What I'm most concerned is that this could have a cumulative effect on the culture of governmental employees to equate online radio and other forms of internet commerce for music in a bad light. I think this is bad for the industry and that the government is doing a disservice to internet commercialization of music.
According to this, Pandora and radio streams are.. STEALING!
It's still downloading music.
This is all very interesting considering it was just ruled that Yahoo online internet radio should be royalty-free and only have to pay normal radio licensing fees: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/19017.cfm
This will end up just wasting man hours for legitimate companies who provide web site owners ways to monetize their content by showing ads, and cost websites money for legitimate use (because they can't record "impressions"). People who do illegitimate things will just find a way around it.
Microsoft needs to remove this useless junk and stick to things that actually help people instead of marketing hype.
IE7 beta2 fails miserably on the Acid2 test, however Opera 9, Konqueror and the new Webkit for Safari do perfectly. Firefox does pretty well, with only a minor glitch. IE7 fixed the most embarassing IE CSS bugs, but didn't make major strides towards being more compliant.
On the other hand, there are some major improvements in IE7, for instance no more need to have a shim frame to block controls from showing through other DIVs.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has required laptops since 1999, and schools who are looking to follow suit should follow the lessons learned from RPI and other schools who already have long-standing laptop requirements. Some things to keep in mind: 1) Even if lab classes are notebook-only, the school will need a few desktop systems in the lab for students who are having problems with their laptops. 2) Software licensing was a huge issue at RPI, with much of the engineering department, for instance, was paying for programs they didn't use because they were for other majors. Make sure that licensing is done at the lowest level possible. Also, having the students using open source programs like Openoffice for document types as a convention could eventually ween the school off expensive licensing programs. 3) Replacement programs... I was forced to get my second lappy off Ebay b/c we didn't have a very good replacement program. It should be expected that each student will be going through at last 1 laptop upgrade while they are at school. 4) Hardware packages... We all had the same 1-size-fits-all choice, so when I got my first lappy, I had to upgrade my ram and hard drive within a year. I recommend offering two packages, one the basic for most students, and a better hardware package for the students who want/need more.
That's the same kinda thing as "The government should pay damages when someone is found innocent in a court case". It's a great fair idea, and how it should be, but many of our government officials are so incompetent that a policies like this would bankrupt them. A better option is to just get rid of the PTO altogether, to just file submissions in some kind of free public domain vault, and let the companies and individuals do the research/battling over who had the idea first if there's many of the same submissions already filed. Obviously, our PTO is too incompetent to do it themselves.
I've been using the internet (and programming) since I was 14 (1994) and since I was the computer expert of the house, I set the rules when it came to the computer (because otherwise people trashed it by not knowing what they were doing). There was porn online back then, but most of it was this rather innocuous amateur stuff and nude pictures on sites hosted by former BBS sysops (and I used to go on various BBSes too back then -- mostly for games) and trading I did in chatrooms on AOL (Yes, I used AOL back then). I did save some of it, and occasionally my parents would wander across it when going through the hard disk, and delete it, so I just got better at hiding it.
Personally, I think that if you are too overbearing with your childrens' interenet use, they'll just learn to be sneaky about things they do. I've seen it many times with computers or other things. You are MUCH better off, in my humble opinion, giving them ground-rules for online chat and message boards, because that's where the danger is. Not entering any personal info online, etc. It'd be like calling random people and telling them all about themselves and having a conversation. They have to be smart about it.
When it comes to things like porn, there is a line between saying you don't want them looking at that stuff, and making them feel that there is something they should be ashamed of a natural curiousity they have.
If they want to go to sites with porn (and there is also peer-2-peer, newsgroups, etc), you probably won't be able to stop them. You might catch them sometimes, but believe me, the last thing you want to do is appear like some kind of computer nazi if you get my drift. I'd deal with it appropriately and not go haywire. In fact, sometimes they might accidentally had that stuff pop up when going to a site they thought was innocent but was a SPAM trap for porn (windows popping up all over the place).
If you go overboard, they will just learn to hide everything they do from you, and there isn't a technology in the world that can shelter them from everything, nor guarantee that they can't close windows quickly when you go by, so your best battle is with pounding it into them to be anonymous in all communications and making sure they never give out personal information, and it was the same way when I was 14, and I was very smart about it. The media also overplays things to get ratings, and most of the stuff on the internet, though perhaps some considered adult material and communications, is not something that will traumatize your children -- especially compared to the kinda stuff they probably talk about at school, which I guarantee is much "worse" in most cases.
The SDK wasn't going to come out for a while, yet the engine and game source (of which the SDK would be based on) is available a lot sooner. If the SDK wasn't going to come out until December, yet people can start modding now, of course its better for early release of mods. That's just common sense.
I'd like to be the devil's advocate and say that I neither believe there is anything wrong with sex or violence in games or media, and it doesn't really depend on age. I'd say it depends on the individuals' ability to realize what is a creation of bits and bytes, and what is real life. I don't think there is a specific age to this, and the government has no right getting involved with this. It is the job of the parents and children to come up with their own standards -- not the media or government.
I believe the solution is to continue rating games and the media, but allow the parents to give their children a card that clears them to buy certain games or see certain movies or buy "pornographic" magazines. This way, it takes the power of restriction and censorship away from the government.
When it comes to sexual imagry in games, I believe that sex is part of human nature, and I think we simply should just not make a link between sex and violence. Otherwise, passionate loving sexual depiction in games is something that I would much rather children see than someone getting their head ripped off.
With respect to violence in video games, I believe that this is simply a way to experience something without taking any risk. You play the game, and if you die, it isn't permanent. It still seems realistic, and gives you the chance to roleplay and people often play a role they would be afraid to in life. I believe as long as people have the conception its not real, then they should be able to play.
If a parent believes that they have educated their child enough, they should be able to give them a card to clear them to buy violent or sexual games. The card could be something made so that children could not make fake ones.
I used to play violent games like Wolfenstein when I was a little kid, saw violent movies, and I also had a stash of porn magazines, and watched pornos my friends had gotten a hold of and not only did they not make me violent (I could barely hurt a fly) or permiscuous. Of course, I can't speak for everyone in saying that because it had no affect on me, it would have no affect on everyone.
According to Half-Life Source Community and Half Life 2 Source Code Resource Page, Gabe Newell and Valve Software reported that the source code stolen wasn't enough to compile a complete game and was only a small amount of the source. They said that even though it compiles, it isn't enough to be usable. This goes along with information from those that have tried building it [I'm not saying whether or not I have tried;-) ]: that most binaries (although some believe all except setup binaries) are built but the game doesn't run beyond the "Loading..." screen. Apparantly, there are no textures, prefabbed models, maps, and game configuration files to put the icing on the cake. These graphical resources alone should probably account for most of the source's size. At least for those lucky enough to get the incomplete source, they can get a good idea how a premier 3d first-person-shooter is written and maybe have a better idea of what is causing errors in the game when they write modifications. Also, word is that Valve will be making modifications to the game so that binaries built from the stolen code will be inoperable with the releases they have delayed. Word is they are also close to finding the identity of the hackers. I wonder if they will sue Microsoft for the security issue in Outlook Express that allowed the hackers to get in. We can only hope.
This is actually good for the modding community. People will be able to start their mods early (If they were lucky enough to get the source) and actually help HL2 not lose the interest of people early on.
This is simple. We just won't buy motherboards that have a Phoenix Bios. I suggest you also email Phoenix to let them know they are going to lose consumers because we will not stand for this.
Its sad that @Stake would be so scared of Microsoft to fire someone for telling the truth.
I'm sure that some other company will be perfectly happy to snatch him right up, partly as a slap in the face to Microsoft and because he can obviously provide some valuable information about the security risks involved with Windows now and in the future.
Maybe even the CCIA might snatch him up? Personally, I think they owe it to him.
I use Al's Messenger on Linux because Msn Messenger doesn't exist. Some people I talk to only use Msn Messenger. Since I use my Linux computer most of the time, it will be a pain to pop over to the Windows computer to send a message to some people. I hope Microsoft goes out of business!
They hooked people, and then decided to start making a profit. People: Convert all your Divx movies to another format and never look back. This kind of thing should not be tolerated!
I look forward to some hacks removing the adware requirements from the codecs, or 3rd party codecs. I hope someone has the guts to do it.
Problem is that USB is too slow of a bus architecture. So is Firewire. With external devices or hard drive connectors, a long serial cord is better than a ribbon or parallel connector. For cards that you slide in, all is really necessary is a way to hot swap them (like PCI-X can do) and be able to slide them in through the back of the case in the same way as you slide in cardbus cards to the laptop.
If this includes dongles, though, I'm going to scream!::Goes and reads the standard:: Dongles are evil.
They neglect a lot of important things in these standards. Foremost, they neglect Linux when creating these standards. Most of these standards become proprietary licensed patents and the hardware they are based on them only has drivers written for Windows by the hardware manufacturers.
Secondly, we need standards for things like CD/DVD burners, drives, and bus architectures and many other things that lately seem to more commonly cause hardware conflicts than not. I am having a conflict with my EHCI and OHCI, along with my DVD-RW drive and one of my firewire busses. Are these guys too lazy to implement standards correctly? If they don't start doing this, standards will mean absolutely nothing. When you leave out part of the standard in your implementations, you are causing problems for everyone.
The other thing is that we need to come up with a replacement for the basic layout of motherboards. We shouldn't have jumpers on boards -- everything should be "jumpered" in Bios. They could replace those jumpers with non-volatile flip-flops or SCRs if they need it close to the devices it jumpers. We need a replacement for the pins for the case front headers like the speaker pins, etc. I believe we should just have one large connector that fits over a whole bank of pins. If you aren't using a pin, you just don't connect it to anything on the motherboard, but the pins will always be in standard locations. That way you can just connect one large connector to the board instead of tons of little connectors. I don't know about you, but my hands are not small enough to be able to do this easily. I'm sick of a mess of power connectors in my case. There has to be a better way to do this.
When it comes to processors to save space on motherboards, they should start using tiny slotted (I don't mean like slot-1 but like a tiny fcpga chip that has all its connectors as a slot) processors with two sided fans that slip over them like a sleeve. This would also mean they could cool both sides of the die.
When it comes to external devices, I'm sick of the mess of power cords. I believe that these devices should have DC power inputs and you should be able to run a daisy chained power cord between all of them.
There are a million things they could fix with computers standards, but before they make computers faster and more powerful, they should tackle the problem of the fact that a lot of the devices within computers like jumpers, connectors, and external devices still use ancient methods that are suboptimal at best. What good is Firewire and USB when you still must run power cords to all your large external devices? They need to look at the big picture more.
I bet they block sites like http://www.askmen.com/ too as the article mentioned that informational sites on sexual topics are blocked. So teenagers who only can access the computer at the library will have to resort to asking their peers or adults for information in which in both cases it might be innacurate. Yet sites that provide objective, down-to-earth information on sexual topics are blocked. Puritanism post-2000? I think so!
Next they will require us to put these on televisions, computers at home, register our children's and our DNA and retinal scans so big brother can keep an eye on us at all times. It goes to show that politicians and media always know what's best for us, and we should rely on their judgement in every case and not worrying about our constant decrese of power as individual citizens in the last 100 years.
Personally, there is not a lot of choice in who we elect, and its a case of electing someone who sucks, or someone who sucks worse. The end result is we get pathetic censorship like this!
"Tonny Yu, founder and CEO of Mailshell, says that any new and better replacement for SMTP would have to have some sort of certification system to guarantee that senders are who they say they are. The obvious candidates would be certificate services like Verisign, but if demand shot up perhaps there would be more competition. Mail servers would also have to be certified, or mail sent to them would not be trustworthy. "
I agree with mail servers having to be certified, but not individual senders unless its a free service. When setting up SSL for my site, I had to pay for a certificate. Since it will be an online store, that's fine... But a casual user of the internet shouldn't have to pay for certificates in order to send an email. I guess if ISPs offered their users the ability to lease a certificate like we do IPs, that would be fine. Those who want more than that could pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm most concerned is that this could have a cumulative effect on the culture of governmental employees to equate online radio and other forms of internet commerce for music in a bad light. I think this is bad for the industry and that the government is doing a disservice to internet commercialization of music.
According to this, Pandora and radio streams are.. STEALING!
It's still downloading music.
This is all very interesting considering it was just ruled that Yahoo online internet radio should be royalty-free and only have to pay normal radio licensing fees: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/19017.cfm
Also company/government bandwidth... However, that's not the way it was presented to the employees.
This will end up just wasting man hours for legitimate companies who provide web site owners ways to monetize their content by showing ads, and cost websites money for legitimate use (because they can't record "impressions"). People who do illegitimate things will just find a way around it.
Microsoft needs to remove this useless junk and stick to things that actually help people instead of marketing hype.
Stealth suits using this material would be very useful. They'd give me an advantage in laser tag :-)
IE7 beta2 fails miserably on the Acid2 test, however Opera 9, Konqueror and the new Webkit for Safari do perfectly. Firefox does pretty well, with only a minor glitch. IE7 fixed the most embarassing IE CSS bugs, but didn't make major strides towards being more compliant. On the other hand, there are some major improvements in IE7, for instance no more need to have a shim frame to block controls from showing through other DIVs.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has required laptops since 1999, and schools who are looking to follow suit should follow the lessons learned from RPI and other schools who already have long-standing laptop requirements. Some things to keep in mind:
1) Even if lab classes are notebook-only, the school will need a few desktop systems in the lab for students who are having problems with their laptops.
2) Software licensing was a huge issue at RPI, with much of the engineering department, for instance, was paying for programs they didn't use because they were for other majors. Make sure that licensing is done at the lowest level possible. Also, having the students using open source programs like Openoffice for document types as a convention could eventually ween the school off expensive licensing programs.
3) Replacement programs... I was forced to get my second lappy off Ebay b/c we didn't have a very good replacement program. It should be expected that each student will be going through at last 1 laptop upgrade while they are at school.
4) Hardware packages... We all had the same 1-size-fits-all choice, so when I got my first lappy, I had to upgrade my ram and hard drive within a year. I recommend offering two packages, one the basic for most students, and a better hardware package for the students who want/need more.
That's the same kinda thing as "The government should pay damages when someone is found innocent in a court case". It's a great fair idea, and how it should be, but many of our government officials are so incompetent that a policies like this would bankrupt them. A better option is to just get rid of the PTO altogether, to just file submissions in some kind of free public domain vault, and let the companies and individuals do the research/battling over who had the idea first if there's many of the same submissions already filed. Obviously, our PTO is too incompetent to do it themselves.
I believe Bush's "October Surprise" will be saying he has caught Osama. Truth being he's known where Osama is all along.
I've been using the internet (and programming) since I was 14 (1994) and since I was the computer expert of the house, I set the rules when it came to the computer (because otherwise people trashed it by not knowing what they were doing). There was porn online back then, but most of it was this rather innocuous amateur stuff and nude pictures on sites hosted by former BBS sysops (and I used to go on various BBSes too back then -- mostly for games) and trading I did in chatrooms on AOL (Yes, I used AOL back then). I did save some of it, and occasionally my parents would wander across it when going through the hard disk, and delete it, so I just got better at hiding it.
Personally, I think that if you are too overbearing with your childrens' interenet use, they'll just learn to be sneaky about things they do. I've seen it many times with computers or other things. You are MUCH better off, in my humble opinion, giving them ground-rules for online chat and message boards, because that's where the danger is. Not entering any personal info online, etc. It'd be like calling random people and telling them all about themselves and having a conversation. They have to be smart about it.
When it comes to things like porn, there is a line between saying you don't want them looking at that stuff, and making them feel that there is something they should be ashamed of a natural curiousity they have.
If they want to go to sites with porn (and there is also peer-2-peer, newsgroups, etc), you probably won't be able to stop them. You might catch them sometimes, but believe me, the last thing you want to do is appear like some kind of computer nazi if you get my drift. I'd deal with it appropriately and not go haywire. In fact, sometimes they might accidentally had that stuff pop up when going to a site they thought was innocent but was a SPAM trap for porn (windows popping up all over the place).
If you go overboard, they will just learn to hide everything they do from you, and there isn't a technology in the world that can shelter them from everything, nor guarantee that they can't close windows quickly when you go by, so your best battle is with pounding it into them to be anonymous in all communications and making sure they never give out personal information, and it was the same way when I was 14, and I was very smart about it. The media also overplays things to get ratings, and most of the stuff on the internet, though perhaps some considered adult material and communications, is not something that will traumatize your children -- especially compared to the kinda stuff they probably talk about at school, which I guarantee is much "worse" in most cases.
Mail your complaints to:
Marlene H. Dortch, Secretary
Federal Communications Commission
Office of the Secretary
445 12th Street SW
Room TW-2048
Washington, DC 20554
Also mention other FCC abuses such as giving Clearchannel and Viacomm almost all the broadcasting market so they can control what we hear.
The SDK wasn't going to come out for a while, yet the engine and game source (of which the SDK would be based on) is available a lot sooner. If the SDK wasn't going to come out until December, yet people can start modding now, of course its better for early release of mods. That's just common sense.
I'd like to be the devil's advocate and say that I neither believe there is anything wrong with sex or violence in games or media, and it doesn't really depend on age. I'd say it depends on the individuals' ability to realize what is a creation of bits and bytes, and what is real life. I don't think there is a specific age to this, and the government has no right getting involved with this. It is the job of the parents and children to come up with their own standards -- not the media or government.
I believe the solution is to continue rating games and the media, but allow the parents to give their children a card that clears them to buy certain games or see certain movies or buy "pornographic" magazines. This way, it takes the power of restriction and censorship away from the government.
When it comes to sexual imagry in games, I believe that sex is part of human nature, and I think we simply should just not make a link between sex and violence. Otherwise, passionate loving sexual depiction in games is something that I would much rather children see than someone getting their head ripped off.
With respect to violence in video games, I believe that this is simply a way to experience something without taking any risk. You play the game, and if you die, it isn't permanent. It still seems realistic, and gives you the chance to roleplay and people often play a role they would be afraid to in life. I believe as long as people have the conception its not real, then they should be able to play.
If a parent believes that they have educated their child enough, they should be able to give them a card to clear them to buy violent or sexual games. The card could be something made so that children could not make fake ones.
I used to play violent games like Wolfenstein when I was a little kid, saw violent movies, and I also had a stash of porn magazines, and watched pornos my friends had gotten a hold of and not only did they not make me violent (I could barely hurt a fly) or permiscuous. Of course, I can't speak for everyone in saying that because it had no affect on me, it would have no affect on everyone.
According to Half-Life Source Community ;-) ]: that most binaries (although some believe all except setup binaries) are built but the game doesn't run beyond the "Loading..." screen. Apparantly, there are no textures, prefabbed models, maps, and game configuration files to put the icing on the cake. These graphical resources alone should probably account for most of the source's size. At least for those lucky enough to get the incomplete source, they can get a good idea how a premier 3d first-person-shooter is written and maybe have a better idea of what is causing errors in the game when they write modifications.
and Half Life 2 Source Code Resource Page, Gabe Newell and Valve Software reported that the source code stolen wasn't enough to compile a complete game and was only a small amount of the source. They said that even though it compiles, it isn't enough to be usable. This goes along with information from those that have tried building it [I'm not saying whether or not I have tried
Also, word is that Valve will be making modifications to the game so that binaries built from the stolen code will be inoperable with the releases they have delayed. Word is they are also close to finding the identity of the hackers. I wonder if they will sue Microsoft for the security issue in Outlook Express that allowed the hackers to get in. We can only hope.
This is actually good for the modding community. People will be able to start their mods early (If they were lucky enough to get the source) and actually help HL2 not lose the interest of people early on.
This is simple. We just won't buy motherboards that have a Phoenix Bios. I suggest you also email Phoenix to let them know they are going to lose consumers because we will not stand for this.
Its sad that @Stake would be so scared of Microsoft to fire someone for telling the truth.
I'm sure that some other company will be perfectly happy to snatch him right up, partly as a slap in the face to Microsoft and because he can obviously provide some valuable information about the security risks involved with Windows now and in the future.
Maybe even the CCIA might snatch him up? Personally, I think they owe it to him.
I use Al's Messenger on Linux because Msn Messenger doesn't exist. Some people I talk to only use Msn Messenger. Since I use my Linux computer most of the time, it will be a pain to pop over to the Windows computer to send a message to some people. I hope Microsoft goes out of business!
They hooked people, and then decided to start making a profit. People: Convert all your Divx movies to another format and never look back. This kind of thing should not be tolerated!
I look forward to some hacks removing the adware requirements from the codecs, or 3rd party codecs. I hope someone has the guts to do it.
Why are all these standards created behind closed doors? They should get more input from users of their hardware.
Problem is that USB is too slow of a bus architecture. So is Firewire. With external devices or hard drive connectors, a long serial cord is better than a ribbon or parallel connector. For cards that you slide in, all is really necessary is a way to hot swap them (like PCI-X can do) and be able to slide them in through the back of the case in the same way as you slide in cardbus cards to the laptop.
::Goes and reads the standard::
If this includes dongles, though, I'm going to scream!
Dongles are evil.
They neglect a lot of important things in these standards. Foremost, they neglect Linux when creating these standards. Most of these standards become proprietary licensed patents and the hardware they are based on them only has drivers written for Windows by the hardware manufacturers.
Secondly, we need standards for things like CD/DVD burners, drives, and bus architectures and many other things that lately seem to more commonly cause hardware conflicts than not. I am having a conflict with my EHCI and OHCI, along with my DVD-RW drive and one of my firewire busses. Are these guys too lazy to implement standards correctly? If they don't start doing this, standards will mean absolutely nothing. When you leave out part of the standard in your implementations, you are causing problems for everyone.
The other thing is that we need to come up with a replacement for the basic layout of motherboards. We shouldn't have jumpers on boards -- everything should be "jumpered" in Bios. They could replace those jumpers with non-volatile flip-flops or SCRs if they need it close to the devices it jumpers. We need a replacement for the pins for the case front headers like the speaker pins, etc. I believe we should just have one large connector that fits over a whole bank of pins. If you aren't using a pin, you just don't connect it to anything on the motherboard, but the pins will always be in standard locations. That way you can just connect one large connector to the board instead of tons of little connectors. I don't know about you, but my hands are not small enough to be able to do this easily. I'm sick of a mess of power connectors in my case. There has to be a better way to do this.
When it comes to processors to save space on motherboards, they should start using tiny slotted (I don't mean like slot-1 but like a tiny fcpga chip that has all its connectors as a slot) processors with two sided fans that slip over them like a sleeve. This would also mean they could cool both sides of the die.
When it comes to external devices, I'm sick of the mess of power cords. I believe that these devices should have DC power inputs and you should be able to run a daisy chained power cord between all of them.
There are a million things they could fix with computers standards, but before they make computers faster and more powerful, they should tackle the problem of the fact that a lot of the devices within computers like jumpers, connectors, and external devices still use ancient methods that are suboptimal at best. What good is Firewire and USB when you still must run power cords to all your large external devices? They need to look at the big picture more.
That's why I'm using my beautiful wget before this is lost forever.
I bet they block sites like http://www.askmen.com/ too as the article mentioned that informational sites on sexual topics are blocked. So teenagers who only can access the computer at the library will have to resort to asking their peers or adults for information in which in both cases it might be innacurate. Yet sites that provide objective, down-to-earth information on sexual topics are blocked. Puritanism post-2000? I think so!
Next they will require us to put these on televisions, computers at home, register our children's and our DNA and retinal scans so big brother can keep an eye on us at all times. It goes to show that politicians and media always know what's best for us, and we should rely on their judgement in every case and not worrying about our constant decrese of power as individual citizens in the last 100 years.
Personally, there is not a lot of choice in who we elect, and its a case of electing someone who sucks, or someone who sucks worse. The end result is we get pathetic censorship like this!
"Tonny Yu, founder and CEO of Mailshell, says that any new and better replacement for SMTP would have to have some sort of certification system to guarantee that senders are who they say they are. The obvious candidates would be certificate services like Verisign, but if demand shot up perhaps there would be more competition. Mail servers would also have to be certified, or mail sent to them would not be trustworthy. "
I agree with mail servers having to be certified, but not individual senders unless its a free service. When setting up SSL for my site, I had to pay for a certificate. Since it will be an online store, that's fine... But a casual user of the internet shouldn't have to pay for certificates in order to send an email. I guess if ISPs offered their users the ability to lease a certificate like we do IPs, that would be fine. Those who want more than that could pay for it.