Is this little traffic light on your router blinking 24/7?:)
Mine has been blinking 24/7 for years, since the first IIS worm. Tcpdump suggests the reason: even if your computer isn't part of a botnet, if you're on a cable modem you can expect to be continually swamped by arp requests as a side effect of other bots' subnet scans.
This "putting a male torso texture on a female torso model" should make it clear that nearly *any* content can be sliced and diced until it's offensive to someone.
From Jack Thompson's July 2005 "Open Letter to the Members of the Entertainment Software Association", for example:
It has been my privilege, as a lifelong Republican, to provide / misogyny and violence against women/. I am / a thug who demonizes / your industry.
My fervent prayer as a Christian is / Lord, give me more / pornography and violence.
I am happy to help / when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks / "loosely educated" about the United States Constitution Today, United States Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton / embarrasses each and every one of you/. Bullying is not real leadership.
Parents just have to be better parents. / Instead of acting like a responsible adult by trying to / be better parents / I, as a lifelong Republican, am going to / engage in ad hominem jihads / This is not courage. This is cowardice. It is the cowardice that all bullies display.
---
This is fun, but not quite "wildfire meme" material. If someone with a little more time wanted to start modding the audio/video of Thompson's TV interviews, on the other hand...
How many of us would think 'well, its just nothing, let me get 5-10 songs tonight' if the price per song was $5 or $10 ?
For one or two bands, I would. Lower that to $2 per song and I'll go up to 5 or 6 bands.
or would any of us get a 'cheaper' song because the song we wanted was priced much higher ?
I do, all the time. For $20 a CD had better be something I'm sure I'll love. For $10 I'll buy an album from someone who's played something I liked on the radio. For $5 I'll take a chance based on just word of mouth. Am I that abnormal, because I base my purchasing decisions on both price and expected value?
Of course, I'm not too sympathetic with the music industry here. They're supposed to be publishers, and if they'd been smart enough to start publishing over the internet ten years ago, Apple would be in no position to start dictating terms now. The labels would just undercut iTunes for any songs they wanted to price at less than $1, and they'd refuse to put on iTunes any songs they wanted to price at more than $1.
But they didn't want to do their jobs (Gosh, isn't the internet that place with all the pirates? We'd better stay away from that!) and now they're mad that they're being ordered around by a company who did their jobs for them. How sad! If the record companies get smart, they'll just be silently grateful that Apple hasn't started dealing with bands directly and cutting the less competent middlemen out altogether.
Not to sound like a complete radical, but why don't we ask ourselves why the government is entitled to step in and get 'a piece' of a private transaction between two people to begin with?
At the root, it's because any government that didn't take a cut from it's citizens couldn't compete with governments that did. As a citizen of the Anarchist Dictatorship of RoyStgnr, for example, you enjoy a 0% sales tax, 0% income tax, 0% gift tax, and 0% capital gains tax... but unfortunately that leaves Our Benevolent Dictator with no way to afford to protect you against those illegitimate tax collectors from other governments who don't recognize our sovereignty. There's lots of them, and their tax revenue can pay for some pretty sweet jails and guns.
It was a biting, harsh criticism of Bush, to his face, in front of the nation's journalism establishment.
Maybe it's being ignored because it was also a biting, harsh criticism of that journalism establishment?
"Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"
That "glass half full/half empty" flub wasn't just a script misreading, the man looked nervous. I'd swear he was afraid that someone would cut his mike before he got to the good lines.
Big, brassy, get-put-on-a-no-fly-list, cajones.
Naah, that would be a PR nightmare for the White House. I wouldn't say anything embarrassing over the phone if I were Colbert, though. Those things have a way of leaking out.
This is for day/night cycles, not month to month
on
Store Your Own Juice
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· Score: 1
You couldn't save very much money if you had to hold on to each $0.10 kilowatt hour for weeks before you could discharge it to save $0.20. Fortunately most electric company prices change by a factor of two every day, predictably, since supplying additional peak capacity during high-demand hours is much more expensive than providing a constant base power load 24/7.
Of course, designing these battery packs for home and business users is a risky business. If battery technology is too expensive or inefficient, it's more economical to just pay for the power company's peak rates, and you won't get any customers. If battery technology gets too cheap and efficient, the power companies are themselves going to start replacing peak capacity with more base capacity plus batteries, so their peak prices will fall until home user batteries become uneconomical, and (except for people worried about blackouts) you won't get any customers.
"World War II" was complete drivel and a pointless sequel to that fair-to-middling book called, imaginatively enough, "World War I". Can't remember who wrote it but, with the flatness of the plot and characters, it was probably Turtledove.
It was Turtledove, but you forgot the invading Space Lizard Empire.
(To non-Turtledove fans: no, I'm not kidding)
(Also: Turtledove's characters and plots are often complex and enthralling - if they seem flat, it's probably because you've been distracted by the one or two Olympian feats of suspension of disbelief that many of his books require... such as the invading Space Lizard Empire. Fair enough.)
Their primary services work fine on low-bandwidth and high latency connections, so an extortionist ISP would have to threaten to cut their customers off from Google entirely.
If an ISP tried extortion, Google could afford to pay, because they're an established company with lots of cash, not a struggling startup anymore.
If an ISP tried extortion, Google could afford to not pay, because they're an established company with a household name, and many people would go back to dialup before they'd lose access to Google search and GMail.
Squint as hard as you can and you might see "vested interests", but the real threat of a crippled (why call it tiered, except to spin the discussion the way the telcos want?) internet isn't to Google, it's to the next Google. If anything, Google has a vested interest in helping telcos lock new competitors out of their networks; luckily for us Google hasn't yet become a "cut off their air supply" sort of company.
Then let me add Spider and Web. Some of the puzzles are a little tough, but for many of them the game setting works as a built-in walkthrough without making you feel like you've failed or breaking you out of the story's atmosphere.
Well, that's what God gets for using C++. You think you've got a well-designed system, then you realize that to make your next set of changes work you're going to have to throw in a bunch of const_casts or mutables.
You can tell He's new to object oriented programming, too - he's got this whole overeager class hierarchy of tau derived from muon derived from electron, top derived from charm derived from up, and on and on, but then when it's finally time to put together the universe He gets sick of the whole thing and builds all His matter from the base classes!
Especially when you read between the lines. He calls their documentation trash, refuses to pose his question in a more appropriate forum, then starts insulting their qualifications... and that's just what he reveals in a sob-story post about how mean those Linux people are! Who knows what the other side of the story is?
Yeah, he's a known troll, but you'd think if he was just making up karma-whoring stories he'd have been more careful to paint himself as a purely sympathetic character in them.
So... when will legislation be inacted to prevent domain parking?
As soon as the legislators realize that domain parking is analogous to sitting on any other sort of property, and that the natural way to fix it is property taxes.
As long as this is perceived to be a "some nerd had to give his website a stupid name because some other nerd was hogging the good names" problem, it'll never attract legislative attention. Make it clear that there's an untapped source of tax revenue here and you'll see the problem fixed in a jiffy.
One warning, though: the fix may be as bad as the disease... How much are your domain names worth to the highest bidder, and can you afford to pay taxes on that without selling them?
People in general react more favorably to "9.99" than "10.00", taxes or not.
You know, everybody says this, but I've never seen it. I think the natural reaction is just the opposite: just as a little kid who doesn't understand money will trade one quarter for two dimes, even adults who do understand money may feel more comfortable giving up ten dollars than giving up nine hundred ninety nine pennies.
Even the creationists admit "microevolution" happens now; but they still won't admit macroevolution until you can turn the bacteria into a puppy before their eyes.
But I don't really see why you'd need kernel support here.
Kernel support is what can prevent users from creating "write to a file" audio/video drivers, "save a copy of movie data" X servers, "pretend every binary is signed" executable loaders, or even just "freeze this program and hunt for DRM keys in RAM" debuggers.
Publishers are finally starting to understand that if you give someone both an encrypted file and the key to decrypt it, no amount of obfuscation can forever prevent him from doing so in a way you didn't expect. So, they're taking it to the next level, where the keys to decrypt DRM content are distributed in hardware, and where the only software that ever gets to touch those keys are programs that have been signed by the DRM cartel.
This will never prevent movies and music from being pirated, of course (we'd have to ban cameras and microphones first), but it's at least a higher grade of snake oil than the MPAA and RIAA are used to paying for. To the big software companies it's fantastic - not only can they force upgrades and prevent software piracy by locking the programs they sell to a single computer, but they can freeze out upstart competitors by making it too hard to get your OS or your audio/video/ebook player signed. Even the big hardware companies will want to get in on the game - the harder it is to get a video driver or audio chipset driver signed, the harder it becomes for new companies to start competing with the existing vendors.
If your "source" doesn't produce a working binary, it is not the real source. Source in the meaning of GPLv2 must be complete, that is, it must include all parts needed to duplicate the executable you distribute, starting from nothing but what is distributed with the operating system and/or compiler.
Cool. Could you send me your copy of Red Hat's private keys?
I suspect the answer is no. Of course, I can recompile Red Hat software and sign it with my own private keys and it will run just fine; it just won't install on computers whose administrators only allow RedHat-signed packages.
You can recompile GPL'ed DRM software and sign it with your own private keys, and it will run just fine; it just won't get access to the DRM keys stored on computers whose administrators only give them to DRM-approved binaries.
The big difference here isn't that DRM software makers are breaking the GPL and Red Hat isn't, the difference is that DRM hardware makers are planning to ensure that you won't truly be the administrator of the next computer you purchase; you'll be "root" of a sandbox instead.
Markey, who is clearly an expert on such topics, declared, "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet. Everyone should understand that." Indeed, because the entire history of the Internet has been based around the ability of broadband providers to offer high-speed video services. What?
Let's go even more abstract: the entire history of the Internet has been one that prohibited the prioritization of network traffic. What what?
Here's what you're looking for but can't seem to stumble across: the entire history of the Internet has been based on the idea that my service gets paid for by me, and so doesn't have to be paid for by any of the people I talk to.
That idea has been part of the entire history of mail and phone service too, for that matter! Would you really want to live in a world where you couldn't make a phone call to your cousin without wondering whether you had to send his phone company more money first to get a usable connection? Where you were advertised a broadband connection to the internet, paid for a broadband connection to the internet, but only received a broadband connection to a few corporations who were also paying your ISP? No. I pay my service provider, the people I communicate with pay theirs, and the service providers negotiate with each other.
Nobody wants to prohibit prioritizing network traffic; that's a strawman argument you've given. What we want to prohibit is ISPs prioritizing network traffic in a way that allows them to blackmail other companies rather than serving their customers. If my ISP prioritizes VoIP packets over HTTP packets because I've asked them to, that's fantastic. If my ISP prioritizes it's own VoIP packets over Vonage's VoIP packets because they're trying to muscle me into changing services, that's awful.
Market needs to move away from focusing on 'first person shoot'em ups' and forge new genres or revisit old ones.. aka the graphical text action type.. which I thought kicked ass! Typing out what your character needed to do was part of the fun and frustration.
Text adventure games are still around, they're just hiding under a more pretentious name now, interactive fiction. The languages and interpreters are much better today than they used to be; unfortunately most of the games written today are one-author affairs, so no graphics. I don't find that to be much of a problem (didn't the pre-VGA Sierra graphics suck anyway?), but tastes differ.
So it's YOU I have to thank for the 5,000 #@($&*#@*$ emails I get every day offering both breast enlargement and penis enlargement creams?
No - like I said, bandwidth is still too expensive for many people, including myself, to be anything other than paranoid about how much we give away to strangers.
That's not freedom - that's irresponsible, self-centered bullshit masqurading as a political stance.
The ability to send anonymous and pseudonymous messages is freedom - it's one of the most fundamental freedoms there is, dating back to "Common Sense" and the "Federalist Papers".
Your ability to ignore or to require payment accompanying anonymous messages is also freedom. I know it's hard when your email system has difficulty recognizing anonymous messages or accepting micropayments (what, you think I don't get spam too?), but those are problems which require technical solutions, not the abandonment of the right to anonymity.
Add to this the fact that in places like China, where the authorities are likely to put your ass in the gulag just for trading encrypted packets, or running some suspicious to them services on suspicious ports, which they will detect due to the wonderful all-pervasive ISP surveilance of every packet provided to them by giants of moral integrity such as Cisco, and things become even murkier.
I find the problem intractable from a theoretical standpoint, given current IP protocols and network implementations.
Here's the two steps to make it tractable:
1. Put your web pages behind an SSL connection. Any web browser today can visit https as easily as http, but an ISP wanting to (or being forced to) snoop those connections will have a monumentally harder time.
But what, your web pages are nothing but an electronics tutorial and a photo album? So much the better. The point isn't that you need to find anti-totalitarian political tracts to translate into Chinese, the point is that if *everything* on the web starts moving to encrypted connections, those sites which need the encrypted connections can use them without sticking out. Web storefronts have done far more to make encryption indispensable than political activists ever could, but every little bit helps. We want to make the Web a place where trying to cut off your people's ability to talk to SSL sites would be like cutting off your own hand.
2. Put proxy services up on your web server. Whether it's an remailer gateway, a web proxy, whatever - the idea is to make it impossible for censors to ban or monitor network access by IP. SSL doesn't protect the IP of the websites you visit, it just protects the content you send and receive from them, and sometimes that's not enough. If you're an ex-Mormon trying not to get kicked out of BYU, it's probably a good idea not to have a lot of exmormon.org IPs in their network logs regardless of whether the content of what you read and write is there as well.
That's it, two steps: first make encrypted communications more common, then use those encrypted communications to make private communications less suspicious. The second step is going to take longer than the first, but it'll get here. The price of bandwidth for proxy services hasn't fallen as fast as the price of CPU time for SSL encoding, but they're both still getting cheaper. From a theoretical point of view, it's always possible for the Chinese government to say "No encryption for you!", but from a practical point of view we can make that equivalent to disconnecting from the internet entirely.
maybe we really should be trying to get our local house in order before opening branch offices
Our difficulties trying to get our local house in order are one of the reasons we need to look into opening branch offices. Hundreds of thousands of years of progress later, the life expectancy near Olduvai Gorge is still 45 years.
You are right that the benefits of Apollo involved politics, science, and technology (in rapidly descending order) and not colonization. That doesn't mean we need to give up on manned spaceflight, just that we need to look for more sustainable ways to accomplish it.
If a bunch of engineers and hard scientists got together and decided how to spend NASA's budget most effectively, we'd see only automated missions.
Speak for the hard scientists. If a bunch of engineers got together and decided how to spend NASA's budget next year, we'd see nothing but launch vehicle R&D. Trying to seriously explore the solar system with current vehicles is like trying to explore another continent via catapult.
What's more, we'd see a dozen different companies competing to create those new components, testbeds and launch vehicles, not just because that's how much money NASA's current budget takes up but because that's how you get a working product instead of an X-33. Engineers find it easier to choose between working prototypes than to choose between stacks of paper viewgraphs. It's more expensive in the short run, but the results usually turn out much better.
Getting a MythTV frontend for under $100 sounds fantastic, but I have MythTV convert everything to MPEG-4 to save disk space, and that mvpmc page only mentions "supports mpeg1 and mpeg2 video". I don't suppose it'll handle any more CPU-intensive codecs?
Slashdot Mirror
Is this little traffic light on your router blinking 24/7? :)
Mine has been blinking 24/7 for years, since the first IIS worm. Tcpdump suggests the reason: even if your computer isn't part of a botnet, if you're on a cable modem you can expect to be continually swamped by arp requests as a side effect of other bots' subnet scans.
This "putting a male torso texture on a female torso model" should make it clear that nearly *any* content can be sliced and diced until it's offensive to someone.
/. Bullying is not real leadership.
From Jack Thompson's July 2005 "Open Letter to the Members of the Entertainment Software Association", for example:
It has been my privilege, as a lifelong Republican, to provide / misogyny and violence against women/. I am / a thug who demonizes / your industry.
My fervent prayer as a Christian is / Lord, give me more / pornography and violence.
I am happy to help / when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks / "loosely educated" about the United States Constitution Today, United States Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton / embarrasses each and every one of you
Parents just have to be better parents. / Instead of acting like a responsible adult by trying to / be better parents / I, as a lifelong Republican, am going to / engage in ad hominem jihads / This is not courage. This is cowardice. It is the cowardice that all bullies display.
---
This is fun, but not quite "wildfire meme" material. If someone with a little more time wanted to start modding the audio/video of Thompson's TV interviews, on the other hand...
How many of us would think 'well, its just nothing, let me get 5-10 songs tonight' if the price per song was $5 or $10 ?
For one or two bands, I would. Lower that to $2 per song and I'll go up to 5 or 6 bands.
or would any of us get a 'cheaper' song because the song we wanted was priced much higher ?
I do, all the time. For $20 a CD had better be something I'm sure I'll love. For $10 I'll buy an album from someone who's played something I liked on the radio. For $5 I'll take a chance based on just word of mouth. Am I that abnormal, because I base my purchasing decisions on both price and expected value?
Of course, I'm not too sympathetic with the music industry here. They're supposed to be publishers, and if they'd been smart enough to start publishing over the internet ten years ago, Apple would be in no position to start dictating terms now. The labels would just undercut iTunes for any songs they wanted to price at less than $1, and they'd refuse to put on iTunes any songs they wanted to price at more than $1.
But they didn't want to do their jobs (Gosh, isn't the internet that place with all the pirates? We'd better stay away from that!) and now they're mad that they're being ordered around by a company who did their jobs for them. How sad! If the record companies get smart, they'll just be silently grateful that Apple hasn't started dealing with bands directly and cutting the less competent middlemen out altogether.
Not to sound like a complete radical, but why don't we ask ourselves why the government is entitled to step in and get 'a piece' of a private transaction between two people to begin with?
At the root, it's because any government that didn't take a cut from it's citizens couldn't compete with governments that did. As a citizen of the Anarchist Dictatorship of RoyStgnr, for example, you enjoy a 0% sales tax, 0% income tax, 0% gift tax, and 0% capital gains tax... but unfortunately that leaves Our Benevolent Dictator with no way to afford to protect you against those illegitimate tax collectors from other governments who don't recognize our sovereignty. There's lots of them, and their tax revenue can pay for some pretty sweet jails and guns.
It was a biting, harsh criticism of Bush, to his face, in front of the nation's journalism establishment.
Maybe it's being ignored because it was also a biting, harsh criticism of that journalism establishment?
"Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"
That "glass half full/half empty" flub wasn't just a script misreading, the man looked nervous. I'd swear he was afraid that someone would cut his mike before he got to the good lines.
Big, brassy, get-put-on-a-no-fly-list, cajones.
Naah, that would be a PR nightmare for the White House. I wouldn't say anything embarrassing over the phone if I were Colbert, though. Those things have a way of leaking out.
You couldn't save very much money if you had to hold on to each $0.10 kilowatt hour for weeks before you could discharge it to save $0.20. Fortunately most electric company prices change by a factor of two every day, predictably, since supplying additional peak capacity during high-demand hours is much more expensive than providing a constant base power load 24/7.
Of course, designing these battery packs for home and business users is a risky business. If battery technology is too expensive or inefficient, it's more economical to just pay for the power company's peak rates, and you won't get any customers. If battery technology gets too cheap and efficient, the power companies are themselves going to start replacing peak capacity with more base capacity plus batteries, so their peak prices will fall until home user batteries become uneconomical, and (except for people worried about blackouts) you won't get any customers.
"World War II" was complete drivel and a pointless sequel to that fair-to-middling book called, imaginatively enough, "World War I". Can't remember who wrote it but, with the flatness of the plot and characters, it was probably Turtledove.
It was Turtledove, but you forgot the invading Space Lizard Empire.
(To non-Turtledove fans: no, I'm not kidding)
(Also: Turtledove's characters and plots are often complex and enthralling - if they seem flat, it's probably because you've been distracted by the one or two Olympian feats of suspension of disbelief that many of his books require... such as the invading Space Lizard Empire. Fair enough.)
Why is it that the main topic of conversation is POTENTIAL net censorship when very real censoship is occurring in China as we speak?
Because we can stop American censorship with lobbying and voting, and we can't stop Chinese censorship without shooting and bombing.
Yes, it sucks that there are some big problems we can't solve, but that shouldn't prevent anyone from working on the ones we can.
Their primary services work fine on low-bandwidth and high latency connections, so an extortionist ISP would have to threaten to cut their customers off from Google entirely.
If an ISP tried extortion, Google could afford to pay, because they're an established company with lots of cash, not a struggling startup anymore.
If an ISP tried extortion, Google could afford to not pay, because they're an established company with a household name, and many people would go back to dialup before they'd lose access to Google search and GMail.
Squint as hard as you can and you might see "vested interests", but the real threat of a crippled (why call it tiered, except to spin the discussion the way the telcos want?) internet isn't to Google, it's to the next Google. If anything, Google has a vested interest in helping telcos lock new competitors out of their networks; luckily for us Google hasn't yet become a "cut off their air supply" sort of company.
Then let me add Spider and Web. Some of the puzzles are a little tough, but for many of them the game setting works as a built-in walkthrough without making you feel like you've failed or breaking you out of the story's atmosphere.
Urgh... that will mess up optimization.
Well, that's what God gets for using C++. You think you've got a well-designed system, then you realize that to make your next set of changes work you're going to have to throw in a bunch of const_casts or mutables.
You can tell He's new to object oriented programming, too - he's got this whole overeager class hierarchy of tau derived from muon derived from electron, top derived from charm derived from up, and on and on, but then when it's finally time to put together the universe He gets sick of the whole thing and builds all His matter from the base classes!
The story sounds plausable
Especially when you read between the lines. He calls their documentation trash, refuses to pose his question in a more appropriate forum, then starts insulting their qualifications... and that's just what he reveals in a sob-story post about how mean those Linux people are! Who knows what the other side of the story is?
Yeah, he's a known troll, but you'd think if he was just making up karma-whoring stories he'd have been more careful to paint himself as a purely sympathetic character in them.
So... when will legislation be inacted to prevent domain parking?
As soon as the legislators realize that domain parking is analogous to sitting on any other sort of property, and that the natural way to fix it is property taxes.
As long as this is perceived to be a "some nerd had to give his website a stupid name because some other nerd was hogging the good names" problem, it'll never attract legislative attention. Make it clear that there's an untapped source of tax revenue here and you'll see the problem fixed in a jiffy.
One warning, though: the fix may be as bad as the disease... How much are your domain names worth to the highest bidder, and can you afford to pay taxes on that without selling them?
People in general react more favorably to "9.99" than "10.00", taxes or not.
You know, everybody says this, but I've never seen it. I think the natural reaction is just the opposite: just as a little kid who doesn't understand money will trade one quarter for two dimes, even adults who do understand money may feel more comfortable giving up ten dollars than giving up nine hundred ninety nine pennies.
Even the creationists admit "microevolution" happens now; but they still won't admit macroevolution until you can turn the bacteria into a puppy before their eyes.
But I don't really see why you'd need kernel support here.
Kernel support is what can prevent users from creating "write to a file" audio/video drivers, "save a copy of movie data" X servers, "pretend every binary is signed" executable loaders, or even just "freeze this program and hunt for DRM keys in RAM" debuggers.
Publishers are finally starting to understand that if you give someone both an encrypted file and the key to decrypt it, no amount of obfuscation can forever prevent him from doing so in a way you didn't expect. So, they're taking it to the next level, where the keys to decrypt DRM content are distributed in hardware, and where the only software that ever gets to touch those keys are programs that have been signed by the DRM cartel.
This will never prevent movies and music from being pirated, of course (we'd have to ban cameras and microphones first), but it's at least a higher grade of snake oil than the MPAA and RIAA are used to paying for. To the big software companies it's fantastic - not only can they force upgrades and prevent software piracy by locking the programs they sell to a single computer, but they can freeze out upstart competitors by making it too hard to get your OS or your audio/video/ebook player signed. Even the big hardware companies will want to get in on the game - the harder it is to get a video driver or audio chipset driver signed, the harder it becomes for new companies to start competing with the existing vendors.
If your "source" doesn't produce a working binary, it is not the real source. Source in the meaning of GPLv2 must be complete, that is, it must include all parts needed to duplicate the executable you distribute, starting from nothing but what is distributed with the operating system and/or compiler.
Cool. Could you send me your copy of Red Hat's private keys?
I suspect the answer is no. Of course, I can recompile Red Hat software and sign it with my own private keys and it will run just fine; it just won't install on computers whose administrators only allow RedHat-signed packages.
You can recompile GPL'ed DRM software and sign it with your own private keys, and it will run just fine; it just won't get access to the DRM keys stored on computers whose administrators only give them to DRM-approved binaries.
The big difference here isn't that DRM software makers are breaking the GPL and Red Hat isn't, the difference is that DRM hardware makers are planning to ensure that you won't truly be the administrator of the next computer you purchase; you'll be "root" of a sandbox instead.
Markey, who is clearly an expert on such topics, declared, "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet. Everyone should understand that." Indeed, because the entire history of the Internet has been based around the ability of broadband providers to offer high-speed video services. What?
Let's go even more abstract: the entire history of the Internet has been one that prohibited the prioritization of network traffic. What what?
Here's what you're looking for but can't seem to stumble across: the entire history of the Internet has been based on the idea that my service gets paid for by me, and so doesn't have to be paid for by any of the people I talk to.
That idea has been part of the entire history of mail and phone service too, for that matter! Would you really want to live in a world where you couldn't make a phone call to your cousin without wondering whether you had to send his phone company more money first to get a usable connection? Where you were advertised a broadband connection to the internet, paid for a broadband connection to the internet, but only received a broadband connection to a few corporations who were also paying your ISP? No. I pay my service provider, the people I communicate with pay theirs, and the service providers negotiate with each other.
Nobody wants to prohibit prioritizing network traffic; that's a strawman argument you've given. What we want to prohibit is ISPs prioritizing network traffic in a way that allows them to blackmail other companies rather than serving their customers. If my ISP prioritizes VoIP packets over HTTP packets because I've asked them to, that's fantastic. If my ISP prioritizes it's own VoIP packets over Vonage's VoIP packets because they're trying to muscle me into changing services, that's awful.
Market needs to move away from focusing on 'first person shoot'em ups' and forge new genres or revisit old ones.. aka the graphical text action type.. which I thought kicked ass! Typing out what your character needed to do was part of the fun and frustration.
Text adventure games are still around, they're just hiding under a more pretentious name now, interactive fiction. The languages and interpreters are much better today than they used to be; unfortunately most of the games written today are one-author affairs, so no graphics. I don't find that to be much of a problem (didn't the pre-VGA Sierra graphics suck anyway?), but tastes differ.
So it's YOU I have to thank for the 5,000 #@($&*#@*$ emails I get every day offering both breast enlargement and penis enlargement creams?
No - like I said, bandwidth is still too expensive for many people, including myself, to be anything other than paranoid about how much we give away to strangers.
That's not freedom - that's irresponsible, self-centered bullshit masqurading as a political stance.
The ability to send anonymous and pseudonymous messages is freedom - it's one of the most fundamental freedoms there is, dating back to "Common Sense" and the "Federalist Papers".
Your ability to ignore or to require payment accompanying anonymous messages is also freedom. I know it's hard when your email system has difficulty recognizing anonymous messages or accepting micropayments (what, you think I don't get spam too?), but those are problems which require technical solutions, not the abandonment of the right to anonymity.
Add to this the fact that in places like China, where the authorities are likely to put your ass in the gulag just for trading encrypted packets, or running some suspicious to them services on suspicious ports, which they will detect due to the wonderful all-pervasive ISP surveilance of every packet provided to them by giants of moral integrity such as Cisco, and things become even murkier.
I find the problem intractable from a theoretical standpoint, given current IP protocols and network implementations.
Here's the two steps to make it tractable:
1. Put your web pages behind an SSL connection. Any web browser today can visit https as easily as http, but an ISP wanting to (or being forced to) snoop those connections will have a monumentally harder time.
But what, your web pages are nothing but an electronics tutorial and a photo album? So much the better. The point isn't that you need to find anti-totalitarian political tracts to translate into Chinese, the point is that if *everything* on the web starts moving to encrypted connections, those sites which need the encrypted connections can use them without sticking out. Web storefronts have done far more to make encryption indispensable than political activists ever could, but every little bit helps. We want to make the Web a place where trying to cut off your people's ability to talk to SSL sites would be like cutting off your own hand.
2. Put proxy services up on your web server. Whether it's an remailer gateway, a web proxy, whatever - the idea is to make it impossible for censors to ban or monitor network access by IP. SSL doesn't protect the IP of the websites you visit, it just protects the content you send and receive from them, and sometimes that's not enough. If you're an ex-Mormon trying not to get kicked out of BYU, it's probably a good idea not to have a lot of exmormon.org IPs in their network logs regardless of whether the content of what you read and write is there as well.
That's it, two steps: first make encrypted communications more common, then use those encrypted communications to make private communications less suspicious. The second step is going to take longer than the first, but it'll get here. The price of bandwidth for proxy services hasn't fallen as fast as the price of CPU time for SSL encoding, but they're both still getting cheaper. From a theoretical point of view, it's always possible for the Chinese government to say "No encryption for you!", but from a practical point of view we can make that equivalent to disconnecting from the internet entirely.
maybe we really should be trying to get our local house in order before opening branch offices
Our difficulties trying to get our local house in order are one of the reasons we need to look into opening branch offices. Hundreds of thousands of years of progress later, the life expectancy near Olduvai Gorge is still 45 years.
You are right that the benefits of Apollo involved politics, science, and technology (in rapidly descending order) and not colonization. That doesn't mean we need to give up on manned spaceflight, just that we need to look for more sustainable ways to accomplish it.
If a bunch of engineers and hard scientists got together and decided how to spend NASA's budget most effectively, we'd see only automated missions.
Speak for the hard scientists. If a bunch of engineers got together and decided how to spend NASA's budget next year, we'd see nothing but launch vehicle R&D. Trying to seriously explore the solar system with current vehicles is like trying to explore another continent via catapult.
What's more, we'd see a dozen different companies competing to create those new components, testbeds and launch vehicles, not just because that's how much money NASA's current budget takes up but because that's how you get a working product instead of an X-33. Engineers find it easier to choose between working prototypes than to choose between stacks of paper viewgraphs. It's more expensive in the short run, but the results usually turn out much better.
Getting a MythTV frontend for under $100 sounds fantastic, but I have MythTV convert everything to MPEG-4 to save disk space, and that mvpmc page only mentions "supports mpeg1 and mpeg2 video". I don't suppose it'll handle any more CPU-intensive codecs?