That answer is so bad it almost sounds like sarcasm. Given how easy it is to sniff sensitive data from an unencrypted wireless network, I can't imagine Bruce would allow it unless he segments his network or wires up his own PC. As others have already pointed out, as long as he's encrypting probably everywhere else it won't make any real difference. If you're on an open wifi network and everything you do is via an SSH tunnel or VPN or something, you're probably doing quite a bit better than using WEP anyway.
I think the really interesting part of this answer is that it doesn't really address the legal issues of someone misusing and abusing your connection for their own evil deeds. I don't know if this has been tested in court but it seems laws about this sort of thing most likely are of the form "you are responsible for what happens with your Internet connection".
I would love to run an open wifi AP for my neighbours and everyone else walking past, but I'm worried about them using it for nefarious deeds when the IP address associated with those deeds is traceable back to me.
I'll be patient, and remember my history. That every time MS release a new product people blindly upgrade? Except that didn't really happen with Vista (at least, from the reports I've read). Uptake has been woeful, for various reasons: massive increase in hardware requirements (I didn't need any new hardware to go from Win2k to XP, but I would if I wanted to get Vista), DRM, crappy driver support, etc.
This is the first time I've ever felt confident the cycle might've been broken. While I don't think big businesses are going to pack up and move to Linux overnight, now they've at least got a decent reason to consider it - the cost of migrating to Linux might be comparable to the cost of "upgrading" to Vista.
Yeh, that's definitely true, but surely there's enough evidence of the prolific spread of internet memes making instant successes out of random douchebags, which hopefully means that there's hope for some excellent small bands to be able to make a living.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, at the moment the only thing that seems to distinguish "really big bands that everyone knows about" and "small bands yet to get on everyone's radar" is that _at the moment_, it is still the marketing efforts of the labels that are responsible for bringing the former to our attention.
Hopefully once someone figures out how to bring the small bands to the masses we'll see some big improvements. We're doing our part in Australia with the Unearthed programme, backed by Australia's (government-funded) youth radio station, TripleJ (best radio station in the world).
I think you make some good points, but I'd just like to add to this:
There isn't a business model that could truly work, at least not a direct one. I'd qualify this further by saying "there isn't a business model that could truly work FOR THE RECORD LABELS". I think there's plenty of business models that'll work for bands themselves, it's just that all the big names that we're used to hearing are tied up in contracts that prevent them from doing what they want.
Radiohead is really the first band I know of that is trying something different in this space. Harvey Danger tried it before them, and I'm sure there's other big name artists out there that I just haven't heard of doing similar.
Simply put, you believe that most people believe that two wrongs make a right? No - I was saying I think most people don't even think of downloading music as being "wrong". They're just DOING it regardless of the risks or anything - for them it's just like finding a free CD on the street and picking it up and taking it home and listening to it.
Arguably, "sharing" - giving people something for free which they would otherwise have to pay for - is indeed wrong.
In the common context, "sharing" == "copyright infringement", which I think many people agree is still wrong. I think, however, most people can justify copyright infringement by thinking that a) the laws about all this stuff are MORE wrong and b) the business practices of the RIAA/MPAA/etc are also MORE wrong. That is, of course, when they bother to think about it at all.
I sort of dislike the term "sharing" as well. Conventionally sharing implies that you're giving someone something that, while they have possession of it, you are unable to use.
That is clearly not the case with digital "sharing" - a more apt term would be "cloning", because you're giving someone something that they can use parallel to you.
And it's not like Google is bribing the Firefox Foundation, the money comes from search engine integration in Firefox. I seem to recall many people considering this 'adware' or 'spyware' when other companies attempted to bundle their advertising products with free/shareware:)
I am extremely concerned about what will happen to America's output of music, movies and TV shows in the event that it falls apart. While the gradual decline in their civil liberties, freedoms, rights, etc is fascinating, if it affects my TV watching I'll be disappointed.
I used to work at Electronics Boutique over the holidays, and I can guarantee that there are plenty of parents out there who would purchase this thing without a moment's hesitation - believing the whole time that they were purchasing a Wii-mote, or even the entire Wii system. I'm totally sure this would happen and from what I can see it certainly seems like this is a totally obvious attempt to cash in on the confusion - but I can't shake off this quote from bash.org: " The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"
If people think they're buying a Nintendo Wii and just go out and buy the first thing that looks remotely like what they want, without even doing a cursory glance for the words "Nintendo" or "Wii", I really can't feel too sorry for them. It's like a form of financial evolution - you either display adaptability or you run out of money and starve and die!
Of course, it doesn't make Wal-Mart any less lame for doing this (and the losers that built it).
How ridiculous and arrogant. How can you accuse the parent of such things when most probably he's not in the target market group for these sites? There's nothing ridiculous or arrogant about it - it's then even more petulant of him to just dismiss them as the GP did if he's not in the target market, because then it's much more likely that he has absolutely no knowledge of the subject matter that he's opining on.
It'd be like me not knowing anything about web servers and then hearing that Google use Apache as their web server software and SmallCompanyX does too, and then assuming that noone else uses Apache at all.
The thing is, it doesn't matter. If the new system isn't as good for downloading stuff, noone is going to use it. BitTorrent isn't suddenly going to cease to exist or stop working - that's the beauty of open source; the genie is out of the bottle and we can now enjoy BitTorrent for the rest of eternity.
More power to Bram and the rest of BitTorrent Inc - they can make some new thing, sell it to the movie/record industry for jillions of dollars, and the rest of us can continue our lives as they were before content in the knowledge that it's not going to affect us at all.
Seems like a weird thing to say in the summary. I know I'd be much more likely to prefer a painfully slow boot process as opposed to random, painful, possibly data-loss-causing BSODs.
I don't think there's any room for interpretation of the word "unlimited." If they use that word, they need to be sued. I agree wholeheartedly. As a non-US person who is always hearing about the litigiousness of US citizens, how has this not happened yet?!?!?
But by and large, this is the reason the utilities commissioners need to push for higher global infrastructure standards. These clowns don't want to upgrade their systems and when users begin to push the limits of their infrastructure, they tax the users rather than upgrading their network as they should. Well, I sort of disagree with this. Calling a service "unlimited" was prolly fine a couple years back, because only a tiny percentage of people would have used anywhere near 100gb/month. Now it's becoming a lot more the norm - maybe not so much because more people are getting online (though that's certainly a contributing factor) but more people are using their Internet connection for downloading heeeeeaps more crap than they used to.
I think its reasonable for them to just put sane caps on their download plans, announce them, and offer higher usage plans for people that want to use more.
I think you guys in the US have had it too good for too long:) Here in Australia "unlimited" meant "around 10GB", so when we hear you guys complaining about "only" 100GB of downloads a month......
Surely youtube.com is only "winning" because people are putting up copyrighted content faster than the copyright owners can file DMCA requests to have it taken down?
I might be alone here, but I watch jack shit on youtube that's not someone else's copyrighted content that someone else has uploaded (except for the extremely rare uploaded home video of some idiot hurting themselves, which probably accounts for less than 2% of my youtube time).
Why would anyone give this ultra-intelligent machine self-awareness? To corrupt a phrase from fantasy writer Terry Pratchett" "This question contains almost all you need to know about human civilisation. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking."
My interest in science I guess probably was grounded in the fact that we always had computers at home, and I used to play computer games with my dad. It wasn't too long before I became interested in how to do make the computer do more and more things that _I_ wanted to do, and then of course you fall quickly into programming.
Computer games have to be an easy way to get people's attention, but working from there (for grade eight) your conversion rate into getting people interested in programming might be pretty low - unless you come up with a clever long-term multi-step plan that gradually exposes them to more and more of the inner works of the mysterious magic beige box.
The other thing I really remember grabbing my attention when I was a kid was the stories of the glory days of the US space programme (the Right Stuff-era). I had a couple of dumbed-down books which completely grabbed my imagination (as it still does today) - the stories of guys like Chuck Yeager and Neil Armstrong just blew me away.
Good luck! I heartily applaud any teacher trying to get more students into science. I was disappointed to see a lack of responses to this post, as well as some negative "why bother" ones. I can't think of anything more important than making sure kids are growing up with a firm grasp on reality grounded in science rather than some sort of religious rubbish that they're taught at home by criminally negligent parents.
Xvid is a possibly-patent-violating, open source, free application. Divx is like the "legal" equivalent (ie, they've paid all the patent licensing fees to the relevant licensing authorities) - so they need all that extra bloat to pay the bills:)
Many more are freely available on youtube and other sites. The ABC doesn't mind you distributing them either. Actually I don't think that's strictly true - from their vodcast page:
This video podcast is made available for use by persons located in Australia only. If you are not located in Australia, you are not authorised to use this podcast. The ABC grants you a licence to download these audio-visual files for your private, personal, domestic, non-commercial use only. You may not use these audio-visual files for any other purpose (including but without limitation downloading, editing, or using these files for the purpose of (a) distribution to a third party; or (b) promoting, advertising, endorsing or implying a connection with you (or any third party) and the ABC, its agents or employees). (emphasis mine.)
How'd they manage to write an article saying the computers "would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who" without managing to include a photo of said computers:(
Yep - I wonder why MS didn't think of this with FSX. They already have the imagery available on their Google Maps equivalent site. Streaming them in real-time seems like a decent next step (though I'd want to be able to cache them and set the cache size).
Slashdot Mirror
I think the really interesting part of this answer is that it doesn't really address the legal issues of someone misusing and abusing your connection for their own evil deeds. I don't know if this has been tested in court but it seems laws about this sort of thing most likely are of the form "you are responsible for what happens with your Internet connection".
I would love to run an open wifi AP for my neighbours and everyone else walking past, but I'm worried about them using it for nefarious deeds when the IP address associated with those deeds is traceable back to me.
This is the first time I've ever felt confident the cycle might've been broken. While I don't think big businesses are going to pack up and move to Linux overnight, now they've at least got a decent reason to consider it - the cost of migrating to Linux might be comparable to the cost of "upgrading" to Vista.
Thanks!
Think I'll pass. I'm happily reading ebooks in any format on my 3 year old HP Ipaq.
or .txt? or .rtf?
Yeh, that's definitely true, but surely there's enough evidence of the prolific spread of internet memes making instant successes out of random douchebags, which hopefully means that there's hope for some excellent small bands to be able to make a living.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, at the moment the only thing that seems to distinguish "really big bands that everyone knows about" and "small bands yet to get on everyone's radar" is that _at the moment_, it is still the marketing efforts of the labels that are responsible for bringing the former to our attention.
Hopefully once someone figures out how to bring the small bands to the masses we'll see some big improvements. We're doing our part in Australia with the Unearthed programme, backed by Australia's (government-funded) youth radio station, TripleJ (best radio station in the world).
Radiohead is really the first band I know of that is trying something different in this space. Harvey Danger tried it before them, and I'm sure there's other big name artists out there that I just haven't heard of doing similar.
MUTE is a privacy-protecting p2p application: MUTE's routing mechanism is inspired by ant behavior.
The industry standard rebuttal
Arguably, "sharing" - giving people something for free which they would otherwise have to pay for - is indeed wrong.
In the common context, "sharing" == "copyright infringement", which I think many people agree is still wrong. I think, however, most people can justify copyright infringement by thinking that a) the laws about all this stuff are MORE wrong and b) the business practices of the RIAA/MPAA/etc are also MORE wrong. That is, of course, when they bother to think about it at all.
I sort of dislike the term "sharing" as well. Conventionally sharing implies that you're giving someone something that, while they have possession of it, you are unable to use.
That is clearly not the case with digital "sharing" - a more apt term would be "cloning", because you're giving someone something that they can use parallel to you.
I am extremely concerned about what will happen to America's output of music, movies and TV shows in the event that it falls apart. While the gradual decline in their civil liberties, freedoms, rights, etc is fascinating, if it affects my TV watching I'll be disappointed.
If people think they're buying a Nintendo Wii and just go out and buy the first thing that looks remotely like what they want, without even doing a cursory glance for the words "Nintendo" or "Wii", I really can't feel too sorry for them. It's like a form of financial evolution - you either display adaptability or you run out of money and starve and die!
Of course, it doesn't make Wal-Mart any less lame for doing this (and the losers that built it).
It'd be like me not knowing anything about web servers and then hearing that Google use Apache as their web server software and SmallCompanyX does too, and then assuming that noone else uses Apache at all.
The thing is, it doesn't matter. If the new system isn't as good for downloading stuff, noone is going to use it. BitTorrent isn't suddenly going to cease to exist or stop working - that's the beauty of open source; the genie is out of the bottle and we can now enjoy BitTorrent for the rest of eternity.
More power to Bram and the rest of BitTorrent Inc - they can make some new thing, sell it to the movie/record industry for jillions of dollars, and the rest of us can continue our lives as they were before content in the knowledge that it's not going to affect us at all.
Seems like a weird thing to say in the summary. I know I'd be much more likely to prefer a painfully slow boot process as opposed to random, painful, possibly data-loss-causing BSODs.
... that aren't all Linux fanboys raging. Or I guess more accurately, nice to see moderation of comments.
I think its reasonable for them to just put sane caps on their download plans, announce them, and offer higher usage plans for people that want to use more.
I think you guys in the US have had it too good for too long
Surely youtube.com is only "winning" because people are putting up copyrighted content faster than the copyright owners can file DMCA requests to have it taken down?
I might be alone here, but I watch jack shit on youtube that's not someone else's copyrighted content that someone else has uploaded (except for the extremely rare uploaded home video of some idiot hurting themselves, which probably accounts for less than 2% of my youtube time).
My interest in science I guess probably was grounded in the fact that we always had computers at home, and I used to play computer games with my dad. It wasn't too long before I became interested in how to do make the computer do more and more things that _I_ wanted to do, and then of course you fall quickly into programming.
Computer games have to be an easy way to get people's attention, but working from there (for grade eight) your conversion rate into getting people interested in programming might be pretty low - unless you come up with a clever long-term multi-step plan that gradually exposes them to more and more of the inner works of the mysterious magic beige box.
The other thing I really remember grabbing my attention when I was a kid was the stories of the glory days of the US space programme (the Right Stuff-era). I had a couple of dumbed-down books which completely grabbed my imagination (as it still does today) - the stories of guys like Chuck Yeager and Neil Armstrong just blew me away.
Good luck! I heartily applaud any teacher trying to get more students into science. I was disappointed to see a lack of responses to this post, as well as some negative "why bother" ones. I can't think of anything more important than making sure kids are growing up with a firm grasp on reality grounded in science rather than some sort of religious rubbish that they're taught at home by criminally negligent parents.
Xvid is a possibly-patent-violating, open source, free application. Divx is like the "legal" equivalent (ie, they've paid all the patent licensing fees to the relevant licensing authorities) - so they need all that extra bloat to pay the bills :)
How'd they manage to write an article saying the computers "would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who" without managing to include a photo of said computers :(
Yep - I wonder why MS didn't think of this with FSX. They already have the imagery available on their Google Maps equivalent site. Streaming them in real-time seems like a decent next step (though I'd want to be able to cache them and set the cache size).