I too would suspect friends of employees. Not that they are bad people or anything, but I've seen more varieties of friend-assisted price-changing scams in the meatspace retail than online variations. Of course, that's because there are only two ways to enable this online; one is backdooring, and the other is to be a clueless idiot loozer programmer.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No, we all understand perfectly that research has demonstrated quadruple ROT13 is no more effective than double ROT13, which is why double ROT13 is in such widespread use.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
You are absolutely right. But you expressed your opinion in a calm, objective, rational, even-handed manner, so you won't get any karma for that %-P
A more two-fisted approach might be to note that yes, big-ass commercial databases (Oracle) have tons of features that you really, really need sometimes. That being said, the vast majority of sites don't need it. Sometimes, the real database professionals pipe up and see things all from their perspective. Fact is, I can do something the size of/. without really encountering a strong need for real database normalization.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Well, if you know that they not only surf blowjob-related pages, but also interracial hardcore pages, you can recommend the oral "services" of a "talented" immigrant from your favorite ex-commie or capitalist dictatorship nation.
And don't you think your wife wouldn't pay for that info, too (if you give me a twenty, I'll tell you what she paid for it).
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right, it's not trivial. It works best if you put bugs into pages where the user enters the email address and you pass it through a query string, and you collect other info too, then you buy a major consumer marketing database named after a simple calculating tool, and turn around and make all your claims about aggregate information only into a big fat steaming load of shit.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I have no idea what you are talking about. There's no problem changing DNS servers via Register.com. I've done it several times.
With netsol on the other hand, I've had them change data from the forms incorrectly, have some accounts fucked so I have to use a web interface which was broken for weeks, and had to wait on hold for 40 minutes on a long distance phone call to talk with a clueless idiot who denied the website had been down and didn't actually fix my problem, forcing me to call back again. Those people aren't qualified to run a taxicab.
You will get no reliability from them.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Oh, and thanks for proving the real difficulty in a PKI infrastructure and why email is still sent in cleartext; bad attitudes by cryptophiles.
There are real difficulties in creating a way to store, validate, and exchange keys. There appear to be insurmountable ones, ironically, in convincing those who are into crypto that anything less that "safe enough to hide from god" is even worth doing. So as long as there is a one-in-a-trillion chance of cracking a key during its useful lifetime, you subvert any attempt to get *some* use out of cryptography. You posture like an advocate, but the views you present are more suitable to those of an opponent. You say we need better crypto, but you are advocating the use of plaintext.
Finally, you top it off by stating that the best that can be said is that it hasn't been cracked yet. Well, woop-de-do. Evolution is still a theory, and you can never "prove" anything to a closed mind.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Production, Recording, equipment, marketing, distribution, pre-established networking, sales, investment return, and, most importantly, covering for albums that did not sell enough to break even. (which is most of them)
Translation for the uninitiated:
Subsidizing executive coke habits; making the band pay for your employees while you count the costs against your profits; Pentagon-worthy purchases of stuff that does the same crap as much cheaper stuff, but comes with many more knobs; kickbacks, bribes, payola, and limos for bands to hide the fact that they're getting robbed; counting profits as losses and selling stock below catalogue price through secret distribution channels in order to lower official sales counts for uppity artists who get paid more than 2% of the profits; selling off overstock out the back door while pretending you burned it and counting income from stuff that just sits there making money as losses; flim-flam artists and lawyers to convince naive kids that you lost money on them when you didn't..
Etc, etc.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Re-read the comment you replied to; it's not a matter of ethics. With the BSD-style license, a commercial developer who decides to fork has barred themselves from enjoying future developments in the public code, unless they want to go to the trouble of maintaining a fork.
For an embedded device, this _could_ cause problems anyway, but it's only likely to do so if it _should_; someone creates a hardware ogg player with it's own encoder and subtly different format. They can use the stuff everyone else encodes, but stuff encoded with their software can't play on other people's players. But suppose that development of the main codebase continues; it's not too hard for the developers to make improvements that cut out the forked version, while playing nice with the manufacturers of Ogg player 2, who are contributing code back.
This kind of code fu keeps microsoft in the black, but it can also keep code in the open.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Didja ever notice that in years when the music industry is firmly "in control" via their hacks, the music stinks, and when the music is good, when a band is great, or when a new musical style or movement breaks out, it's inevitably from people outside the industry who do it for their own reasons, and who would (and usually do) become well known without any help from the industry whatsoever?
So if the music industry died, who would notice? Excepting maybe 12yo girls and gay men who find bland pop music from teenagers titillating, and a few of the industry's coke dealers, no one would mind at all.
For the 10 guys who make their living writing songs for other people, I'm sure they can find work compiling and composing soundtracks.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
If the record companies were ever going to create legal ways to download music (all of their catalogue, or most of it - not just two sample songs), I might agree with you. But they are under the delusion that they can create "secure" download formats. Their definition of secure (which, to be fair, is a necessary consequence of "securing" technologies) eliminates all fair use, relies on proprietary formats, and generally screws the customer in every way imaginable. So let them shut the hell up and go back to their usual business of fucking bands up the ass.
The net result is that there will be no alternative to Napster until something of Freenet's strength becomes really practical and widely used. Until then its your loss, and theirs.
Someday they will figure out that, like video releases of films, letting the cat out of the bag will provide a valuable second market for music. But they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that decision that is as inevitable as it is profitable. And before that happens, they will waste a billion dollars smoking that "secure format" crack, while consumers just say, "No thanks, I don't need that stuff to be cool."
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No, you can't. It's not the same web anymore. And not only that, but it's not like anyone was actually looking for prior art; academic computing journals would never discuss an "invention" so trivial.
Yes, trivial. I haven't even read the patent filing, and even from here I can see that I could design such a system in five minutes, and one good week of programming would give me the same "invention" if I were starting from complete scratch. This so-called innovation is to put the session ID before the question mark in the URL so it's easier to keep a temporary copy on disk. BFD.
I would have to laugh at anyone who calls that an innovation, except that I'd see the better of it and just give a swift kick in the ass with no explanation.
Ten bucks says not even the so-called inventors can explain why anyone should care; this is just the usual patent-as-anti-competetive weapon horseshit. I defy anyone to explain why such a trivial technique is deserving of SEVENTEEN YEARS of freedom from competition. The whole point of the patent is to encourage innovation; patents like these STIFLE innovation and bring us that much closer to an economy where permission to conduct business of any sort must be granted, not assumed.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
In a similar move, Microsoft and Intel both made investments in Avid, the maker of the market-leader for video editing software. Sure enough, a while later, Avid declared that they were moving from Mac to NT. They deployed aggressive sales tactics to get people to make the switch. Then, when the people who actually use the software rebelled, they ended up largely dumping the move, stranding the poor fools who actually bought Avid for NT (which, incidentally, never worked as advertised).
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Before you conclude "bull" on the phone outlet (it's a major issue for me - I do my own wiring and I don't have an afternoon to blow on that kind of bull), you ought to check the sales figures for Tivo. Tivo is a great product. People love it. But for some reason, they aren't buying it.
Meanwhile, the company just keeps drifting further and further from serving their customers.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
This doesn't always happen. I managed to stall for about 6 months with this, but they caught up. I mostly kept refusing until the CEO started to put direct pressure on. Of course, since they didn't ask me to sign these agreements until long after I was hired, they weren't legal anyway. So I signed them, noting that they were worthless.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I don't know what justifies "copyright is such a fundamental part of american society." It's not, mostly because no one actually thinks about it - or wants to.
There's not much point in saying "information wants to be free." The hard-ass practical truth is that it's going to be. Copyright is going to be fundamentally changed and society will adjust, and move on. People will still make a living from their minds, and from their skills. It will just be damn hard to do something once and keep making a living off that forever. Not like working for a living is going to kill anyone.
You can disagree with me, but the fundamental effect of technology on copyright - once you realize what it takes to make protection shcemes really work - means there is only one choice, and that is complete and utter control of the citizenry. And you know what? It won't work. People just won't buy it.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
If welfare state is bad, then why is Microsoft asking for a little corporate welfare here? Protection from the state! Hey, now we know where the "red" in Redmond is!
This is obviously part of Microsoft's lame attempts to get more politically savvy. This guy is actually trying to schmooze and cozy up to the Beltway crowd; "Hey, that 'free' stuff, a little pinko, don't you think?" Meanwhile it comes off so badly he'll wish he shut up by the time this is over.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
There may be a flood, and probably some connection difficulties as a result, but the likely result is fragmentation in a positive way; more specialty servers and networks. You'll find that certain OpenNaps cater to certain musical tastes, and this will allow it to grow in a manageable way.
My favorite thing about Napster at present, though, is the amazing music I've been exposed to that I would NEVER otherwise hear. There is no chance of me walking into an Indian music store or salsa shop and knowing what to buy. Thanks to Napster, I can check it out, then go in and buy when I know what stuff is good. The RIAA has their heads planted firmly in their anuses pretending that this isn't a 10,000-fold improvement over hearing about the Gypsy Kings on Z-Shit-hundred and buying that. It just doesn't favor their payola distribution model, who cares, fuck them.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
They were dragged kicking and screaming into greater profits that time, and this time will be no different, unless you prefer a police state.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I too would suspect friends of employees. Not that they are bad people or anything, but I've seen more varieties of friend-assisted price-changing scams in the meatspace retail than online variations. Of course, that's because there are only two ways to enable this online; one is backdooring, and the other is to be a clueless idiot loozer programmer.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
No, we all understand perfectly that research has demonstrated quadruple ROT13 is no more effective than double ROT13, which is why double ROT13 is in such widespread use.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
That one doesn't even go to 2.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
A more two-fisted approach might be to note that yes, big-ass commercial databases (Oracle) have tons of features that you really, really need sometimes. That being said, the vast majority of sites don't need it. Sometimes, the real database professionals pipe up and see things all from their perspective. Fact is, I can do something the size of /. without really encountering a strong need for real database normalization.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
And don't you think your wife wouldn't pay for that info, too (if you give me a twenty, I'll tell you what she paid for it).
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right, it's not trivial. It works best if you put bugs into pages where the user enters the email address and you pass it through a query string, and you collect other info too, then you buy a major consumer marketing database named after a simple calculating tool, and turn around and make all your claims about aggregate information only into a big fat steaming load of shit.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I lost 50 pounds!!! Ask me how. Sucker.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
With netsol on the other hand, I've had them change data from the forms incorrectly, have some accounts fucked so I have to use a web interface which was broken for weeks, and had to wait on hold for 40 minutes on a long distance phone call to talk with a clueless idiot who denied the website had been down and didn't actually fix my problem, forcing me to call back again. Those people aren't qualified to run a taxicab.
You will get no reliability from them.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
#999999
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
There are real difficulties in creating a way to store, validate, and exchange keys. There appear to be insurmountable ones, ironically, in convincing those who are into crypto that anything less that "safe enough to hide from god" is even worth doing. So as long as there is a one-in-a-trillion chance of cracking a key during its useful lifetime, you subvert any attempt to get *some* use out of cryptography. You posture like an advocate, but the views you present are more suitable to those of an opponent. You say we need better crypto, but you are advocating the use of plaintext.
Finally, you top it off by stating that the best that can be said is that it hasn't been cracked yet. Well, woop-de-do. Evolution is still a theory, and you can never "prove" anything to a closed mind.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Subsidizing executive coke habits; making the band pay for your employees while you count the costs against your profits; Pentagon-worthy purchases of stuff that does the same crap as much cheaper stuff, but comes with many more knobs; kickbacks, bribes, payola, and limos for bands to hide the fact that they're getting robbed; counting profits as losses and selling stock below catalogue price through secret distribution channels in order to lower official sales counts for uppity artists who get paid more than 2% of the profits; selling off overstock out the back door while pretending you burned it and counting income from stuff that just sits there making money as losses; flim-flam artists and lawyers to convince naive kids that you lost money on them when you didn't..
Etc, etc.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
For an embedded device, this _could_ cause problems anyway, but it's only likely to do so if it _should_; someone creates a hardware ogg player with it's own encoder and subtly different format. They can use the stuff everyone else encodes, but stuff encoded with their software can't play on other people's players. But suppose that development of the main codebase continues; it's not too hard for the developers to make improvements that cut out the forked version, while playing nice with the manufacturers of Ogg player 2, who are contributing code back.
This kind of code fu keeps microsoft in the black, but it can also keep code in the open.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
So if the music industry died, who would notice? Excepting maybe 12yo girls and gay men who find bland pop music from teenagers titillating, and a few of the industry's coke dealers, no one would mind at all.
For the 10 guys who make their living writing songs for other people, I'm sure they can find work compiling and composing soundtracks.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
The net result is that there will be no alternative to Napster until something of Freenet's strength becomes really practical and widely used. Until then its your loss, and theirs.
Someday they will figure out that, like video releases of films, letting the cat out of the bag will provide a valuable second market for music. But they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that decision that is as inevitable as it is profitable. And before that happens, they will waste a billion dollars smoking that "secure format" crack, while consumers just say, "No thanks, I don't need that stuff to be cool."
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Yes, trivial. I haven't even read the patent filing, and even from here I can see that I could design such a system in five minutes, and one good week of programming would give me the same "invention" if I were starting from complete scratch. This so-called innovation is to put the session ID before the question mark in the URL so it's easier to keep a temporary copy on disk. BFD.
I would have to laugh at anyone who calls that an innovation, except that I'd see the better of it and just give a swift kick in the ass with no explanation.
Ten bucks says not even the so-called inventors can explain why anyone should care; this is just the usual patent-as-anti-competetive weapon horseshit. I defy anyone to explain why such a trivial technique is deserving of SEVENTEEN YEARS of freedom from competition. The whole point of the patent is to encourage innovation; patents like these STIFLE innovation and bring us that much closer to an economy where permission to conduct business of any sort must be granted, not assumed.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
If this would just knock out cell phones you could probably sell a million of them.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
In a similar move, Microsoft and Intel both made investments in Avid, the maker of the market-leader for video editing software. Sure enough, a while later, Avid declared that they were moving from Mac to NT. They deployed aggressive sales tactics to get people to make the switch. Then, when the people who actually use the software rebelled, they ended up largely dumping the move, stranding the poor fools who actually bought Avid for NT (which, incidentally, never worked as advertised).
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Meanwhile, the company just keeps drifting further and further from serving their customers.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Um... I think that mechanism is called "selling things." And it works quite well, even without government-created monopolies (patents).
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
This doesn't always happen. I managed to stall for about 6 months with this, but they caught up. I mostly kept refusing until the CEO started to put direct pressure on. Of course, since they didn't ask me to sign these agreements until long after I was hired, they weren't legal anyway. So I signed them, noting that they were worthless.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
In any case, let's hear it for the tree.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
There's not much point in saying "information wants to be free." The hard-ass practical truth is that it's going to be. Copyright is going to be fundamentally changed and society will adjust, and move on. People will still make a living from their minds, and from their skills. It will just be damn hard to do something once and keep making a living off that forever. Not like working for a living is going to kill anyone.
You can disagree with me, but the fundamental effect of technology on copyright - once you realize what it takes to make protection shcemes really work - means there is only one choice, and that is complete and utter control of the citizenry. And you know what? It won't work. People just won't buy it.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
This is obviously part of Microsoft's lame attempts to get more politically savvy. This guy is actually trying to schmooze and cozy up to the Beltway crowd; "Hey, that 'free' stuff, a little pinko, don't you think?" Meanwhile it comes off so badly he'll wish he shut up by the time this is over.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
My favorite thing about Napster at present, though, is the amazing music I've been exposed to that I would NEVER otherwise hear. There is no chance of me walking into an Indian music store or salsa shop and knowing what to buy. Thanks to Napster, I can check it out, then go in and buy when I know what stuff is good. The RIAA has their heads planted firmly in their anuses pretending that this isn't a 10,000-fold improvement over hearing about the Gypsy Kings on Z-Shit-hundred and buying that. It just doesn't favor their payola distribution model, who cares, fuck them.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.