Well, yeah, KDE is for weenies. That doesn't mean it can't be for power users too.
those that really do not want to interface with UNIX the way it was meant: through a command-line interface
Take a look at the new konqueror, then, with it's option to open up a short terminal in the file manager window, and change directories in that terminal when you change them in the final manager or vice versa.
Or if command line scripting's more your thing, take a look at "dcop", which lets you control any exported interface of a KDE application from the command line.
He reveals info about some significant advantages over the old 1.0 platform
Of course, it wouldn't be as good PR to talk about the significant advantages over the old 2.0 platform, like stability. My best explanation for KDE 2.0 was that it was an olive branch after all the insults Gnome developers took over their "1.0" misrelease. I managed to get konqueror to crash within a minute of using it. I tried both compiling from scratch and prebuilt binaries before giving up. To be fair, I didn't try the 2.0.1 release or whatever came next; the bugs I saw may have been pounced on more quickly than I'm giving them credit for.
Most of the problems seem to be gone now; in the 2.1 beta that comes with Red Hat fisher (yes! beta software squared!) I couldn't make any of the main components crash, and even koffice took some time and work to bring down. I hope the RH7.1 final is delayed long enough to slip KDE 2.1 final in; it's really worth a look now.
But any viable replacement for Napster (and there will be one) must stress NON-INFRINGING uses from the beginning.
How do you "stress" one particular use of this sort of system? It's a directory service! Since MP3 files have specific types of metadata (ID3 tags with artist/songname/time/etc), OpenNap servers can provide a directory service which stresses that sort of audio encoding; but what, to a computer, differentiates copyrighted MP3 files from public domain MP3 files or copyrighted files authorized for redistribution? That stupid little "copyright bit" in the header that nobody sets?
OpenNap is a server, not a judge; to a server data is data. Now, if by "stress non-infringing uses" you mean that the operator/programmer should make some sort of blather about what their service should *really* be used for, then that's at least practical, even if it is completely meaningless. Do Stallman's views on proprietary software prevent me me from backing up my Windows partition with GNU tar? (Great idea if you're as tired of reinstalling self-destructed Win9x partitions as I am, BTW) Software doesn't care what it's owner's moral beliefs are, unless those beliefs are reflected in the code's operation.
1. The decay time of a satellite in a 200 mile orbit is a few months or years. They are pulled into lower orbits by atmospheric drag, and eventually they re-enter. They are not going to stay up long enough to do much of anything.
It's years for the satellites, months for the junk. The drag on a satellite is essentially proportional to it's area, so the deceleration is basically proportional to it's area/mass ratio. In other words, the orbit of a 10 gram bolt can decay as much as 100 times faster than the orbit of a 10 ton satellite. Of course, the satellite isn't as dense as the bolt, is likely to have big drag-creating solar panels, etc... but there's still an order of magnitude difference there.
Go up a few hundred miles and the situation gets nastier; orbital velocities aren't that much lower, but the influence of air drag is greatly reduced.
There's the problem. Around LEO, every hundred miles you go up, the air density drops by a factor of ten. By the time you put it in GEO, that bolt is going to be in an orbit that will hang around for millenia, being perturbed by the tide, by sunlight, etc. On the other hand, it's only in LEO that you have to worry about junk from a polar orbit hitting an equatorial satellite at several kilometers/second relative velocity. Stuff around GEO is lower speed to begin with, and is pretty much restricted to the same plane and same velocity so relative impact speeds are reduced too.
2) clones are denied certain rights through legislative action due to religious and other group's pressuring (try and argue with a straight face that Congress won't pass stupid, knee-jerk legislation affecting important issues)
I'm sure someone will try to pass stupid, knee-jerk legislation. A ban on human cloning, for example, would be likely. But to remove civil rights of cloned humans? Like hell. Even if something got by Congress, there's those pesky equal protection amendments to consider, and I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court wouldn't need to consider them very long.
But really... isn't this step, rather than 1) a human is cloned, the step where things go bad? Why not stop the sequence here, rather than at the cloning stage? Or for that matter, why not just ban all genetic research, and push things two steps back instead of one?
3) society becomes stratified along the clone/non-clone boundary due to the differences in rights
Exactly how many clones are you picturing here? What percentage of the population is going to want exact duplicates of themselves? Even if there are enough clones to count as a sizable minority, it's hard for even a grossly bigoted society to express prejudice towards targets it can't identify. It's not like clones would be a visually distinguishable racial group; they would just happen to exactly resemble a DNA source human much older than them, as the source appeared decades earlier. How do you express prejudice toward such a person? How do you avoid the "decoys" like identical twins and sons who "have their father's eyes"?
4) clones become increasingly violent in an attempt to regain the rights perceived as being lost
There are a lot of people in the USA today who perceive their rights as being lost. Most of them are resorting to politics and non-violent protest to change that.
5) clones militarize
And so, if all the wackiness in steps 2-4 comes to pass, what is the final step before ultimate doom...? A military battle. Like the sort of thing that could be touched off by China/Taiwan, USA/Iraq, Palestine/Israel (just to list situations with the potential for atomic/biological/chemcial weapons to be used), etc. at any time. If a military battle is the last stage before our ultimate doom, we have bigger things to worry about than artificial twins.
Too many people get the order of that reversed. Case in point, from Tatara's article:
However, before we give a sentient being life, we had better recognize that we may be incapable of properly bestowing life...
I suppose it's arguable that many of the lives on this planet already were "improperly bestowed", but I doubt that the recipient of an expensive cloned birth will be subject to the same substandard education and lousy family situation that our less fortunate sentient beings are stuck with today. Of course, he/she will have been bestowed with the genes of an existing, happy human being, and will have to suffer the consequences. Darn.
But what will happen to these clones if we discover that science can't regenerate a soul?
Someone's been watching too many movies. Repeat after me: "A clone is an organism whose genetic code is copied from another organism". A clone is not a vat-baby, or a teleported copy of yourself from the Evil Star Trek Universe Where Everybody Has Moustaches. In fact, in the special case where that copying occurs at conception, we call the clone an "identical twin", and most of them claim to have souls.
Will people dare to fall in love with, and mate with, a clone?
Stupid people won't. That's okay; more potential partners for the rest of us.
Again, I feel myself wanting to apologize for what seems like crackpot issues.
You know how if you're unsure on multiple choice tests, they advise you to go with your first instinct?
The dangers of pushing this particular button simply aren't as obvious as they are with the destructive energy of a nuclear bomb.
The dangers of polka music are equally subtle, and for much the same reason.
If it gets out of hand?and I think cloning a human being will undoubtedly be the go-ahead for taking things too far?our ultimate doom could slowly arise over a matter of time.
Aside from "it's neeewwww, and scaaarrryyy!" could anyone give me a nice plausible step by step theory where step 1 is "a human is cloned" and step n is "our ultimate doom"? Perhaps I just lack imagination, but I'm having trouble filling in steps 2 through n-1, myself.
I'd insert the requisite "I can't believe this made it to Slashdot" bitching here, but it's been such a slow weekend that I'm almost happy to waste my time ranting at the clue-deprived.
It seems most of stigmatic's earlier trolls are of the "random Eminem song given Slashdotty lyrics" type. It's nice to see these people broaden their horizons with more karma whorific efforts.
Isn't there a factual error there, however? "once upon a kernel 2.0.14"? I thought 2.0.14 predated Gnome 1.0 by almost a year, and considering that 1.0 should have been called "0.5" I shudder to think what the alpha versions were like.
Well, at least this explains why the only Score:5 post in this discussion is a troll: because there are honest people like yourself who probably get moderator points regularly but who just don't know better.
Kiss The Blade, The Lover's Arrival, Urban Existentialist... there is a new breed of trolls who get their kicks by posting the "non-raving devil's advocate" post. They suck in a dozen replies giving the rebuttals which any educated Slashdotter (no, that's not always an oxymoron) knows by heart. The occasional Score: -1, Troll is more than made up for by the regular "Wow, he's not parroting the Slashdot party line, he must be insightful!" Score: 5 karma injections.
To be fair, evil_one's user info doesn't show any such pattern of trolling. This is the big problem: the only way to tell a real troll from a simple misguided/uninformed but intelligent poster is to check out their past behavior.
How so? He's pointing out that an operating system these days should be able to detect new hardware as it is added to the system.
Yes, but he's doing so in a way that implies that hardware autodetection will just reach Linux for the first time in Debian 2.3/3.0! This is incorrect: some other distributions (e.g. Red Hat) have had hardware autodetection at bootup for at least a year, and many have had hardware autodetection at installation since before I started using Linux in '97.
Windows 95 and up do this, and it is nice when it works. I've had to fight with the feature at times,
Fun with Windows 98 first edition: Plug in an external (I don't know what brands... Zoom?; but it works on mine.) 56K fax/modem. Win98 autodetects it, but complains that no "56KModem" drivers are installed or located on the Win98 CD. Installing the "Hayes compatible" modem driver makes it work and connect at 56K, of course, but with every reboot you will be pestered for those "56KModem drivers" to handle the device on COM1 which Windows should realize it has a driver for.
Just last night I saw a commercial for MS Server software, bragging about how it was so stable, no humans needed to maintain the servers.
The commercial doesn't say that no humans were needed to maintain the servers, it says that no humans had been needed to keep the servers up for days. That's right, not years, not months, days.
Didn't everyone else find this as hilarious as I did? I can just imagine the advertising agency handing the original script back to Microsoft, saying "We've convinced people that cigarettes promote a healthy rugged lifestyle, that they just need to purchase a $40,000 SUV before they can go jaunting off to a picnic in the mountains, and that they can become cool by paying a 900 percent markup on sweatshop tennis shoes. But you expect people to believe that a Microsoft server can go weeks without a sysadmin's attention? Change that to hours, or days maybe, then we'll talk about putting it in a commercial. Oh, and try not to do anything publically humiliating like letting your own network go down twice just as we start the ad campaign. You need to meet us halfway here!"
"It has come to our attention that the name Carnivore made the DCS1000 system sound like a predatory device made to invade people's privacy. In actuality, the DCS1000 is an electronic device made to invade people's privacy. We regret any confusion."
On the other hand, Rob also used to fix major Slash code problems infrequently, and only had a few thousand of us whiny users to deal with. You make your tradeoffs. Roblimo put it like:
"The only reason Rob Malda has stopped responding to most comments and emails is overwhelming volume. Go add up the total number of reader-posted comments on Slashdot in the average week.
Then add another 500+ emails per day."
On the other hand, you have to wonder if the editors aren't secretly afraid of having their comments moderated like everybody else...
After they get these in place, they'll have a means whereas patrol cars can stop your car remotely in any instance.
Patrol cars can already stop your car in any instance. What the hell do you plan to do if you see a police siren behind you, floor it and hope they'll decide not to pursue?
Um, who exactly believes that "User #508" is a troll account?
And what made that message a troll anyway? Paragraph 1, which was mostly correct and preceded with "I'll bet"? Or paragraph 2, which was right on the money?
Click-through agreements have loads of legal, ethical, and practical problems (they aren't made until after you've purchased the product, they aren't an actual signature, the product isn't necessarily run the first time by the owner, it is possible to bypass them by hacking the product before running it and agreeing not to hack it...)
With our cable modem service, at least, there's something like four pages of fine print that they got us to put a physical signature on during installation. I made the (apparantly incorrect, according to other posters) assumption that DirecTV would have their bases covered that way.
The difference is simple: DirectTV can beat hackers technically; the recording industry cannot.
DirectTV sends broadcasts over the airwaves, and can send encryption keys for those broadcasts over phone lines on a separate, authenticated channel. Although they cannot prevent legitimate subscribers from recording and sharing the broadcasts they paid for, they can easily prevent pirates from accessing broadcasts they have not paid for (without getting a copy of the frequently changeable keys or a tape/CD-R of the desired program from a legitimate subscriber.)
This is not possible with the recording industry, because they cannot change encryption keys on the media they sell, and they must include those keys with the media or with the players in order to allow the media to be played back even once. At this point it isn't encryption, it's scrambling. And scrambling can always be defeated, as long as we control the hardware. For any non-interactive media that can be played back on a general purpose computer or a sufficiently hackable electronics device, it is simply impossible to enforce "pay per play", "do not copy", etc. with technological measures. Despite SDMI, I think most of them know they can't beat copyright violators technically, and know that the only way to beat violators in court is to with unconstitutional laws like the DMCA that hurt non-violators as well. It's not just evil we're dealing with here, it's desparation.
They got a dish and decoding equipment from DirecTV, and presumably (correct me if I'm wrong) signed an agreement not to hack that equipment when they did so.
If you feel like putting up a dish to capture that satellite's signal, go ahead. Manipulate it however you want, too. But unless you can brute force the encryption keyspace or you the transmitting company, your manipulations are not going to get very far.
The question then becomes "what do DirecTV subscribers actually sign to, under what conditions, and when?" I don't use the system, so I'm not going to speculate... but I will point out that their ongoing, "you must communicate with our modem to get the latest decryption firmware updates" service could make it real hard to decode their signal without their help, even if you can purchase the system (with original firmware) while avoiding signing away your rights to hack it.
The (textual strict subset of English) program or the (having nothing to do with DeCSS) strict English interpreter?
I disagree with your point, since as others have pointed out a program is still a program even if it's interpreted. But even more important is that your point is irrelevant to the above question; I think you're losing sight of the forest for the trees here...
And if there's any group who can understand the benefits from a stimulating peer-group, it's the/. crowd.
Darn right. Sure, I used Linux before I got my login here, but I installed it completely unaware of how l33t I was becoming. Why, until I started reading Slashdot, I had no idea how close the affiliation between Microsoft and Satan really was! And while I'm sure many of us had pictured Natalie Portman naked before, it took true insight to consider the implications of adding petrification to the scenario.
But, we have never had a disaster that has wiped out all higher life, although the Dinosaurs certainly took a hit, but it still didn't wipe out all the higher vertebrates. Doesn't this indicate that the earth has incredibly powerful equilibrium mechanisms that we probably don't fully understand, primarily because of our lack of historical perspective?
In case you're listening to doomsayers for your global warming news, let me bring things back into perspective. Nobody is worried that global warming will boil the oceans and wipe out all vertebrate life. Many people are worried that global warming will cause trillions of dollars worth of flooding damage, reduced crop production, etc. The other vertebrate species don't have billions of members living in difficult to abandon habitats in coastal regions, or dependent on high-yield agriculture; nor do they understand/care if drought-induced starvation cuts their population by a fraction.
Slashdot Mirror
And that'll teach me to post before reading the article.
Too bad I can't moderate myself down, but I'm sure some helpful jerk will take care of it for me...
I've always found KDE for 'weenies',
Well, yeah, KDE is for weenies. That doesn't mean it can't be for power users too.
those that really do not want to interface with UNIX the way it was meant: through a command-line interface
Take a look at the new konqueror, then, with it's option to open up a short terminal in the file manager window, and change directories in that terminal when you change them in the final manager or vice versa.
Or if command line scripting's more your thing, take a look at "dcop", which lets you control any exported interface of a KDE application from the command line.
or via a windowmanager like twm,
This is a joke, right?
He reveals info about some significant advantages over the old 1.0 platform
Of course, it wouldn't be as good PR to talk about the significant advantages over the old 2.0 platform, like stability. My best explanation for KDE 2.0 was that it was an olive branch after all the insults Gnome developers took over their "1.0" misrelease. I managed to get konqueror to crash within a minute of using it. I tried both compiling from scratch and prebuilt binaries before giving up. To be fair, I didn't try the 2.0.1 release or whatever came next; the bugs I saw may have been pounced on more quickly than I'm giving them credit for.
Most of the problems seem to be gone now; in the 2.1 beta that comes with Red Hat fisher (yes! beta software squared!) I couldn't make any of the main components crash, and even koffice took some time and work to bring down. I hope the RH7.1 final is delayed long enough to slip KDE 2.1 final in; it's really worth a look now.
But any viable replacement for Napster (and there will be one) must stress NON-INFRINGING uses from the beginning.
How do you "stress" one particular use of this sort of system? It's a directory service! Since MP3 files have specific types of metadata (ID3 tags with artist/songname/time/etc), OpenNap servers can provide a directory service which stresses that sort of audio encoding; but what, to a computer, differentiates copyrighted MP3 files from public domain MP3 files or copyrighted files authorized for redistribution? That stupid little "copyright bit" in the header that nobody sets?
OpenNap is a server, not a judge; to a server data is data. Now, if by "stress non-infringing uses" you mean that the operator/programmer should make some sort of blather about what their service should *really* be used for, then that's at least practical, even if it is completely meaningless. Do Stallman's views on proprietary software prevent me me from backing up my Windows partition with GNU tar? (Great idea if you're as tired of reinstalling self-destructed Win9x partitions as I am, BTW) Software doesn't care what it's owner's moral beliefs are, unless those beliefs are reflected in the code's operation.
1. The decay time of a satellite in a 200 mile orbit is a few months or years. They are pulled into lower orbits by atmospheric drag, and eventually they re-enter. They are not going to stay up long enough to do much of anything.
It's years for the satellites, months for the junk. The drag on a satellite is essentially proportional to it's area, so the deceleration is basically proportional to it's area/mass ratio. In other words, the orbit of a 10 gram bolt can decay as much as 100 times faster than the orbit of a 10 ton satellite. Of course, the satellite isn't as dense as the bolt, is likely to have big drag-creating solar panels, etc... but there's still an order of magnitude difference there.
Go up a few hundred miles and the situation gets nastier; orbital velocities aren't that much lower, but the influence of air drag is greatly reduced.
There's the problem. Around LEO, every hundred miles you go up, the air density drops by a factor of ten. By the time you put it in GEO, that bolt is going to be in an orbit that will hang around for millenia, being perturbed by the tide, by sunlight, etc. On the other hand, it's only in LEO that you have to worry about junk from a polar orbit hitting an equatorial satellite at several kilometers/second relative velocity. Stuff around GEO is lower speed to begin with, and is pretty much restricted to the same plane and same velocity so relative impact speeds are reduced too.
Then we'd be having more "Galileo trial"s now, rather than having to reach centuries into the past for anti-science witchhunt examples that bad.
Granted, "clones are people too" is a little more complicated than Galilean astronomy, but the message is more immediately worthwhile, too.
2) clones are denied certain rights through legislative action due to religious and other group's pressuring (try and argue with a straight face that Congress won't pass stupid, knee-jerk legislation affecting important issues)
I'm sure someone will try to pass stupid, knee-jerk legislation. A ban on human cloning, for example, would be likely. But to remove civil rights of cloned humans? Like hell. Even if something got by Congress, there's those pesky equal protection amendments to consider, and I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court wouldn't need to consider them very long.
But really... isn't this step, rather than 1) a human is cloned, the step where things go bad? Why not stop the sequence here, rather than at the cloning stage? Or for that matter, why not just ban all genetic research, and push things two steps back instead of one?
3) society becomes stratified along the clone/non-clone boundary due to the differences in rights
Exactly how many clones are you picturing here? What percentage of the population is going to want exact duplicates of themselves? Even if there are enough clones to count as a sizable minority, it's hard for even a grossly bigoted society to express prejudice towards targets it can't identify. It's not like clones would be a visually distinguishable racial group; they would just happen to exactly resemble a DNA source human much older than them, as the source appeared decades earlier. How do you express prejudice toward such a person? How do you avoid the "decoys" like identical twins and sons who "have their father's eyes"?
4) clones become increasingly violent in an attempt to regain the rights perceived as being lost
There are a lot of people in the USA today who perceive their rights as being lost. Most of them are resorting to politics and non-violent protest to change that.
5) clones militarize
And so, if all the wackiness in steps 2-4 comes to pass, what is the final step before ultimate doom...? A military battle. Like the sort of thing that could be touched off by China/Taiwan, USA/Iraq, Palestine/Israel (just to list situations with the potential for atomic/biological/chemcial weapons to be used), etc. at any time. If a military battle is the last stage before our ultimate doom, we have bigger things to worry about than artificial twins.
Too many people get the order of that reversed. Case in point, from Tatara's article:
However, before we give a sentient being life, we had better recognize that we may be incapable of properly bestowing life...
I suppose it's arguable that many of the lives on this planet already were "improperly bestowed", but I doubt that the recipient of an expensive cloned birth will be subject to the same substandard education and lousy family situation that our less fortunate sentient beings are stuck with today. Of course, he/she will have been bestowed with the genes of an existing, happy human being, and will have to suffer the consequences. Darn.
But what will happen to these clones if we discover that science can't regenerate a soul?
Someone's been watching too many movies. Repeat after me: "A clone is an organism whose genetic code is copied from another organism". A clone is not a vat-baby, or a teleported copy of yourself from the Evil Star Trek Universe Where Everybody Has Moustaches. In fact, in the special case where that copying occurs at conception, we call the clone an "identical twin", and most of them claim to have souls.
Will people dare to fall in love with, and mate with, a clone?
Stupid people won't. That's okay; more potential partners for the rest of us.
Again, I feel myself wanting to apologize for what seems like crackpot issues.
You know how if you're unsure on multiple choice tests, they advise you to go with your first instinct?
The dangers of pushing this particular button simply aren't as obvious as they are with the destructive energy of a nuclear bomb.
The dangers of polka music are equally subtle, and for much the same reason.
If it gets out of hand?and I think cloning a human being will undoubtedly be the go-ahead for taking things too far?our ultimate doom could slowly arise over a matter of time.
Aside from "it's neeewwww, and scaaarrryyy!" could anyone give me a nice plausible step by step theory where step 1 is "a human is cloned" and step n is "our ultimate doom"? Perhaps I just lack imagination, but I'm having trouble filling in steps 2 through n-1, myself.
I'd insert the requisite "I can't believe this made it to Slashdot" bitching here, but it's been such a slow weekend that I'm almost happy to waste my time ranting at the clue-deprived.
It seems most of stigmatic's earlier trolls are of the "random Eminem song given Slashdotty lyrics" type. It's nice to see these people broaden their horizons with more karma whorific efforts.
Isn't there a factual error there, however? "once upon a kernel 2.0.14"? I thought 2.0.14 predated Gnome 1.0 by almost a year, and considering that 1.0 should have been called "0.5" I shudder to think what the alpha versions were like.
Well, at least this explains why the only Score:5 post in this discussion is a troll: because there are honest people like yourself who probably get moderator points regularly but who just don't know better.
Kiss The Blade, The Lover's Arrival, Urban Existentialist... there is a new breed of trolls who get their kicks by posting the "non-raving devil's advocate" post. They suck in a dozen replies giving the rebuttals which any educated Slashdotter (no, that's not always an oxymoron) knows by heart. The occasional Score: -1, Troll is more than made up for by the regular "Wow, he's not parroting the Slashdot party line, he must be insightful!" Score: 5 karma injections.
To be fair, evil_one's user info doesn't show any such pattern of trolling. This is the big problem: the only way to tell a real troll from a simple misguided/uninformed but intelligent poster is to check out their past behavior.
How so? He's pointing out that an operating system these days should be able to detect new hardware as it is added to the system.
Yes, but he's doing so in a way that implies that hardware autodetection will just reach Linux for the first time in Debian 2.3/3.0! This is incorrect: some other distributions (e.g. Red Hat) have had hardware autodetection at bootup for at least a year, and many have had hardware autodetection at installation since before I started using Linux in '97.
Windows 95 and up do this, and it is nice when it works. I've had to fight with the feature at times,
Fun with Windows 98 first edition: Plug in an external (I don't know what brands... Zoom?; but it works on mine.) 56K fax/modem. Win98 autodetects it, but complains that no "56KModem" drivers are installed or located on the Win98 CD. Installing the "Hayes compatible" modem driver makes it work and connect at 56K, of course, but with every reboot you will be pestered for those "56KModem drivers" to handle the device on COM1 which Windows should realize it has a driver for.
Just last night I saw a commercial for MS Server software, bragging about how it was so stable, no humans needed to maintain the servers.
The commercial doesn't say that no humans were needed to maintain the servers, it says that no humans had been needed to keep the servers up for days. That's right, not years, not months, days.
Didn't everyone else find this as hilarious as I did? I can just imagine the advertising agency handing the original script back to Microsoft, saying "We've convinced people that cigarettes promote a healthy rugged lifestyle, that they just need to purchase a $40,000 SUV before they can go jaunting off to a picnic in the mountains, and that they can become cool by paying a 900 percent markup on sweatshop tennis shoes. But you expect people to believe that a Microsoft server can go weeks without a sysadmin's attention? Change that to hours, or days maybe, then we'll talk about putting it in a commercial. Oh, and try not to do anything publically humiliating like letting your own network go down twice just as we start the ad campaign. You need to meet us halfway here!"
That applies to your employer just as much as to your university.
"It has come to our attention that the name Carnivore made the DCS1000 system sound like a predatory device made to invade people's privacy. In actuality, the DCS1000 is an electronic device made to invade people's privacy. We regret any confusion."
On the other hand, Rob also used to fix major Slash code problems infrequently, and only had a few thousand of us whiny users to deal with. You make your tradeoffs. Roblimo put it like:
"The only reason Rob Malda has stopped responding to most comments and emails is overwhelming volume. Go add up the total number of reader-posted comments on Slashdot in the average week.
Then add another 500+ emails per day."
On the other hand, you have to wonder if the editors aren't secretly afraid of having their comments moderated like everybody else...
After they get these in place, they'll have a means whereas patrol cars can stop your car remotely in any instance.
Patrol cars can already stop your car in any instance. What the hell do you plan to do if you see a police siren behind you, floor it and hope they'll decide not to pursue?
Um, who exactly believes that "User #508" is a troll account?
And what made that message a troll anyway? Paragraph 1, which was mostly correct and preceded with "I'll bet"? Or paragraph 2, which was right on the money?
The Prior Art Search Engine developers would have to get permission to use Altavista's "search engine" patent!
Click-through agreements have loads of legal, ethical, and practical problems (they aren't made until after you've purchased the product, they aren't an actual signature, the product isn't necessarily run the first time by the owner, it is possible to bypass them by hacking the product before running it and agreeing not to hack it...)
With our cable modem service, at least, there's something like four pages of fine print that they got us to put a physical signature on during installation. I made the (apparantly incorrect, according to other posters) assumption that DirecTV would have their bases covered that way.
With, as the commercial goes (in a voice that sounds like the speaker is simultaneously bench pressing 300),
"More muscles, sir!"
"More missiles, sir!"
"More steroids, sir!"
Okay, I made that last up. But still, it's sad to see that they've made the original G.I.Joe into a thinking man's cartoon...
The difference is simple: DirectTV can beat hackers technically; the recording industry cannot.
DirectTV sends broadcasts over the airwaves, and can send encryption keys for those broadcasts over phone lines on a separate, authenticated channel. Although they cannot prevent legitimate subscribers from recording and sharing the broadcasts they paid for, they can easily prevent pirates from accessing broadcasts they have not paid for (without getting a copy of the frequently changeable keys or a tape/CD-R of the desired program from a legitimate subscriber.)
This is not possible with the recording industry, because they cannot change encryption keys on the media they sell, and they must include those keys with the media or with the players in order to allow the media to be played back even once. At this point it isn't encryption, it's scrambling. And scrambling can always be defeated, as long as we control the hardware. For any non-interactive media that can be played back on a general purpose computer or a sufficiently hackable electronics device, it is simply impossible to enforce "pay per play", "do not copy", etc. with technological measures. Despite SDMI, I think most of them know they can't beat copyright violators technically, and know that the only way to beat violators in court is to with unconstitutional laws like the DMCA that hurt non-violators as well. It's not just evil we're dealing with here, it's desparation.
They got a dish and decoding equipment from DirecTV, and presumably (correct me if I'm wrong) signed an agreement not to hack that equipment when they did so.
If you feel like putting up a dish to capture that satellite's signal, go ahead. Manipulate it however you want, too. But unless you can brute force the encryption keyspace or you the transmitting company, your manipulations are not going to get very far.
The question then becomes "what do DirecTV subscribers actually sign to, under what conditions, and when?" I don't use the system, so I'm not going to speculate... but I will point out that their ongoing, "you must communicate with our modem to get the latest decryption firmware updates" service could make it real hard to decode their signal without their help, even if you can purchase the system (with original firmware) while avoiding signing away your rights to hack it.
Since Slashdot can easily get 14 "first posts" in the time it takes to write one, it is nearly impossible for post 14 to be "Redundant".
The (textual strict subset of English) program or the (having nothing to do with DeCSS) strict English interpreter?
I disagree with your point, since as others have pointed out a program is still a program even if it's interpreted. But even more important is that your point is irrelevant to the above question; I think you're losing sight of the forest for the trees here...
And if there's any group who can understand the benefits from a stimulating peer-group, it's the /. crowd.
Darn right. Sure, I used Linux before I got my login here, but I installed it completely unaware of how l33t I was becoming. Why, until I started reading Slashdot, I had no idea how close the affiliation between Microsoft and Satan really was! And while I'm sure many of us had pictured Natalie Portman naked before, it took true insight to consider the implications of adding petrification to the scenario.
But, we have never had a disaster that has wiped out all higher life, although the Dinosaurs certainly took a hit, but it still didn't wipe out all the higher vertebrates. Doesn't this indicate that the earth has incredibly powerful equilibrium mechanisms that we probably don't fully understand, primarily because of our lack of historical perspective?
In case you're listening to doomsayers for your global warming news, let me bring things back into perspective. Nobody is worried that global warming will boil the oceans and wipe out all vertebrate life. Many people are worried that global warming will cause trillions of dollars worth of flooding damage, reduced crop production, etc. The other vertebrate species don't have billions of members living in difficult to abandon habitats in coastal regions, or dependent on high-yield agriculture; nor do they understand/care if drought-induced starvation cuts their population by a fraction.