This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the Americans could come up with a reasonable and fair system of rating. Unfortunately, there ain't no such animal.
Unfortunately? What?? First you call the people trying to rate the web (who with no doubt believe they ARE trying to create a reasonable and fair system) censors, and then you admit you think it is unfortunate that the system is doomed to be unreasonable and unfair.
The fact that there is no fair, reasonable, managable, or even remotely feasible way to rate the Internet is the most fortunate thing about this whole affair. The most frightening thing I can imagine is censorship that actually works and doesn't make people angry.
Don't confuse this with an issue of practical problems: it is not. This is a human rights issue.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I would say that this goes to show the utter bullshit that is the whole cyber terrorism thing. Why spend billions of dollars trying to police imaginary squads of crackers set to destroy our information infrastructure, when a couple of idiots with shovels can create major mayhem like this?
I wonder what an organized group of wire cutters who did a little bit of research on their targets could accomplish. I have a feeling it wouldn't be pretty.
I can't say I noticed anything myself (the net has been dog slow for me as long as I can remember, so), but if a small event like this can cause major problems, then the Internet is definetly closing up on critical mass....
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
All paste something I wrote about this situation a while ago, based mostly around my experiences here in Sweden. If I'm factually wrong about something here, I would like to be corrected.
---------
OK, onto the a couple of days delayed summary of the entire telecom situation. I'm probably not the most knowledgeable person about this, you will find. In fact, it has been very difficult for me to try to get most of this stuff straight myself (and some of it might still be, em, bent). However, it seems a lot of people absolutely no clue about this, so maybe I can bring some light to it for them. Observe that this deals mostly with Sweden (for obvious reasons my interest in other Telecom markets is limited). So what is up with the insane per minute costs in Europe? Well, basically those are there because the companies find them profitable, and don't feel like getting into a price war that will push them down. Now, that might seem obvious, but I know a lot of people think that the main Telecom company (that supplies the phone lines, in Sweden's case Telia) is the issue. They are not innocent, but then nor are any of the other players. Fact is, that most (like 90% or something) of the money you pay via your phone bill gets flushed right through to the ISP through agreements made when competition was first introduced to the Telecom market. As I understand it, the Telecom companies came up with the idea of having a fee for someone who carries traffic from their network, onto somebody else's, because back then the other networks in question were mobile phone providers, and the Telecom monopoly wanted part of the money made from calls on those phones. The ISPs love this: They get the money, which is ridiculously more than they have in costs, and the Phone company has to bill you, getting the badwill. They could easily set up their modems on their own networks, diverted at your local switchboard, and charge whatever price they wanted, but why would they do that? Why is this not the case in America? Well, if you look in the history books back to the age when Compuserve and America Online ruled America, it was. The thing that makes America (and some other places, like Australia I believe) different from here is that they have a very regulated Telecom market (in America there is a whole government organ, the FCC, dealing with it), and one of the regulations is that local calls are free. So while the big ISPs were charging their per minute rates, a lot of small ISPs appeared that didn't. These consisted of people who bought a 2 megabit line at 2k $ a month, and then signed up 200 people at 20$ a month, and had themselves a business. These small ISPs put the pressure on the big ones, who had to offer flatrate services to survive. In Europe, where local calls are free, only the ISPs who own (or rent) their own telecom networks can offer flatrate, and they don't want to, seeing as they are cashing out big time on the situation as it is. So is the situation hopeless? Yes and no. All markets where companies are making to much money, sooner or later competition sets in and adjusts things. That is why we love capitalism. BUT, the thing is, the companies are already competing, just not by lowering the prices. You ever wonder how the Swedish (and I believe other European) ISPs can afford to sell modems for free to new subscribers? Well, look on your phone bill. Yupp, those hundred of Euros you pay every month are buying Sportsters for Mr. and Mrs. Newbie-"I vant to be on de Inter-net"-lamer. Go ahead, weep. The reason for this is that the ISPs are not interested in stealing customers who already use the Internet from one another, instead they are interested in getting as many of the NEW users as possible. And new users have it pretty damn good today, being showered with gifts from the ISPs (the rebate on a new computer can be in the vicinity of 200 Euros is Sweden if you sign up with and ISP when buying it). Sooner or later, however, so many people will have signed up that the ISPs will have to start looking at one another, and then I think we will have a pricewar. In Sweden, I do see this happening, at least to some extent, in the not so far future. Most people know about the 1 month offer that Swedish ISP Tele2 had for half the minute charges this spring, but this is not what I am talking about, since they were using it to convince people to sign up for their long distance calling service, and never advertised it to people who were not already customers. However, a few weeks ago I received a letter from Tele2 asking that I start using the numbers on their long distance carrier permanently, and that the old "normal" numbers might be shutting down. That is a better sign. What about the new technologies like ADSL? A very tricky question that no one really knows the answer to, at least no one who has felt like sharing it with me. I received and offer from Telia right when I came back from Indonesia that to sign up for their ADSL service. The 2 megabit service came at the ridiculous price of.05 Euros (is there a term for hundredth of a Euro???) per Megabyte. You do the math, that price pretty much prohibits any broadband applications. Its great if your gonna use it as for the same things you would a modem, but that is so got damn pointless. I know people who got it, and they are now spending their time playing Quake with "rate 2500" on their 2 megabit lines. Hurrah. The reason for this idiotic price is of course that they are afraid that ADSL will become a low cost alternative to their almost as idiotic modem and isdn price. The fact that it destroys all the value of getting a broadband line in the first place (anyone who thinks surfing the web or sending email on an ISDN line is too slow needs go visit Treebeard or something) was a little to difficult for them. In America, of course, they have the opposite problem. ISPs are offering ADSL at flatrate prices because otherwise no one would change from modem and ISDN. The problem with this, of course, is that any nerd with a TI can figure out that there is no way the Internet can handle every Joe Blow with unlimited access to a 2megabit line. A realistic price for ADSL Internet access IMO: 1 Gigabyte free per month,.01 -.02 Euros for each additional Megabyte.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
If I were Caldera this article would bother me greatly. After all, he bases the article on an old version of OpenLinux, and then recommends people to use Redhat or stick with Windows.
Personally, what scares me is that this guy is a technology journalist... What sort of technology does he cover exactly? farming tools?
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Re:As far as I can see...
on
Dear Mr. Straw
·
· Score: 0
Inferiority complex.
Think about, it was not the intellectual core of European society that left for America, but the bumms, the farm hands, the troublemakers, and the generally useless topsoil of society.
After 200 years as a country they have yet to even begin to form a culture that doesn't involve the god given right to shoot people down on sight.
They still think that a football is a bunch of guys fighting over a ball.
They still haven't learned to eat with a knife and fork.
They still use double negatives.
You would be touchy too.
PS Check the TLD before replying next time PPS Go ahead, moderate me down, I've got the karma to spare.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Re:As far as I can see...
on
Dear Mr. Straw
·
· Score: 1
Funny, I seem to think those are the two things that are RIGHT about america.
Pretty much everything else is wrong...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Have you ever seen a camera pan around fast (and I mean really fast) in a movie or on tv?
You see nothing but blur, which makes for a nice effect in a horror movie, but would be VERY annoying if you panning around in order to aim, fire, and kill a target in less than half a second.
60 fps will always be the minimum for playable action games (people who are really serious will say even higher, the "pro" Quake players won't play with less 100).
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I don't have any references to back up my point, so I may well be wrong, but I have heard to "first to file"/"first to invent" debate cited many times.
Of course their must be some sort of prior art, I mean, I doubt anyone has patented the wheel yet...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
You missed something here. "Prior art" as a legal term is an American invention, because patents in America are granted on a first to invent basis. In Europe, patents are granted on a first to file basis, and this guy was obviously the first asshole.
If it has been granted, I believe it pretty much stands...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
And anybody SERIOUS about hiding his ip can do that too, so well that it is unlikely that anyone without a bunch of court orders will get him.
There are services for it (anonnymizer.com) too.
As for the Social Security Number thing, I never got what was up with keeping them private. I understand they can be used to get financial info about you and stuff, but I would be scared shitless if all someone needed to know was a 20 odd digit number to get stuff like that out about me.
We all have the equivalent of SSNs here, but they are all but secret. They appear on all bills, id cards, I even write it on my exams at school. But they sure as hell can't be used to unlock a bunch of private information...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Which must be the ultimate form of hypocracy, because for all the people I have known who have died, the one thing it has never been to face their loss, is gentle.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
I can just see it now, the nervous parents waiting in a doctors office. A doctor steps in through the door with a serious face and clipboard full of readings:
doctor: I believe I have some difficult news, mother: oh god.. doctor: the tests are in and it looks like your child is going to a... father: It can't be! doctor: I'm afraid so, it will be a geek, no doubt about. mother: oh god... father: But, this can't be.. doctor: I'm afraid.. father: But I was varsity football, my wife was a cheerleader. I never touched a compute... mother: We took precautions, they said it couldn't happen. doctor: Sometimes it just happens, thats all. There was nothing you could have done. father: Is it bad? doctor: I'm afraid so. The reading is one of the highest I have seen. We are talking a/. Karma of 100+ and patches to the Kernel class of geek here. mother: oh god... doctor: Of course, we understand if you choose not to take on the burden of raising such a child...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Em, that might be true if you are using it as a server or are in need of some sort of ultra fast performance workstation, but for the only application where those extra 200 mhz are actually needed, what harddrive you have makes shit all difference.
can you say Quake?
I wish I was only kidding here...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Sounds interesting, but aren't those "coin" things quite heavy to carry around? And if their value is aboslute, don't people try to bust up the payphones to get the "coins" out so they can make phonecalls (or are the "coins" also used in other places?)
Can you buy "coins" at kiosks?
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
At my old highschool the PCs (sx33 with Win31 I think, I'm an old old man) were always so screwed up so finally we had enough and installed some locking software ourselves, taking over control over the computer room.
Needless to say the admins were not happy, but they must have gotten the hint because after we handed over the keys they got better.
wow - Doom and Mortal Kombat flashbacks galore...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Rather, it's exactly like the cards used for pay phones in europe
off topic, but WTF do you use to operate payphones in America???
I thought Smartcards were common, we have had them as a payment system (a chip on my bankcard that can load up a limited amount of electronic money) for almost a year now.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Yeah sure, but here in Finland education is free, paid by the gov.
There is no such thing as free sex, I mean lunch.
Your paying the government back for that education in the form of taxes every day you work in Finland. The "government" is not some magical thing that makes money, its (at least it supposed to be) you and a lot of other people.
Unless of course you are planning to split the country as soon as you have earned your "free" degree. Like me:-).
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Actually, from what I have heard SDMI watermarks will be audible, ie people with good equipment and hearing will take note. The point is that overwriting them will make an even larger degridation of the sound (of course, if you overright watermarked frames with a high degree interpolation it should make it sound better, but I don't know exactly how it works).
And remember, these watermarks are not only going on downloadable music, but on all future CDs as well. If I was a Hi-Fi nut, I would be worried sick about this.
Hardware devices will probably (at the very least) require that songs are signed by the RCIAA key (of course, SDMI has to be exportable from the USA, so we can just put distributed.net to cracking that:-) ).
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
As nice as this device seems to be (damn it looks cool) I simply don't believe that we will ever again see a good, free, mp3 player on hardware. Because hardware can only be designed and manufactured by companies (read litigation targets) and sold by distributors and outlets worried about retaliation from the sdmi bunch, it is doomed to all for their awful ideas of apropriation of information.
Even this article talks about using encryption to safegaurd against piracy. Since when can encryption safegaurd against piracy? Encryption can keep a secret between to parties that WANT to keep it, the nature of piracy is that one of the parties wants to spread the information.
What you can do through digital signatures and watermarks is mark WHO the original party spreading the information was. But from there you have to go the legal route...
So, more laws, more lawyers, more easy ways for kids to commit serious crimes, more arguments for infringing on our freedom, and more kids going to jail.
Don't fight with Mathematics. Its a really bad idea...
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
The NSA is an organisation designed and designated to, in secret, subvert both American and non-American privacy and freedom for the larger cause of "national security" (and to some extent even some international security).
However, national security is a thing of the past. What threat is their towards american national freedom? Really?
There is only one enemy left, and it is only as dangerous as we are letting it be (for reasons of commerce) and actually more interested in the continued repression of its own people then anything to do with us (hmm, I wonder if Chinese people can access Slashdot... and if they do??).
Instead, the entire intelligence community, which, no doubt, is undemocratic in the very secrecy of its nature, has gotten so happy with its own unbarred existance that it just is not about to let go. To some extent they try to justify their actions in the public eye by speaking of the horrid, but largely imaginary, terrophiles from which they are keeping us and our children safe, but to an even larger degree they don't need to defend themselves. Shadow organizations like the NSA already have their claws so deep in the bumbling, populistic, corrupted to the bone political climates like Washington, that they simply are not under any threat at all.
SAFE will never pass. The NSA knows it, we know it.
What I wonder about, more than anything else is: Where does the NSA find new mathematicians?
They are the largest employer of mathematicians in the WORLD, meaning they are picking the best and brightest of maths majors like me right out of university and using them in a work that is shifting from subverting the freedom of people to the useless struggle to keep an organization with no use alive.
Why do people do it? As I see it, it must either be ignorance or cynisism. Either because they, like the scientists who worked away building bombs and rockets for the Nazis, are too enclosed in their work and research to look even one second at what they are doing, and who they are doing it for.
Or, because they share the simple, yet dark, conviction that a free society needs to be schimera in order to exist. That man kind simply isn't capable of being free without destroying itself. That out of arrogance for people they are doing them a favour by deciding their lives for them.
And maybe they are right. But then I say we might as well let things take their course. Give me freedom or... you know the cliche.
- /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Slashdot Mirror
The humans in the Matrix served only as a battery. They mention the use of fusion power as well.
Of course, your unlikely to have accidents putting to much hydrogen into a container (well, unless someone lights a cigarette).
-
And, how, exactly, is forcing sites to register under certian domain names any different from forcing sites to carry meta-tags for filtering services?
The point here is not that people don't like meta-tags. Its that we don't like censorship. Period.
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This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the Americans could come up with a reasonable and fair system of rating. Unfortunately, there ain't no such animal.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Unfortunately? What?? First you call the people trying to rate the web (who with no doubt believe they ARE trying to create a reasonable and fair system) censors, and then you admit you think it is unfortunate that the system is doomed to be unreasonable and unfair.
The fact that there is no fair, reasonable, managable, or even remotely feasible way to rate the Internet is the most fortunate thing about this whole affair. The most frightening thing I can imagine is censorship that actually works and doesn't make people angry.
Don't confuse this with an issue of practical problems: it is not. This is a human rights issue.
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I would say that this goes to show the utter bullshit that is the whole cyber terrorism thing. Why spend billions of dollars trying to police imaginary squads of crackers set to destroy our information infrastructure, when a couple of idiots with shovels can create major mayhem like this?
I wonder what an organized group of wire cutters who did a little bit of research on their targets could accomplish. I have a feeling it wouldn't be pretty.
I can't say I noticed anything myself (the net has been dog slow for me as long as I can remember, so), but if a small event like this can cause major problems, then the Internet is definetly closing up on critical mass....
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All paste something I wrote about this situation a while ago, based mostly around my experiences here in Sweden. If I'm factually wrong about something here, I would like to be corrected.
---------
OK, onto the a couple of days delayed summary of the entire telecom situation. I'm probably not the most knowledgeable person about this, you will find. In fact, it has been very difficult for me to try to get most of this stuff straight myself (and some of it might still be, em, bent). However, it seems a lot of people absolutely no clue about this, so maybe I can bring some light to it for them. Observe that this deals mostly with Sweden (for obvious reasons my interest in other Telecom markets is limited). So what is up with the insane per minute costs in Europe? Well, basically those are there because the companies find them profitable, and don't feel like getting into a price war that will push them down. Now, that might seem obvious, but I know a lot of people think that the main Telecom company (that supplies the phone lines, in Sweden's case Telia) is the issue. They are not innocent, but then nor are any of the other players. Fact is, that most (like 90% or something) of the money you pay via your phone bill gets flushed right through to the ISP through agreements made when competition was first introduced to the Telecom market. As I understand it, the Telecom companies came up with the idea of having a fee for someone who carries traffic from their network, onto somebody else's, because back then the other networks in question were mobile phone providers, and the Telecom monopoly wanted part of the money made from calls on those phones. The ISPs love this: They get the money, which is ridiculously more than they have in costs, and the Phone company has to bill you, getting the badwill. They could easily set up their modems on their own networks, diverted at your local switchboard, and charge whatever price they wanted, but why would they do that? Why is this not the case in America? Well, if you look in the history books back to the age when Compuserve and America Online ruled America, it was. The thing that makes America (and some other places, like Australia I believe) different from here is that they have a very regulated Telecom market (in America there is a whole government organ, the FCC, dealing with it), and one of the regulations is that local calls are free. So while the big ISPs were charging their per minute rates, a lot of small ISPs appeared that didn't. These consisted of people who bought a 2 megabit line at 2k $ a month, and then signed up 200 people at 20$ a month, and had themselves a business. These small ISPs put the pressure on the big ones, who had to offer flatrate services to survive. In Europe, where local calls are free, only the ISPs who own (or rent) their own telecom networks can offer flatrate, and they don't want to, seeing as they are cashing out big time on the situation as it is. So is the situation hopeless? Yes and no. All markets where companies are making to much money, sooner or later competition sets in and adjusts things. That is why we love capitalism. BUT, the thing is, the companies are already competing, just not by lowering the prices. You ever wonder how the Swedish (and I believe other European) ISPs can afford to sell modems for free to new subscribers? Well, look on your phone bill. Yupp, those hundred of Euros you pay every month are buying Sportsters for Mr. and Mrs. Newbie-"I vant to be on de Inter-net"-lamer. Go ahead, weep. The reason for this is that the ISPs are not interested in stealing customers who already use the Internet from one another, instead they are interested in getting as many of the NEW users as possible. And new users have it pretty damn good today, being showered with gifts from the ISPs (the rebate on a new computer can be in the vicinity of 200 Euros is Sweden if you sign up with and ISP when buying it). Sooner or later, however, so many people will have signed up that the ISPs will have to start looking at one another, and then I think we will have a pricewar. In Sweden, I do see this happening, at least to some extent, in the not so far future. Most people know about the 1 month offer that Swedish ISP Tele2 had for half the minute charges this spring, but this is not what I am talking about, since they were using it to convince people to sign up for their long distance calling service, and never advertised it to people who were not already customers. However, a few weeks ago I received a letter from Tele2 asking that I start using the numbers on their long distance carrier permanently, and that the old "normal" numbers might be shutting down. That is a better sign. What about the new technologies like ADSL? A very tricky question that no one really knows the answer to, at least no one who has felt like sharing it with me. I received and offer from Telia right when I came back from Indonesia that to sign up for their ADSL service. The 2 megabit service came at the ridiculous price of-
If I were Caldera this article would bother me greatly. After all, he bases the article on an old version of OpenLinux, and then recommends people to use Redhat or stick with Windows.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Personally, what scares me is that this guy is a technology journalist... What sort of technology does he cover exactly? farming tools?
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Inferiority complex.
Think about, it was not the intellectual core of European society that left for America, but the bumms, the farm hands, the troublemakers, and the generally useless topsoil of society.
After 200 years as a country they have yet to even begin to form a culture that doesn't involve the god given right to shoot people down on sight.
They still think that a football is a bunch of guys fighting over a ball.
They still haven't learned to eat with a knife and fork.
They still use double negatives.
You would be touchy too.
PS Check the TLD before replying next time
PPS Go ahead, moderate me down, I've got the karma to spare.
-
Funny, I seem to think those are the two things that are RIGHT about america.
Pretty much everything else is wrong...
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Have you ever seen a camera pan around fast (and I mean really fast) in a movie or on tv?
You see nothing but blur, which makes for a nice effect in a horror movie, but would be VERY annoying if you panning around in order to aim, fire, and kill a target in less than half a second.
60 fps will always be the minimum for playable action games (people who are really serious will say even higher, the "pro" Quake players won't play with less 100).
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I don't have any references to back up my point, so I may well be wrong, but I have heard to "first to file"/"first to invent" debate cited many times.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Of course their must be some sort of prior art, I mean, I doubt anyone has patented the wheel yet...
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You missed something here. "Prior art" as a legal term is an American invention, because patents in America are granted on a first to invent basis. In Europe, patents are granted on a first to file basis, and this guy was obviously the first asshole.
If it has been granted, I believe it pretty much stands...
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And anybody SERIOUS about hiding his ip can do that too, so well that it is unlikely that anyone without a bunch of court orders will get him.
There are services for it (anonnymizer.com) too.
As for the Social Security Number thing, I never got what was up with keeping them private. I understand they can be used to get financial info about you and stuff, but I would be scared shitless if all someone needed to know was a 20 odd digit number to get stuff like that out about me.
We all have the equivalent of SSNs here, but they are all but secret. They appear on all bills, id cards, I even write it on my exams at school. But they sure as hell can't be used to unlock a bunch of private information...
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Passed on seems gentler.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Which must be the ultimate form of hypocracy, because for all the people I have known who have died, the one thing it has never been to face their loss, is gentle.
-
I can just see it now, the nervous parents waiting in a doctors office. A doctor steps in through the door with a serious face and clipboard full of readings:
/. Karma of 100+ and patches to the Kernel class of geek here.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
doctor: I believe I have some difficult news,
mother: oh god..
doctor: the tests are in and it looks like your child is going to a...
father: It can't be!
doctor: I'm afraid so, it will be a geek, no doubt about.
mother: oh god...
father: But, this can't be..
doctor: I'm afraid..
father: But I was varsity football, my wife was a cheerleader. I never touched a compute...
mother: We took precautions, they said it couldn't happen.
doctor: Sometimes it just happens, thats all. There was nothing you could have done.
father: Is it bad?
doctor: I'm afraid so. The reading is one of the highest I have seen. We are talking a
mother: oh god...
doctor: Of course, we understand if you choose not to take on the burden of raising such a child...
-
Em, that might be true if you are using it as a server or are in need of some sort of ultra fast performance workstation, but for the only application where those extra 200 mhz are actually needed, what harddrive you have makes shit all difference.
can you say Quake?
I wish I was only kidding here...
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Sounds interesting, but aren't those "coin" things quite heavy to carry around? And if their value is aboslute, don't people try to bust up the payphones to get the "coins" out so they can make phonecalls (or are the "coins" also used in other places?)
Can you buy "coins" at kiosks?
-
At my old highschool the PCs (sx33 with Win31 I think, I'm an old old man) were always so screwed up so finally we had enough and installed some locking software ourselves, taking over control over the computer room.
Needless to say the admins were not happy, but they must have gotten the hint because after we handed over the keys they got better.
wow - Doom and Mortal Kombat flashbacks galore...
-
Rather, it's exactly like the cards used for pay phones in europe
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
off topic, but WTF do you use to operate payphones in America???
I thought Smartcards were common, we have had them as a payment system (a chip on my bankcard that can load up a limited amount of electronic money) for almost a year now.
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Yeah, Rob should increase the Karma needed to start at 2 to say, well, how about 40
Also more people should moderate themselves down before posting.
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Yeah sure, but here in Finland education is free, paid by the gov.
There is no such thing as free sex, I mean lunch.
Your paying the government back for that education in the form of taxes every day you work in Finland. The "government" is not some magical thing that makes money, its (at least it supposed to be) you and a lot of other people.
Unless of course you are planning to split the country as soon as you have earned your "free" degree. Like me
-
Actually, from what I have heard SDMI watermarks will be audible, ie people with good equipment and hearing will take note. The point is that overwriting them will make an even larger degridation of the sound (of course, if you overright watermarked frames with a high degree interpolation it should make it sound better, but I don't know exactly how it works).
And remember, these watermarks are not only going on downloadable music, but on all future CDs as well. If I was a Hi-Fi nut, I would be worried sick about this.
Hardware devices will probably (at the very least) require that songs are signed by the RCIAA key (of course, SDMI has to be exportable from the USA, so we can just put distributed.net to cracking that
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Actually, Stocholm University doesn't have a CS department. I believe it is the Mathematics Department that is honoring Linus.
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As nice as this device seems to be (damn it looks cool) I simply don't believe that we will ever again see a good, free, mp3 player on hardware. Because hardware can only be designed and manufactured by companies (read litigation targets) and sold by distributors and outlets worried about retaliation from the sdmi bunch, it is doomed to all for their awful ideas of apropriation of information.
Even this article talks about using encryption to safegaurd against piracy. Since when can encryption safegaurd against piracy? Encryption can keep a secret between to parties that WANT to keep it, the nature of piracy is that one of the parties wants to spread the information.
What you can do through digital signatures and watermarks is mark WHO the original party spreading the information was. But from there you have to go the legal route...
So, more laws, more lawyers, more easy ways for kids to commit serious crimes, more arguments for infringing on our freedom, and more kids going to jail.
Don't fight with Mathematics. Its a really bad idea...
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i mean seriously whos gonna launch a bomb containing the smallpox virus to anyone? thats just insane.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Since when has that stopped humans from doing anything?
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The NSA is an organisation designed and designated to, in secret, subvert both American and non-American privacy and freedom for the larger cause of "national security" (and to some extent even some international security).
... you know the cliche.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
However, national security is a thing of the past. What threat is their towards american national freedom? Really?
There is only one enemy left, and it is only as dangerous as we are letting it be (for reasons of commerce) and actually more interested in the continued repression of its own people then anything to do with us (hmm, I wonder if Chinese people can access Slashdot... and if they do??).
Instead, the entire intelligence community, which, no doubt, is undemocratic in the very secrecy of its nature, has gotten so happy with its own unbarred existance that it just is not about to let go. To some extent they try to justify their actions in the public eye by speaking of the horrid, but largely imaginary, terrophiles from which they are keeping us and our children safe, but to an even larger degree they don't need to defend themselves. Shadow organizations like the NSA already have their claws so deep in the bumbling, populistic, corrupted to the bone political climates like Washington, that they simply are not under any threat at all.
SAFE will never pass. The NSA knows it, we know it.
What I wonder about, more than anything else is: Where does the NSA find new mathematicians?
They are the largest employer of mathematicians in the WORLD, meaning they are picking the best and brightest of maths majors like me right out of university and using them in a work that is shifting from subverting the freedom of people to the useless struggle to keep an organization with no use alive.
Why do people do it? As I see it, it must either be ignorance or cynisism. Either because they, like the scientists who worked away building bombs and rockets for the Nazis, are too enclosed in their work and research to look even one second at what they are doing, and who they are doing it for.
Or, because they share the simple, yet dark, conviction that a free society needs to be schimera in order to exist. That man kind simply isn't capable of being free without destroying itself. That out of arrogance for people they are doing them a favour by deciding their lives for them.
And maybe they are right. But then I say we might as well let things take their course. Give me freedom or
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