You may find it perfectly acceptable now, but what about if they turn around and start doing the same thing to us? I, for one, don't even find it acceptable as a one-way thing. People in Asian countries have as much right to email me as anyone else. Isolationist tactics will destroy the internet as we know it, and negate much of the good that it has done and is doing around the world. This is not the path we want to go down. It's a poor solution, and it's certainly not the right solution.
Then neither am I. I had the priviledge of seeing Eben Moglen speak during OSConf at University of Toronto, and after that display, I feel it's safe to say that the FSF does not need any legal advice from the outside, much less IANALs from Slashdot getting the issue hopelessly confused.
Other lawyers who are ignorant of the law, seem to irritate him somewhat. I don't blame him. But given that tidbit of knowledge, just imagine how he feels about the garbage SCO is throwing around.
I am sure that if it has not done so already, the FSF will respond decisively in an ethical and legal manner, and certainly nothing substantial will ever come of SCO's whining.
There's just something that seems fundamentally wrong about connecting to a global network and then blacklisting half of it.
It's like buying Lucky Charms cereal, then filtering out all the marshmallows and throwing them in the garbage because they're not healthy. Very true, but if that's how you feel, why bother buying Lucky Charms?
Surely it would be more effective to implement challenge-response, or simply boycott email in favour of IM or a secure messageboard/contact form, or whatever you prefer. The problem is with email, not with Asia.
Besides, I think this study is bogus. All the studies I've previously seen pointed squarely at the USA as the primary source of spam. Empirical evidence from my own email box bears this out. Most of the spam I receive tends to come from residential cable modem/DSL lines in various countries, predominantly the states. I suspect that these are either virus-hijacked boxes, or people being paid to send spam through their home connection (ie, the ads placed on telephone polls: "Have an internet connection at home? Make up to $4,000/month with no effort required! Call now!")
I know they have always been against the code of conduct. So it has been in every MMORPG. It's a legal CYA thing, and a moral objection on the part of the companies. It strikes me as similar to the way most companies approach opensource. They come into it already having made the decision that they want to retain exclusive control over their things, and they see nothing remotely attractive about the complete antithesis of that.
You didn't, however, address my point. If scumbags are abusing their housing system, then some far more direct alternatives should've been the first things they considered. The obvious solution is to limit the number of houses that a single account can buy in a week/month/year. Another solution would be to discourage bots by making the starting price absolutely obscene, and lower it as time goes on if no one buys it. Brokers get much much poorer much much quicker if they still insist on snagging the house at any cost. If you're desperate, you'll pay for it. Much like the real-life real estate market works.
Alternately, they could take the social-solution-to-a-social-problem approach and make buying houses for the sole purpose of selling them to another player against the code of conduct, and punish the brokers with expulsion from the game. I know that's not Turbine's style (they have always taken a very light-touch, mostly hands-off approach to managing the game) but it's often a better way of dealing with problems than attempting to solve a social problem with a technological solution.
That alone makes it alright to risk any number of animals to save the life of one human.
Maybe in your opinion, but that is very, very far from being considered a universal truth of any sort. Certainly not all of us have such a high opinion of humans. If I had to choose between saving the life of a cat or my boss, sentient or not guess which I would choose? And I'd feel it was at least as morally neutral as choosing one human over another to save.
Most animals with moderately sized brains have the ability to learn. This at least qualifies them as intelligent, and therefore equal, in my books. And some are not more equal than others. Sentient is a rather meaningless term as far as I'm concerned, and should not be used to decide whether a creature deserves to live or die any more than the same choice should be made based on distinctions such as whether it has feathers or fur, or is green or pink, or is large or small.
I don't argue that sometimes animal testing is needed for the good of all, but it should be decided based on careful consideration of the issues and types of suffering involved, rather than a blanket "moral right".
cut it non-sentient species just don't rate as highly as sentient species.
I'm just glad there are plenty of people who don't think that way.
Sounds like a problem with the design of the house-buying system, not a problem with eBay sales. This is the kind of misguided band-aid solution that made me give up Asheron's Call in the first place. "Oh no, everyone is trying to get GSA instead of checking out the pointless new greaves we added in this update! There's only one way to fix this: Let's make GSA suck so they don't want it anymore!"
I am pretty sure you are wrong. A buffer overrun is a way of putting data PAST the end of your variable (which would be marked NX in your hypothetical scenario) into an about-to-be-executed chunk memory.
By definition, this about-to-be-executed memory has to NOT be marked NX, or the program could not execute its jump, and would have no way of meandering its way out of the function and back up the stack.
NX may be useful, but it won't end buffer overruns. There are only really two ways to do that: strn* or a better programming language.
There are no laws saying MS can't jack up their prices, but there are laws saying MS can't be a monopoly.
Um, it's quite the opposite actually. Microsoft is free to be as much of a monopoly as it wants. If its products are that good that everyone wants to use them, hurrah for Microsoft. It becomes against the law when the monopoly uses its position of power to lock-in consumers, lock-out competitors, dump product below cost to destroy competitors, jack up prices to ridiculous levels while no competition is in sight and various other underhanded tactics often used by Microsoft. The Sherman Anti-trust Act is called 'Anti-trust' for a reason. A monopoly has complete control over its market. Rather than simply disallowing this from happening when it might've happened for a good reason (See: Google) instead the public trusts the monopoly to behave responsibly. When that trust is violated, that's when they need to be nailed by the law.
If it were just some random guy providing this service, I'd agree with you. However, it's not some random guy, it's being funded by a government agency. And depending on how socialist your government is (rather a lot, in the UK) they may very well have a duty to provide you, the citizens, with free beer. Or more to the point, provide you with free information -- especially in the context of education and university research.
Because, while the people with PDF files, OpenOffice presentations, and such were mostly amenable to either converting them to PowerPoint, or simply using their own computers, the majority of the presenters could not/would not use anything other than PowerPoint.
Remember that people from all walks of open-source life were at this conference, including Microsoft's manager of their Shared Source initiative, government officials, non-technical people, even people who were basically arguing against F/OSS.
Still, the irony did not go unnoticed. I heard all sorts of people mentioning it with varying levels of amusement.
Of course, it seems relevant to note that without exception, the very best speakers did not use any presentation software at all. Some of them, Dr. Moglen included, didn't even have notes.
Actually, I work as a lead programmer for an international petroleum engineering/consulting company. So when it comes to petroleum products I do actually have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about, at least relative to most Slashdotters. I know a lot of numbers for Propane off the top of my head, so I'll stick to that primarily. Butane is very similar in properties to Propane though, so it shouldn't make much difference.
The stuff they wanted to use for refrigerants is not the same stuff you light up a cigar, or BBQ on a grill with.
I guarantee it is the same stuff, although it's kept in compressed or liquid form, by the sound of it.
Both of those include significant amounts of moisture to prevent a large explosion.
I've never heard of this. The only additive in commercially-available propane and butane is the mercaptans used to make it smell. The only thing that I can imagine adding moisture would do is reduce the effectiveness of the mercaptans, which are actually quite notorious for being suppressed by moisture.
Butane/propane-based refrigerants if used in a conventional single family refrigerator appliance would have enough explosive gas to not only take out your house, but both of your neighbors as well.
If you happened to get this propane into a healthy mix with oxygen and then light it, yes, it can be very explosive, but realistically that isn't quite as easy as it sounds. If it was, you would hear much more often about trailerparks and campgrounds completely obliterating themselves, considering each resident usually has at least 1 propane tank and usually several. Propane has a fairly narrow flammability range. With a mix of anything less than about 2.5% propane to air, there isn't enough fuel and any attempt at ignition starves. Any more than 10% propane, though, and it will quickly suffocate itself of air, preventing further ignition. This is the same reason real cars don't explode when they burn, unlike Hollywood's take on the concept.
Basically, the only way for a large-scale explosion to occur is for the propane gas to leak into the house, slowly propagating and mixing with the air, then being ignited by a spark while the concentration is in its flammable range. Keep in mind this has to be done without anyone noticing the stink of mercaptans, which are quite noticable at concentrations of around 0.5% and higher. So, basically, the only way for the gas to reach the 2.5% lower limit without someone noticing, is if no one is home. This is basically identical to the process that leads to the relatively few natural gas explosions (which are often fed by a shattered pipeline after the explosion, for added fun and destruction)
We have already been managing risks just like this sucessfully for a long time now, with few problems. That's what really irks me about this. Most of the fear-mongering that goes on doesn't seem to notice that almost everything around us is, or can be, extremely dangerous. But we're crafty, adaptive little creatures and we have many very smart people carefully ensuring that any danger is sufficiently mitigated. And given the amount of stuff that *just works*, compared to the small percentage that have turned out to be dangerous above and beyond what we anticipated, I think that our creativity has earned some trust.
Yes, because I know of so many people who have been maimed because their bicycle or motorcycle wheels seized up for no apparent reason out of the blue. Wait, actually, I don't even know anyone who has ever had any mechanical parts seize up at random while a vehicle is in motion.
Why do so many people insist on responding to every new idea with "Wow, this could hurt someone" hysteria? Are they like the anti-invention version of Slashdot's grammar police?
No. Lack of security holes are essential for a secure system.
If I write a daemon that prints "Hello World" it does not need to be chrooted to be secure. So should all daemons be. If a network-accessible program is accessing files, especially user-specified files, it needs to be god damned careful about it. End of story.
Chroot is a poor kludge of an attempt to turn a non-secure program into a secure one. I would prefer if it weren't in OpenBSD at all, it gives people a false sense of security. Even a perfect chroot leaves you open to all sorts of other vulnerabilities.
Fire also has the very real potential of being used as a weapon. What a bunch of dipshits we are for loosing (no, that is not a mispelling) that into the world. X-rays do too. Lasers, definitely. Nuclear reactions, don't even get me started. (sarcasm)All of these things clearly shouldn't be allowed because they may become a weapon in the hands of terrorists, completely disregard any other benefits they may provide to our society.(/sarcasm)
This trend to use "omg think of teh childrens!!!!11!!1one!" to suffocate invention and innovation is abhorrent. I cannot even begin to describe how short-sighted and painfully ignorant it is. I am tired of all this pansying. Danger is part of life, get over it.
They produce the movies, it's their call. If they don't want you to be able to do thing 'x' with it, then you can't, it's that simple. If they require you to use a particular piece of hardware to view their movies, then that's that.
I really don't see any moral, ethical, or legal way around the fact. They own the copyright on the movies. If you want to see them, then they have every right to tell you to view them, or not view them, in whatever way they want. You may find it distasteful or discriminatory but it's not your call, it's theirs.
If you don't like the way they're telling you to do things, then god damn, please stick up for yourself and say "Alright, fine, I'm not buying any more of your shit." If you really want things to change, that's the *only* way you're going to do it. Vote With Your Wallet. End of story. That's right: No Matrix for you; No Lord of the Rings for you. You'll live. At the very least cut down on the movies you watch and go watch some live theater, go to hear an orchestra play, support the very things that the movie industry is currently destroying. The only alternative is to accept the way they want to do it. So, make a decision. Do you actually like movies more than you hate the way they're treating you?
I get the impression from your comments that you think this is a minor infraction.
As a matter of fact, it is.
Why? Because he's not rich? That's a stunningly ignorant attitude. How do you expect someone to ever become 'big-name' if they can't afford to pay the bills because people ignore the copyright on their works? There is just so much wrong with that attitude I don't even know where to start.
You can't just twist around the meaning of fairness and say "this guy is more important, so it's not allowed, but this guy is less important, so who cares." The law must be applied equally. We're all equal. There cannot be some people who are "more equal" or the whole damn system implodes.
Copyright protects anyone and everyone who produces a creative work. If the judge decides that the "fair value" of his work is $100, fine. But he deserves absolutely every penny of that $100. Only the reparations scale with damages, his rights do not. As the previous poster said, "They will end up paying fair value for it, plus any lawyer fees."
This is great! I do all my development on my 12" Powerbook G4, since I prefer to code in (and for) Mac OS X. That is all good, but it certainly isn't the fastest thing in the world, and I dread having to compile something large like Tex or Mozilla on it. If I was able to get it to do distributed compiles on the numerous Athlons I've got sitting around, it would be awesome.
Some people, including you, are in the mindset that a laptop is a portable PC, suitable for use on airplanes, and very little else.
You see, there is a completely different sort of person out there who feels they don't need the configurability or blazing-speed performance of a desktop, and much prefer to have a computer that they can bring to work with them, over to a friends, out on vacation, on a business trip, out in the great outdoors doing whatever it is you want to do. Many of these people don't even have or want a desktop PC for which they will need a seperate monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a desk. All of this takes up significant real-estate.
Hence, the desktop-replacement laptops were born, and these people rejoiced. These people still do use their computer for everything you use it for, though, and still accumulate as much junk on their hard drives as you do, in fact generally quite a bit moreso as they don't always have a network connection, so need to keep a copy of everything they may need to use stored locally.
... if you know what you're doing. First of all, there are specialty CD-Rs intended for archival purposes. These will inherently last longer than normal CDs for numerous reasons, assuming the manufacturers are not full of crap. To find these CD-Rs, check a photography store, as photographers tend to have a need for both archival and mass storage thanks to digital cameras. You will likely find some there.
Second, the biggest mistake most people make in CD archival is to write on the CDs with magic marker -- DO NOT DO THIS. The ink will, given several years, leach through the extremely thin plastic on the labelled side of the CD and pollute the optical layer, resulting in a ruined CD. Adhesive stickers, I'm told, are not much better. There are special CD-labelling markers out there, I don't know if they work well as I haven't tried them, but I doubt they're worse than a magic marker. I have found that writing very lightly with a soft, dark graphite pencil works well. If you're very paranoid, you might consider not labelling the CD at all and just be meticulous in returing it to its (properly labelled) case when you're done.
Additionally, store the CDs properly. Somewhere reasonable. Not in direct sunlight. Safely stowed in their jewel cases.
Of course, even doing all this, no one can tell you that your CDs will still work in 100 years. It hasn't even been 100 years since we invented the damn things, how do we know how long they will last? Still, these are steps that should allow your CDs to last for at least as long as a magnetic tape, and with perfect accuracy, as opposed to the slow degradation of audio tapes.
What we really need is something similar to the S.M.A.R.T. technology in harddrives nowadays, to alert you that "Listen, I'm getting close to reaching the limit of my error-correction techniques here. This media probably isn't going to last a whole lot longer. You may want to do something about that." Currently, there's really no way to tell until it's too late.
Actually, while CCDs typically exhibit tremendous noise during long exposures unless attached to a hefty peltier cooler (not that they overheat, they just like to be chilly), Canon's newer, top-end-ish cameras use CMOS sensors, which most astrophotography buffs have found to be very close to noiseless. Not quite film quality yet, but getting there.
My Digital Rebel is basically noiseless regardless of exposure length at ISO 100. There are one or two variously-colored CMOS hotspots a pixel or two wide (similar to a lit pixel on an LCD screen) that begin to show themselves after a minute or two, but other than that, it's crystal clear.
Things like this are the reason I used to enjoy reading Slashdot. Now that they're mostly gone, I don't know why I still do. Glutton for punishment I guess.
Since the firmware is most likely not GPL, and the kernel source is GPL, we've got a GPL violation on our hands.
Correction is on its way:
The GPL offers no restrictions on what code you can put into the GPL'd project. If you were putting the kernel into a non-GPL product, then that's definitely a GPL violation, but not the other way around. So, if you are allowed to put the firmware binary code into the kernel, through fair-use, a license, whatever, then it's fine to do that. If you're not licensed to do it somehow you're (to use the popular vernacular) stealing. This is probably where the dynamic-pulling of the firmware comes in. If you own the device in question, and pull the firmware right out of it, there's no question that's your right as owner of the device.
The problem here is that using binary garbage is against the spirit of the GPL. I could make a GPL'd version of a short C program that reads in a bunch of opcodes from a large array and executes them, resulting in a full-featured (browser/word processor/database/widget/whatever). Is this program open-source? Not really, but technically since it is under the GPL, Debian would allow it. They're now changing that position, and saying that this does not in fact count as open-source software, and they do not want it in their distribution.
Doesn't really seem like that big of a deal, unless I'm missing something?
Freedom never really seems like a big deal. I constantly hear people berating RMS, but contrary to popular belief, there is a purpose behind the things he does and says. Same with the Debian project. I agree it is probably going to be frustrating and stupid in the short term. But most of these strange, philosophical sort of decisions are all about long term goals and this one is no exception.
Slashdot Mirror
You may find it perfectly acceptable now, but what about if they turn around and start doing the same thing to us? I, for one, don't even find it acceptable as a one-way thing. People in Asian countries have as much right to email me as anyone else. Isolationist tactics will destroy the internet as we know it, and negate much of the good that it has done and is doing around the world. This is not the path we want to go down. It's a poor solution, and it's certainly not the right solution.
Then neither am I. I had the priviledge of seeing Eben Moglen speak during OSConf at University of Toronto, and after that display, I feel it's safe to say that the FSF does not need any legal advice from the outside, much less IANALs from Slashdot getting the issue hopelessly confused.
Other lawyers who are ignorant of the law, seem to irritate him somewhat. I don't blame him. But given that tidbit of knowledge, just imagine how he feels about the garbage SCO is throwing around.
I am sure that if it has not done so already, the FSF will respond decisively in an ethical and legal manner, and certainly nothing substantial will ever come of SCO's whining.
There's just something that seems fundamentally wrong about connecting to a global network and then blacklisting half of it.
It's like buying Lucky Charms cereal, then filtering out all the marshmallows and throwing them in the garbage because they're not healthy. Very true, but if that's how you feel, why bother buying Lucky Charms?
Surely it would be more effective to implement challenge-response, or simply boycott email in favour of IM or a secure messageboard/contact form, or whatever you prefer. The problem is with email, not with Asia.
Besides, I think this study is bogus. All the studies I've previously seen pointed squarely at the USA as the primary source of spam. Empirical evidence from my own email box bears this out. Most of the spam I receive tends to come from residential cable modem/DSL lines in various countries, predominantly the states. I suspect that these are either virus-hijacked boxes, or people being paid to send spam through their home connection (ie, the ads placed on telephone polls: "Have an internet connection at home? Make up to $4,000/month with no effort required! Call now!")
I know they have always been against the code of conduct. So it has been in every MMORPG. It's a legal CYA thing, and a moral objection on the part of the companies. It strikes me as similar to the way most companies approach opensource. They come into it already having made the decision that they want to retain exclusive control over their things, and they see nothing remotely attractive about the complete antithesis of that.
You didn't, however, address my point. If scumbags are abusing their housing system, then some far more direct alternatives should've been the first things they considered. The obvious solution is to limit the number of houses that a single account can buy in a week/month/year. Another solution would be to discourage bots by making the starting price absolutely obscene, and lower it as time goes on if no one buys it. Brokers get much much poorer much much quicker if they still insist on snagging the house at any cost. If you're desperate, you'll pay for it. Much like the real-life real estate market works.
Alternately, they could take the social-solution-to-a-social-problem approach and make buying houses for the sole purpose of selling them to another player against the code of conduct, and punish the brokers with expulsion from the game. I know that's not Turbine's style (they have always taken a very light-touch, mostly hands-off approach to managing the game) but it's often a better way of dealing with problems than attempting to solve a social problem with a technological solution.
That alone makes it alright to risk any number of animals to save the life of one human.
Maybe in your opinion, but that is very, very far from being considered a universal truth of any sort. Certainly not all of us have such a high opinion of humans. If I had to choose between saving the life of a cat or my boss, sentient or not guess which I would choose? And I'd feel it was at least as morally neutral as choosing one human over another to save.
Most animals with moderately sized brains have the ability to learn. This at least qualifies them as intelligent, and therefore equal, in my books. And some are not more equal than others. Sentient is a rather meaningless term as far as I'm concerned, and should not be used to decide whether a creature deserves to live or die any more than the same choice should be made based on distinctions such as whether it has feathers or fur, or is green or pink, or is large or small.
I don't argue that sometimes animal testing is needed for the good of all, but it should be decided based on careful consideration of the issues and types of suffering involved, rather than a blanket "moral right".
cut it non-sentient species just don't rate as highly as sentient species.
I'm just glad there are plenty of people who don't think that way.
Sounds like a problem with the design of the house-buying system, not a problem with eBay sales. This is the kind of misguided band-aid solution that made me give up Asheron's Call in the first place. "Oh no, everyone is trying to get GSA instead of checking out the pointless new greaves we added in this update! There's only one way to fix this: Let's make GSA suck so they don't want it anymore!"
"One person's experience" does not constitute a habit.
I'm curious, if more people also had similar serious problems, then does it become a habit? If not, what does it take?
I am pretty sure you are wrong. A buffer overrun is a way of putting data PAST the end of your variable (which would be marked NX in your hypothetical scenario) into an about-to-be-executed chunk memory.
By definition, this about-to-be-executed memory has to NOT be marked NX, or the program could not execute its jump, and would have no way of meandering its way out of the function and back up the stack.
NX may be useful, but it won't end buffer overruns. There are only really two ways to do that: strn* or a better programming language.
There are no laws saying MS can't jack up their prices, but there are laws saying MS can't be a monopoly.
Um, it's quite the opposite actually. Microsoft is free to be as much of a monopoly as it wants. If its products are that good that everyone wants to use them, hurrah for Microsoft. It becomes against the law when the monopoly uses its position of power to lock-in consumers, lock-out competitors, dump product below cost to destroy competitors, jack up prices to ridiculous levels while no competition is in sight and various other underhanded tactics often used by Microsoft. The Sherman Anti-trust Act is called 'Anti-trust' for a reason. A monopoly has complete control over its market. Rather than simply disallowing this from happening when it might've happened for a good reason (See: Google) instead the public trusts the monopoly to behave responsibly. When that trust is violated, that's when they need to be nailed by the law.
If it were just some random guy providing this service, I'd agree with you. However, it's not some random guy, it's being funded by a government agency. And depending on how socialist your government is (rather a lot, in the UK) they may very well have a duty to provide you, the citizens, with free beer. Or more to the point, provide you with free information -- especially in the context of education and university research.
Because, while the people with PDF files, OpenOffice presentations, and such were mostly amenable to either converting them to PowerPoint, or simply using their own computers, the majority of the presenters could not/would not use anything other than PowerPoint.
Remember that people from all walks of open-source life were at this conference, including Microsoft's manager of their Shared Source initiative, government officials, non-technical people, even people who were basically arguing against F/OSS.
Still, the irony did not go unnoticed. I heard all sorts of people mentioning it with varying levels of amusement.
Of course, it seems relevant to note that without exception, the very best speakers did not use any presentation software at all. Some of them, Dr. Moglen included, didn't even have notes.
Actually, I work as a lead programmer for an international petroleum engineering/consulting company. So when it comes to petroleum products I do actually have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about, at least relative to most Slashdotters. I know a lot of numbers for Propane off the top of my head, so I'll stick to that primarily. Butane is very similar in properties to Propane though, so it shouldn't make much difference.
The stuff they wanted to use for refrigerants is not the same stuff you light up a cigar, or BBQ on a grill with.
I guarantee it is the same stuff, although it's kept in compressed or liquid form, by the sound of it.
Both of those include significant amounts of moisture to prevent a large explosion.
I've never heard of this. The only additive in commercially-available propane and butane is the mercaptans used to make it smell. The only thing that I can imagine adding moisture would do is reduce the effectiveness of the mercaptans, which are actually quite notorious for being suppressed by moisture.
Butane/propane-based refrigerants if used in a conventional single family refrigerator appliance would have enough explosive gas to not only take out your house, but both of your neighbors as well.
If you happened to get this propane into a healthy mix with oxygen and then light it, yes, it can be very explosive, but realistically that isn't quite as easy as it sounds. If it was, you would hear much more often about trailerparks and campgrounds completely obliterating themselves, considering each resident usually has at least 1 propane tank and usually several. Propane has a fairly narrow flammability range. With a mix of anything less than about 2.5% propane to air, there isn't enough fuel and any attempt at ignition starves. Any more than 10% propane, though, and it will quickly suffocate itself of air, preventing further ignition. This is the same reason real cars don't explode when they burn, unlike Hollywood's take on the concept.
Basically, the only way for a large-scale explosion to occur is for the propane gas to leak into the house, slowly propagating and mixing with the air, then being ignited by a spark while the concentration is in its flammable range. Keep in mind this has to be done without anyone noticing the stink of mercaptans, which are quite noticable at concentrations of around 0.5% and higher. So, basically, the only way for the gas to reach the 2.5% lower limit without someone noticing, is if no one is home. This is basically identical to the process that leads to the relatively few natural gas explosions (which are often fed by a shattered pipeline after the explosion, for added fun and destruction)
We have already been managing risks just like this sucessfully for a long time now, with few problems. That's what really irks me about this. Most of the fear-mongering that goes on doesn't seem to notice that almost everything around us is, or can be, extremely dangerous. But we're crafty, adaptive little creatures and we have many very smart people carefully ensuring that any danger is sufficiently mitigated. And given the amount of stuff that *just works*, compared to the small percentage that have turned out to be dangerous above and beyond what we anticipated, I think that our creativity has earned some trust.
Yes, because I know of so many people who have been maimed because their bicycle or motorcycle wheels seized up for no apparent reason out of the blue. Wait, actually, I don't even know anyone who has ever had any mechanical parts seize up at random while a vehicle is in motion.
Why do so many people insist on responding to every new idea with "Wow, this could hurt someone" hysteria? Are they like the anti-invention version of Slashdot's grammar police?
No. Lack of security holes are essential for a secure system.
If I write a daemon that prints "Hello World" it does not need to be chrooted to be secure. So should all daemons be. If a network-accessible program is accessing files, especially user-specified files, it needs to be god damned careful about it. End of story.
Chroot is a poor kludge of an attempt to turn a non-secure program into a secure one. I would prefer if it weren't in OpenBSD at all, it gives people a false sense of security. Even a perfect chroot leaves you open to all sorts of other vulnerabilities.
Fire also has the very real potential of being used as a weapon. What a bunch of dipshits we are for loosing (no, that is not a mispelling) that into the world. X-rays do too. Lasers, definitely. Nuclear reactions, don't even get me started. (sarcasm)All of these things clearly shouldn't be allowed because they may become a weapon in the hands of terrorists, completely disregard any other benefits they may provide to our society.(/sarcasm)
This trend to use "omg think of teh childrens!!!!11!!1one!" to suffocate invention and innovation is abhorrent. I cannot even begin to describe how short-sighted and painfully ignorant it is. I am tired of all this pansying. Danger is part of life, get over it.
They produce the movies, it's their call. If they don't want you to be able to do thing 'x' with it, then you can't, it's that simple. If they require you to use a particular piece of hardware to view their movies, then that's that.
I really don't see any moral, ethical, or legal way around the fact. They own the copyright on the movies. If you want to see them, then they have every right to tell you to view them, or not view them, in whatever way they want. You may find it distasteful or discriminatory but it's not your call, it's theirs.
If you don't like the way they're telling you to do things, then god damn, please stick up for yourself and say "Alright, fine, I'm not buying any more of your shit." If you really want things to change, that's the *only* way you're going to do it. Vote With Your Wallet. End of story. That's right: No Matrix for you; No Lord of the Rings for you. You'll live. At the very least cut down on the movies you watch and go watch some live theater, go to hear an orchestra play, support the very things that the movie industry is currently destroying. The only alternative is to accept the way they want to do it. So, make a decision. Do you actually like movies more than you hate the way they're treating you?
I get the impression from your comments that you think this is a minor infraction.
As a matter of fact, it is.
Why? Because he's not rich? That's a stunningly ignorant attitude. How do you expect someone to ever become 'big-name' if they can't afford to pay the bills because people ignore the copyright on their works? There is just so much wrong with that attitude I don't even know where to start.
You can't just twist around the meaning of fairness and say "this guy is more important, so it's not allowed, but this guy is less important, so who cares." The law must be applied equally. We're all equal. There cannot be some people who are "more equal" or the whole damn system implodes.
Copyright protects anyone and everyone who produces a creative work. If the judge decides that the "fair value" of his work is $100, fine. But he deserves absolutely every penny of that $100. Only the reparations scale with damages, his rights do not. As the previous poster said, "They will end up paying fair value for it, plus any lawyer fees."
This is great! I do all my development on my 12" Powerbook G4, since I prefer to code in (and for) Mac OS X. That is all good, but it certainly isn't the fastest thing in the world, and I dread having to compile something large like Tex or Mozilla on it. If I was able to get it to do distributed compiles on the numerous Athlons I've got sitting around, it would be awesome.
Some people, including you, are in the mindset that a laptop is a portable PC, suitable for use on airplanes, and very little else.
You see, there is a completely different sort of person out there who feels they don't need the configurability or blazing-speed performance of a desktop, and much prefer to have a computer that they can bring to work with them, over to a friends, out on vacation, on a business trip, out in the great outdoors doing whatever it is you want to do. Many of these people don't even have or want a desktop PC for which they will need a seperate monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a desk. All of this takes up significant real-estate.
Hence, the desktop-replacement laptops were born, and these people rejoiced. These people still do use their computer for everything you use it for, though, and still accumulate as much junk on their hard drives as you do, in fact generally quite a bit moreso as they don't always have a network connection, so need to keep a copy of everything they may need to use stored locally.
... if you know what you're doing. First of all, there are specialty CD-Rs intended for archival purposes. These will inherently last longer than normal CDs for numerous reasons, assuming the manufacturers are not full of crap. To find these CD-Rs, check a photography store, as photographers tend to have a need for both archival and mass storage thanks to digital cameras. You will likely find some there.
Second, the biggest mistake most people make in CD archival is to write on the CDs with magic marker -- DO NOT DO THIS. The ink will, given several years, leach through the extremely thin plastic on the labelled side of the CD and pollute the optical layer, resulting in a ruined CD. Adhesive stickers, I'm told, are not much better. There are special CD-labelling markers out there, I don't know if they work well as I haven't tried them, but I doubt they're worse than a magic marker. I have found that writing very lightly with a soft, dark graphite pencil works well. If you're very paranoid, you might consider not labelling the CD at all and just be meticulous in returing it to its (properly labelled) case when you're done.
Additionally, store the CDs properly. Somewhere reasonable. Not in direct sunlight. Safely stowed in their jewel cases.
Of course, even doing all this, no one can tell you that your CDs will still work in 100 years. It hasn't even been 100 years since we invented the damn things, how do we know how long they will last? Still, these are steps that should allow your CDs to last for at least as long as a magnetic tape, and with perfect accuracy, as opposed to the slow degradation of audio tapes.
What we really need is something similar to the S.M.A.R.T. technology in harddrives nowadays, to alert you that "Listen, I'm getting close to reaching the limit of my error-correction techniques here. This media probably isn't going to last a whole lot longer. You may want to do something about that." Currently, there's really no way to tell until it's too late.
Actually, while CCDs typically exhibit tremendous noise during long exposures unless attached to a hefty peltier cooler (not that they overheat, they just like to be chilly), Canon's newer, top-end-ish cameras use CMOS sensors, which most astrophotography buffs have found to be very close to noiseless. Not quite film quality yet, but getting there.
My Digital Rebel is basically noiseless regardless of exposure length at ISO 100. There are one or two variously-colored CMOS hotspots a pixel or two wide (similar to a lit pixel on an LCD screen) that begin to show themselves after a minute or two, but other than that, it's crystal clear.
Things like this are the reason I used to enjoy reading Slashdot. Now that they're mostly gone, I don't know why I still do. Glutton for punishment I guess.
Since the firmware is most likely not GPL, and the kernel source is GPL, we've got a GPL violation on our hands.
Correction is on its way:
The GPL offers no restrictions on what code you can put into the GPL'd project. If you were putting the kernel into a non-GPL product, then that's definitely a GPL violation, but not the other way around. So, if you are allowed to put the firmware binary code into the kernel, through fair-use, a license, whatever, then it's fine to do that. If you're not licensed to do it somehow you're (to use the popular vernacular) stealing. This is probably where the dynamic-pulling of the firmware comes in. If you own the device in question, and pull the firmware right out of it, there's no question that's your right as owner of the device.
The problem here is that using binary garbage is against the spirit of the GPL. I could make a GPL'd version of a short C program that reads in a bunch of opcodes from a large array and executes them, resulting in a full-featured (browser/word processor/database/widget/whatever). Is this program open-source? Not really, but technically since it is under the GPL, Debian would allow it. They're now changing that position, and saying that this does not in fact count as open-source software, and they do not want it in their distribution.
Doesn't really seem like that big of a deal, unless I'm missing something?
Freedom never really seems like a big deal. I constantly hear people berating RMS, but contrary to popular belief, there is a purpose behind the things he does and says. Same with the Debian project. I agree it is probably going to be frustrating and stupid in the short term. But most of these strange, philosophical sort of decisions are all about long term goals and this one is no exception.
Uh, I'm making an mp3 copy so I can listen to my music without carting all my CDs around. Why is this stealing, all of a sudden?
Perhaps you're a broke college student, and your only computer is a laptop with a broken CD-drive.
Been there, done that.