Democracy does not garuntee liberty. People can vote to entrust all their liberties to the government, or in extreme cases (think WWII Germans & Italians) to a dictator. Democracy is the best know tool to allow people to keep their liberty, but not a garuntee by any means.
That said, socialism (or 'democratic socialism') is an abdication by the people to the government of their liberties. They pick who tells them how to live (or what goods and services they get, which quickly becomes how to live). This can be accomplished by a strong command and control government (a failure everywhere it was tried), or this can be controled by skimming off a market economy, and then using the money to fund a tight framework around that economy (the later is the US model).
The alternative to our silly free market system is very few companies that never fail, because they are propped up by the government. New industries in the US are financed by individuals (stock holders, initial venture capital then general public) who are willing to take a risk on a new market. Some companies fail, people lose money. Some companies succeed, people make money.
The fact that most new (and esp high tech) industries start and flurish in the US is specifically because of this cycle. The high rate of failure you state isn't because the people are incompetent, it is because there are enough people in the US willing to take risk on new ventures.
The high rate of failure is a side effect of success, not a warning sign of failure. The kinds of safe industries you are thinking of do have a low rate of failure (compared to high tech). Do they have a higher rate of failure in the US than in countries that prop up their larger industries to insure that even unsound companies stay afloat? yes.
I'll take our way over your pinko (had to say it once folks) solution.
An even better feature would imitate FTP/FSP sites with limited bandwidth. They garuntee X kbits/sec by only allowing Y connections so that X*Y == total bandwidth. If you can get on, your speed will be OK.
To get the same result on Gnutella, don't return any search results while all your bandwidth is being consumed. Only advertise your wares if you have the bandwidth to spare.
The judge said that the code wasn't purely free speech because it has a law-breaking side effect (it is against the DMCA). His clarifying example was that computer viruses (which are code) are not considered free speech, even though they are expressive, because they break all kinds of laws in the process (not just speech, but action).
The judge's dismissal of the defense seems to pivot around the fact that he doesn't think code is protected speech. to quote :
Computer code is expressive... but computer code is not purely expressive any more than the assasination of a political figure is a purely political statement.
So basically, code is expressive (like speech) but can be regulated (like porn) because it has side effects.
Check out blocks http://www.kripto.org/blocks/, which recently appeared on freshmeat
In the blocks model, servers spin off into pods of 10. The 'blocks' of information are then routed through different pods, the origin IP and destination IP aren't known unless you have compromised all the pods in between.
An advantage of the pod model is that it would be easier to kill.spammers.dead pod A could voluntarily drop connections to adjacent pods if people in the pod B (the evil pod) has been feeding crap. pod A could trust adjacent pods that have been reliable in the past, they transmit a message to drop pod B from the loop and pod A does so.
A neat little system, and the cool factor is that multiple versions of the client could implement their own threshholds, filtering policies etc. You get organic filtering as the protocols that actually keep spammers out become the favored clients.
-spRed
disclaimer, I have no affiliation with blocks, and it has some protocol difficulties of its own. (but I do think it is on the right track)
Only allowing images from one site won't help. It is trivial to set up a proxy from/. (for example) to doubleclick, or anyone else. Doubleclick would still get the info, and to the browser it would look like/.
I agree with the current high scoring comment, if web sites are merely outsourcing their traffic analysis, there is no problem. You don't demand that sites that use WebTrends to analyse their logs say so in their privacy policy, do you? It only becomes a problem when the 3rd party trackers are allowed to aggregate the information they collect for their clients, and can resell that information. I would say that it is in the best interests of the collectors to NOT do this if they just want to sell a traffic analysis service.
Anyone remember Max Headroom? Instant online voting, the ad-space on TV in the minutes up to the election window went for astronomical amounts. The swing in the polls fluctuated 20% in thirty seconds as last ditch scare commercials and fantastic promises were made.
The motor-voter laws are bad enough, if people can't be bothered to fill out a form at the post office AND show up on election day (we'll forget about actually reading up on the candidates and issues) then they get what they deserve.
As for the poster that said (paraphrasing) the masses would finally get their due and topple the special interest groups, are you kidding? Think of all the morons you work with or know socially. Then consider that the people you work and hang out with are a self-selecting group. The rest of the population looks like god-knows-what.
TUX is a combination of kernel-space HTTP and kernel-space caching. Would it be possible to have a user-space version of TUX that uses shared memory instead of kernel memory? The first mumblings I've heard are stability and security worries of having a kernel-space implementation. The user-space version would always be slower than the kernel space version (at least one extra memory-to-memory copy), but would the object caching by itself provide a speedup?
And out of curiosity, how generic is the TUX caching mechanism (is it more like a namespace for kernel-space shared memory)?
Does this mean there will finally be an annoucement on the death of Server51? It looked promising, esp because it could have tighter integration w/ freshmeat itself. Does anyone actually check sourceforge for release news? doub it.
Ranting aside, if you could make it official one way or another, I wouldn't have to check once a week to see if S51 it still there.
The problem isn't when Excite charges money for fast service to it's subscribers. It would become a problem when Excite steers users to those sites, because it makes its money from the extra traffic. The financial incentive is to make those sites more temping to their users, and this can be done with both the carrot (fast service) and the stick. The stick is what is frightening, they reduce QoS for sites that don't pay the vigorish. Users visit mainly the prefered sites since they are fast, and shun other sites without deep pockets since they are on the thin little line to the Excite network.
This obviously doesn't have to happen, Excite may persue this as just a little lucrative business on the side. Or @Home users might not allow it to get out of control, by finding another provider and forcing Excite to keep the general purpose pipe fat to keep its customers.
Anyone remember who wrote the bit on hot potato[e] routing(SF author maybe?). It was another take on how an Old Boys Network could be established to regulate who gets to use resources. Packets that aren't coming from or going to a prefered IP are passed along to the next (other company's) router since they don't generate direct revenue. If everyone passes the buck, then the packet gets tossed around like a hot potato until it finally gets delivered or its TTL expires.
This was on ArsTechinca a couple days ago, I know that it is possible that the submitting user didn't see it there, but I see lots of stories on/. where the commentary could have been listed almost verbataim from another compilation site.
This isn't the story approver's problem, but I see lots of sites give/. props when the run with a story seen first on/., but I never see [the submitters on] slashdot give a shout to people that they steal leads from. Granted all the story ideas can't be stolen, but lots are.
Now that you mention it, I just went and checked my Karma. I had moderator points last week, at least a couple of which were used vs 'HOT GRITS IN MY PANTS!!' and I'm down a couple Karma.
I'm no karma whore, I mainly lurk. I've probably posted six times in the last two years. But still, losing Karma for putting in the time to moderate is annoying.
-Red
Re:I bet they are popular...
on
Date Pagers
·
· Score: 3
No, the first and finest hack of these will involve someone tumbling the preferences output. At any given nano-second you are the most desireable man in the world according to your pager.
[ Okay, it's terms and conditions, but just as odious ] from the 'Terms and Conditions' on mp3.com:
You agree to bound by and subject to such terms and conditions, including but not limited to the
(i) Instant Listening Service Terms and Conditions of Use and (ii) Beam-it End User Web Site And Software Terms And Conditions Of Use, each of which are incorporated herein by reference.
(my ephasis)
Does anyone with an mp3.com account have a copy of these or a link to them? I'm curious if any of these agreements (which you can't read before saying 'I Do') prohibits reverse engineering of the software, and/or attempts to circumvent it.
From here on in, all articles must be approved by more than one/. editor. It can be called the Katz sanity check.
post by Jon Katz
I had breakfast this morning, but in our brave new world will there still be a need for breakfast? or even more compelling, will there still be a concept of morning? With our new plugged-in generation, I don't think we can overlook the possiblity that these things we take for granted will still be around
If you do a search on our boy Jack, You will find an unapollagetic shill for the industry. This boy is a natural born whore, and is not to be reasoned with. (Sorry for the lack of balance, but if you just spent an hour reading words by/written for him, you wouldn't be too sympathetic either)
ESR almost touches on an interesting point, that bots can win because they use all the available info passed to the client, and not just the stuff that is then passed on to the human player.
Why not put hooks into the Quake client code for players to create their own bots? Make hooks for all the available info, and then play will change from who has the fastest fingers to who has the best bot.
You work around the problem that someone has more info than another (you could call the early warning of other players 'radar' for theme) and turn the game back into a close fought competition.
Experienced coders could compile their own clients that gather info from the code hooks, and a benevolent coder could build a scripting package that uses the same hooks for the less technical crowd.
If you can't outlaw cheating, make those the rules. -Red
It seems to me that these posts seem to fall into one of three categories, keeping in mind that ppl that devote most of their time to religion don't read slashdot:
1) People are blowing this way out of proportion. They aren't requiring that creationism be taught, they are merely NOT requiring that evolution be taught as gospel (pardon the pun)
2) There is plenty of evidence for evolution, these the people in Kansas are depriving their children of a large body of scientific study.
3) the "right wing" "funies" "religious whackos" are taking over. Why is it that the most insane sounding posts on this board are the ones demonizing others of being irrational, jerk-knee, and with absolutely no grounding in rationality? (and name calling to boot)
An aside on./ readers: You are looking at, and conversing with, ppl who are generally in technical fields. They are more likely to be atheists and agnostics that the avg population. Even if they aren't one of those two, (like me) they are bound to be more versed in the sciences than the average joe.
The debate that is going on here/should/ be about how one school system managed to seperate itself from church and state (in the current sense) by removing a restriction on what it/could/ teach from that which is predominantly popular and believed ( one of the reasons for outlawing a state sponsored religion )
Does this open the path that kids in Kansas may be denied the evidence for evolution? certainly.
What we should all hope this means is that _we_ will have more of a say in what our children learn, without having to resort to home schooling. (I dearly hope I don't have to homeschool my children, but I will if I have to)
sp-Red
ps, I only read the first 200 posts, so I don't expect you will have read this one either.
How about a tech company that develops bots, and either: 1) Sells the bot software (boooo!) 2) Uses the bot software to accumulate lots of resources, and sell the chars on eBay. I used to do this all the time on MUDs (without the selling part).
In response to earlier posters that said these sales violate the spirit of the game, this is an age old debate on MUDs. You have several groups of players that think the other ones are out of touch. The power players, who just want to be bigger badder faster more, and live for the kill. The chatters, who want nothing more than to stand in the town square and chat. Several other sub-species exist, like me who just coded bots on muds where they weren't allowed. The challenge was to make them as un-bot like as possible, if you get caught botting, it wasn't a good enough bot. Also try to make them as hardcore productive as the human hack-n-slash players. -s.p. Red
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have Democracy confused with liberty.
Democracy does not garuntee liberty. People can vote to entrust all their liberties to the government, or in extreme cases (think WWII Germans & Italians) to a dictator. Democracy is the best know tool to allow people to keep their liberty, but not a garuntee by any means.
That said, socialism (or 'democratic socialism') is an abdication by the people to the government of their liberties. They pick who tells them how to live (or what goods and services they get, which quickly becomes how to live). This can be accomplished by a strong command and control government (a failure everywhere it was tried), or this can be controled by skimming off a market economy, and then using the money to fund a tight framework around that economy (the later is the US model).
-spRed
Oh boy,
The alternative to our silly free market system is very few companies that never fail, because they are propped up by the government. New industries in the US are financed by individuals (stock holders, initial venture capital then general public) who are willing to take a risk on a new market. Some companies fail, people lose money. Some companies succeed, people make money.
The fact that most new (and esp high tech) industries start and flurish in the US is specifically because of this cycle. The high rate of failure you state isn't because the people are incompetent, it is because there are enough people in the US willing to take risk on new ventures.
The high rate of failure is a side effect of success, not a warning sign of failure. The kinds of safe industries you are thinking of do have a low rate of failure (compared to high tech). Do they have a higher rate of failure in the US than in countries that prop up their larger industries to insure that even unsound companies stay afloat? yes.
I'll take our way over your pinko (had to say it once folks) solution.
-sb
The real question the Boston /. contingent is asking is, what bar will you be sitting in AFTER the speaking engagement?
/. status into a few freebies :p
I'm sure you can parley your
-spRed
An even better feature would imitate FTP/FSP sites with limited bandwidth. They garuntee X kbits/sec by only allowing Y connections so that X*Y == total bandwidth. If you can get on, your speed will be OK.
To get the same result on Gnutella, don't return any search results while all your bandwidth is being consumed. Only advertise your wares if you have the bandwidth to spare.
spRed
The judge said that the code wasn't purely free speech because it has a law-breaking side effect (it is against the DMCA). His clarifying example was that computer viruses (which are code) are not considered free speech, even though they are expressive, because they break all kinds of laws in the process (not just speech, but action).
-spRed
The judge's dismissal of the defense seems to pivot around the fact that he doesn't think code is protected speech. to quote :
... but computer code is not purely expressive any more than the assasination of a political figure is a purely political statement.
Computer code is expressive
So basically, code is expressive (like speech) but can be regulated (like porn) because it has side effects.
-spRed
Check out blocks http://www.kripto.org/blocks/, which recently appeared on freshmeat
In the blocks model, servers spin off into pods of 10. The 'blocks' of information are then routed through different pods, the origin IP and destination IP aren't known unless you have compromised all the pods in between.
An advantage of the pod model is that it would be easier to kill.spammers.dead pod A could voluntarily drop connections to adjacent pods if people in the pod B (the evil pod) has been feeding crap. pod A could trust adjacent pods that have been reliable in the past, they transmit a message to drop pod B from the loop and pod A does so.
A neat little system, and the cool factor is that multiple versions of the client could implement their own threshholds, filtering policies etc. You get organic filtering as the protocols that actually keep spammers out become the favored clients.
-spRed
disclaimer, I have no affiliation with blocks, and it has some protocol difficulties of its own. (but I do think it is on the right track)
Only allowing images from one site won't help. It is trivial to set up a proxy from /. (for example) to doubleclick, or anyone else. Doubleclick would still get the info, and to the browser it would look like /.
I agree with the current high scoring comment, if web sites are merely outsourcing their traffic analysis, there is no problem. You don't demand that sites that use WebTrends to analyse their logs say so in their privacy policy, do you? It only becomes a problem when the 3rd party trackers are allowed to aggregate the information they collect for their clients, and can resell that information. I would say that it is in the best interests of the collectors to NOT do this if they just want to sell a traffic analysis service.
-Red
Anyone remember Max Headroom? Instant online voting, the ad-space on TV in the minutes up to the election window went for astronomical amounts. The swing in the polls fluctuated 20% in thirty seconds as last ditch scare commercials and fantastic promises were made.
The motor-voter laws are bad enough, if people can't be bothered to fill out a form at the post office AND show up on election day (we'll forget about actually reading up on the candidates and issues) then they get what they deserve.
As for the poster that said (paraphrasing) the masses would finally get their due and topple the special interest groups, are you kidding? Think of all the morons you work with or know socially. Then consider that the people you work and hang out with are a self-selecting group. The rest of the population looks like god-knows-what.
-spRed
TUX is a combination of kernel-space HTTP and kernel-space caching. Would it be possible to have a user-space version of TUX that uses shared memory instead of kernel memory? The first mumblings I've heard are stability and security worries of having a kernel-space implementation. The user-space version would always be slower than the kernel space version (at least one extra memory-to-memory copy), but would the object caching by itself provide a speedup?
And out of curiosity, how generic is the TUX caching mechanism (is it more like a namespace for kernel-space shared memory)?
-spRed
Does this mean there will finally be an annoucement on the death of Server51? It looked promising, esp because it could have tighter integration w/ freshmeat itself. Does anyone actually check sourceforge for release news? doub it.
Ranting aside, if you could make it official one way or another, I wouldn't have to check once a week to see if S51 it still there.
-sb
The problem isn't when Excite charges money for fast service to it's subscribers. It would become a problem when Excite steers users to those sites, because it makes its money from the extra traffic. The financial incentive is to make those sites more temping to their users, and this can be done with both the carrot (fast service) and the stick. The stick is what is frightening, they reduce QoS for sites that don't pay the vigorish. Users visit mainly the prefered sites since they are fast, and shun other sites without deep pockets since they are on the thin little line to the Excite network.
This obviously doesn't have to happen, Excite may persue this as just a little lucrative business on the side. Or @Home users might not allow it to get out of control, by finding another provider and forcing Excite to keep the general purpose pipe fat to keep its customers.
Anyone remember who wrote the bit on hot potato[e] routing(SF author maybe?). It was another take on how an Old Boys Network could be established to regulate who gets to use resources. Packets that aren't coming from or going to a prefered IP are passed along to the next (other company's) router since they don't generate direct revenue. If everyone passes the buck, then the packet gets tossed around like a hot potato until it finally gets delivered or its TTL expires.
-sb
This was on ArsTechinca a couple days ago, I know that it is possible that the submitting user didn't see it there, but I see lots of stories on /. where the commentary could have been listed almost verbataim from another compilation site.
/. props when the run with a story seen first on /., but I never see [the submitters on] slashdot give a shout to people that they steal leads from. Granted all the story ideas can't be stolen, but lots are.
This isn't the story approver's problem, but I see lots of sites give
-sb
Now that you mention it, I just went and checked my Karma. I had moderator points last week, at least a couple of which were used vs 'HOT GRITS IN MY PANTS!!' and I'm down a couple Karma.
I'm no karma whore, I mainly lurk. I've probably posted six times in the last two years. But still, losing Karma for putting in the time to moderate is annoying.
-Red
No, the first and finest hack of these will involve someone tumbling the preferences output. At any given nano-second you are the most desireable man in the world according to your pager.
All things to all people? Technology doesn't lie!
-john smallberries
from the 'Terms and Conditions' on mp3.com
(my ephasis)
Does anyone with an mp3.com account have a copy of these or a link to them? I'm curious if any of these agreements (which you can't read before saying 'I Do') prohibits reverse engineering of the software, and/or attempts to circumvent it.
-Red
post by Jon Katz
I had breakfast this morning, but in our brave new world will there still be a need for breakfast? or even more compelling, will there still be a concept of morning? With our new plugged-in generation, I don't think we can overlook the possiblity that these things we take for granted will still be around
If you do a search on our boy Jack,
You will find an unapollagetic shill for the industry. This boy is a natural born whore, and is not to be reasoned with. (Sorry for the lack of balance, but if you just spent an hour reading words by/written for him, you wouldn't be too sympathetic either)
-s.p. Red
ESR almost touches on an interesting point, that bots can win because they use all the available info passed to the client, and not just the stuff that is then passed on to the human player.
Why not put hooks into the Quake client code for players to create their own bots? Make hooks for all the available info, and then play will change from who has the fastest fingers to who has the best bot.
You work around the problem that someone has more info than another (you could call the early warning of other players 'radar' for theme) and turn the game back into a close fought competition.
Experienced coders could compile their own clients that gather info from the code hooks, and a benevolent coder could build a scripting package that uses the same hooks for the less technical crowd.
If you can't outlaw cheating, make those the rules.
-Red
It seems to me that these posts seem to fall into one of three categories, :
./ readers:
/should/ be about how one school system /could/ teach from that which is predominantly
keeping in mind that ppl that devote most of their time to religion don't
read slashdot
1) People are blowing this way out of proportion. They aren't requiring that
creationism be taught, they are merely NOT requiring that evolution
be taught as gospel (pardon the pun)
2) There is plenty of evidence for evolution, these the people in Kansas
are depriving their children of a large body of scientific study.
3) the "right wing" "funies" "religious whackos" are taking over.
Why is it that the most insane sounding posts on this board are the ones
demonizing others of being irrational, jerk-knee, and with absolutely no
grounding in rationality? (and name calling to boot)
An aside on
You are looking at, and conversing with, ppl who are generally in technical
fields. They are more likely to be atheists and agnostics that the avg
population. Even if they aren't one of those two, (like me) they are bound
to be more versed in the sciences than the average joe.
The debate that is going on here
managed to seperate itself from church and state (in the current sense) by
removing a restriction on what it
popular and believed
( one of the reasons for outlawing a state sponsored religion )
Does this open the path that kids in Kansas may be denied the evidence
for evolution? certainly.
What we should all hope this means is that _we_ will have more of a say
in what our children learn, without having to resort to home schooling.
(I dearly hope I don't have to homeschool my children, but I will if I have to)
sp-Red
ps, I only read the first 200 posts, so I don't expect you will have read this one either.
How about a tech company that develops bots, and either:
1) Sells the bot software (boooo!)
2) Uses the bot software to accumulate lots of resources, and sell the chars on eBay.
I used to do this all the time on MUDs (without the selling part).
In response to earlier posters that said these sales violate the spirit of the game, this is an age old debate on MUDs. You have several groups of players that think the other ones are out of touch. The power players, who just want to be bigger badder faster more, and live for the kill. The chatters, who want nothing more than to stand in the town square and chat. Several other sub-species exist, like me who just coded bots on muds where they weren't allowed. The challenge was to make them as un-bot like as possible, if you get caught botting, it wasn't a good enough bot. Also try to make them as hardcore productive as the human hack-n-slash players.
-s.p. Red