors melt above about 3500C, a "light bulb" type of reactor consisting of a hollow quartz bulb with a cloud of gaseous nuclear fuel confined in the center could operate at 25000 C, radiating in the ultraviolet range instead of heat per se. In an engine based on this type of reactor, hydrogen flowing past the outside of the bulb would be superheated and expelled as rocket exhaust. No chemical combustion, no radioactive emissions, just heat transfer.
Check out this interesting article, part 10 of a series, about a hypothetical design for a non-polluting, 100% reusable nuclear rocket based on the Saturn V form factor. Using existing engineering apart from the gaseous core reactor, it could lift 1000 tons of payload into orbit (6 times the capacity of the proposed single-use Ares 5 cargo rocket, and 30 times that of the shuttle), and then return 1000 tons of cargo to a powered vertical landing. No expendable fuel tanks, no solid booster recovery, just a big old Flash Gordon style rocketship. This is heavy lifting power that could take up a space hotel or moon base in one shot. It could power enormous ships to Mars in 3 months, not merely to explore but to colonize, carrying hundreds of people at a time, hundreds of tons of equipment and supplies, and highly effective radiation shielding.
I know it's the "N" word, but this rocket wouldn't be a nuclear disaster waiting to happen. If such a ship crashed or exploded and released its entire nuclear fuel load into the atmosphere, the nuclides released would be 1% of what came out of a single 1950s bomb test (and there were many of those).
Teleportation isn't the only thing that messes with our preconceptions about "self." Suppose you got into a time machine and traveled back 1 minute, then got out and watched your original self get in and vanish. Did you really "travel" back through time, or are you a copy of your original self that was destroyed in the time machine? For that matter, does the you who goes to sleep at night survive to wake up in the morning, or is your personality essentially rebooted when you lose consciousness, creating a different you?
Well the writers are just playing with these ideas in a stimulating way. They only have to get it right to the extent that most readers understand the reality. Back in the days when the early explorers were coming to America, Europe was abuzz with tales of exotic creatures, natives and treasures to be found here. Imagine the strange visions that would have been created if movies had existed then.
In the same light, when will forum posters unionize? The content for sites like Slashdot and Fark is written almost entirely by volunteers, yet it's that discussion content that brings readers to the sites to click on the ads or pay for subscriptions. According to the common logic of today they deserve a share of the profits.
I question the whole idea that people have an inherent right to be paid when something they did turns out to have value because of the efforts of someone else. A great actor can stand on the street corner acting all day and might make a few bucks from passersby. If other people put that acting on film, distribute it to thousands of theaters and advertise it, THEN it becomes worth a lot of money, but only as a component of that whole package.
People doing any kind of creative work owe it to themselves to decide how they want to market their work. Do they want to sell it outright and let go of it, do they want to license it out, do they want to go through all the hassle of self-producing it so they have total control and keep all the profits, or what? Nobody is chained to a keyboard. But once they make that decision they shouldn't come back later and complain.
The solution is still the same: Reinstall Windows.
1/3 don't want any part of it
1/3 think it's ok
1/3 are somewhere in the middle
And maybe 1 in 1000 know enough to have a meaningful opinion at all.
"Guess there's no point worrying about it now."
"Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back."
The word at MS is that he gave an admin an unfavorable review after a broken-off love affair. It was the review, not the affair, that violated company policy. I haven't heard anything about another VP being involved except on the web.
Another provision of the Bono Act was that the copyrights on all sound recordings made before 1972 were extended to the year 2067. This encompasses the entire Golden Age of Radio and a wealth of other early recordings, even those that had already been in the public domain for years. Wax cylinder recordings made by Thomas Edison in the 1890s are now back under copyright until 2067. I have yet to see a single coherent argument for the public benefit of doing this.
If they give me superpowers, cool sunglasses and a long black coat, I'm in!
Virus writer or not, I think letting anybody conduct business activity of any kind from prison is a bad idea. It defeats the meaning of punishment. A person in prison should simply be unavailable for all business purposes. They should have to appoint someone as caretaker of their assets while they are in jail, similar to what presidents in office must do.
I think people will eventually get rid of the iTunes, but not overnight. The DRM-free services are competing directly with the major labels, and the market will eventually decide which survives. Record companies currently have the advantage of controlling almost all well-known music, but that advantage will decrease as more musicians achieve popularity without them. My guess is that record companies will eventually become vendors of oldies whose rights they control, but that's a huge catalog. Thanks to Congress, music copyrights now last for 95 years, and the rights on all sound recordings made before 1972 were extended to 2067. So even if all musicians completely abandon their pursuit of recording contracts tomorrow, record companies will still have plenty of product to sell until almost everyone who is in the music business today is long dead.
Makes me wonder if the writer is even aware that wireless exists.
A number of companies have been trying to sell wireless networks for rural ISPs but haven't made much headway in the market. I don't get it. The systems are non-line-of-sight and the price and bandwidth are competetive. If I were putting together a rural network, wireless would be my first choice.
I fear you will be out of luck, because insurance companies will use the least common denominator. High-BMI Americans who are obese far outnumber the high-BMI ones who work out. On the other hand, high-stress Type A people tend to be on the slim side, but they're prone to early heart attacks. So what's fair? And how much do you want to pay the insurance industry to exhaustively assess everybody's true risk level?
I totally agree, and I can think of two reasons other than simple altruism:
1. Almost anything you do affects your health risk and life expectancy -- the amount of sleep you get, the distance you commute to work, how good your social life is, etc. Unless insurance companies profile and monitor everybody's behavior to the Nth degree, the system is never really going to be fair. Things like smoking and traffic violations seem like simple, obvious reasons for differential insurance rates, but the grey areas vastly outnumber the black and white. People are quick to say, "Why should I pay for somebody who isn't as healthy and skinny as I am?" But the guy next door whose cholesterol is even lower than theirs and flosses his teeth more often than they do could say the same thing about them. The answer is the same as why people should pay for the public school system even if they don't have kids. We all benefit from living in a country with free public education, and we all benefit from obese McDonald's addicts who work and pay taxes to keep the highways repaired and the tofu trucks running.
2. As with long distance rates, the cost of metering and billing doesn't pay for itself. Making the system more complicated increases the overhead and decreases the value. You would think insurance companies would be wise to this, but it took many decades for phone companies to start offering flat rates, and insurance companies are even more anal than phone companies. Examples of needless overhead abound. The cost of complying with our income tax system is estimated somewhere between $200 billion and $500 billion a year. In addition to the IRS there's an army of clerks, accountants, lawyers, bankers, computer programmers and other people whose whole careers revolve around performing the mechanics of paying or avoiding taxes. People have to start realizing that life will actually end up costing less if we let go of the illusion that accounting is free.