The pigs wearing clothes thing is a rash simplification of the inherent problems with communism. Communism is fundamentally flawed as a political and social philosophy because it puts the communal and needs and goods over the freedom of the individual. Even the most enlightened and philanthropic leader(s) could not produce a communist state in which I would want to live.
The "Linux Movement" (I know, I know, I know) might be a communal effort, but it reminds much more of the voluntary cooperations of Anarchist socialists, then anything Marx and Engels spoke of.
One of the truly great things about Linux is that it gives almost complete freedom to the (informed) individual user, while other operative systems tend to dictate what someone "above" has found is "for the general best".
I believe both Matrox and ATI have daughterboards for their new cards that allow for realtime mpeg-2 (DVD quality) encoding on => Pentium 2 systems.
With one of these cards and a $ 500 25 gig harddisk, you could be doing this already (except of course, you can't expect to use the computer for anything else while you are at it).
Maybe when the current P2 gets replaced this is what I will do with it, like the old Pentium is playing MP3s today (and 486 is, em, printing:-) ).
From reading the protocols bit in Applied Cryptography I got the feeling that all public key systems relied on good and trusted servers for distributing public keys. How do the current systems handle public key management?
Is that not the real area where the land of the free (and the home of the brave) is screwing us over?
Is it just me, or does the idea that something like this is possible just stem from the fact popular misconception that the easily proxied and filterable Web is the Internet. I mean, they can have all ISPs block off http ports so people have tp use the filtering proxies (I think) but to be realistic, they will have to block off all other ports as well.
I mean, how will they stop my naughty pic DCC file bot? How will they keep people from joining my Q3 server where I replaced the wall textures for pornography?
So far I have yet to here of program that scans tcp packets looking for dirty bits...
- All spelling errors are deliberate and for the sake of effect.
The times are seldom and far between, but sometimes I am really proud of my country...
Which is Ironic, because Math is my field, so if the world worked the way they say it does, I should be angry that I can't monopolize whatever I should happen to be the first to stumble upon.
Patents are an infringement on the freedom of thought.
I thought this was a well known English proverb, but maybe I am mistaking (proverbs are a bitch to bilingualism, I can never remember which come from what language).
More clearly stated it would be - "You have to decide whether you want to eat your cake or have it later - you can't do both."
Yes, I know, and this is part of the issue. The point I am trying to make is that the Broadband ISPs can't afford to supply unlimited bandwidth to people who are going to run servers on it. This is fact, it has nothing to do with what the stupid companies said or didn't say.
So as it is, you have a choice between a ratecap, a firewall, and generally bad service. That @HOME are a bunch of idiots who couldn't do the elementary math of guessing that their network would be overloaded when they launched it is really a moot point. You should have done that math...
Their is a certain group of people (who I seem to find are more predominant in America then here) who are always whining about whether things are right, fair, instead of just looking at the situation and trying to make the best out of it. This is the same philosophy that has turned the American legal system into the great cludge of stupidity it has become.
I'm sorry to take the side of the big bad corporation in this issue, but I definitely don't agree with all the whining.
You can't have your cake and eat it too people, if you super cheap flat rate broadband, you just can't expect that they will let you run a 100 channel shoutcast server off it as well.
Yeah, it has its disadvantages if you want to send large files around or remote heavy x applications, but for all other purposes this is enough for home usage, well enough in fact.
I know that several Cable Modem and ADSL services here in Sweden have taken it one step further in combating the server problem and put every user behind an ip masquerading firewall instead (goodbye ICQ, goodbye DCC, goodbye Telnetting/SSHing to the home machine, goodbye any kind of server what so ever). If that is the option, I know what I would choose (if I wasn't stuck on a stupid minute metered ISDN that is)...
I can't remember the page right now, but there was actually a Java port of Quake somewhere on the web at one time. It ran in a Java applett i Netscape and allowed you to walk through one level and even play something like multiplayer.
I believe id software made them close it, but that it popped up again under a different name...
Creative wrote the glide wrapper for the sole purpose of screwing 3dfx over as revenge for the whole STB affair (3dfx suddenly going from supplier to competitor).
It is a rather childish way to run a company, and they had to have been expecting this...
As a rule of thumb, I would feel happy using any crypto that the NSA doesn't want me using...
Unless they are doing a whole reverse psychology thing to make us feel safe with strong crypto by making a big deal about it. But, no matter how many mathemticians they have indoctrinated, they are still government, and as such, by defenition, stupid.
I'm falling for a troll here, but you are making the assumption that Microsoft acts rationally with respect to competition. History has shown they do not.
Microsoft is the most paranoid company on the face of the earth, and whenever they see ANYTHING that even remotely in a million years on a distant planet in Alpha Centauri might threaten their domination of "every desk in every home" (Netscape, Java, DrDos, etc) they go in super defense mode - regardless of whether it is actually a threat or not.
Paranoia is the #1 sign that something is very wrong in Redmond...
Re:Benefits for the community if Red Hat goes publ
on
Red Hat IPO Details
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· Score: 1
>> You can buy Red Hat stock, theoretically this gives you a say in how the company is run (assuming their IPO is preferred voting shares) You are either very rich or very naive.
I bet you're one of those people who votes too...
Re:Except that China is censoring the Internet
on
Bootlegging Buffy
·
· Score: 1
As far as I know, China does not offer Internet access at all. Sure, they offer a select number of Internet services that they can monitor and censor.
You think China is censoring people running programs remotely using X? I think they simply closed that port...
The Web is not the Internet people, people attempting to censor the Web (see Australia) are just driving the adoption of other protocols and services (fine by me).
Anyone else remember the early Ninetees when EVERYTHING (even ftp servers) were to be available via email...
Yes, of course all things seek to survive, but a corporation is by its nature not a complex system like a society. The beauty of the corporation is that it seeks only one thing, money. This is why they are (comparatively) easily controled and regulated.
The issue here is not whether a free market will cure its own evils, because these laws (patents) are not induced by the market, but by the state to begin with. The company is not threatening to dump prices or send hit men over to the startups: they are threatening to use the law against them.
When the law can be used in this respect, the issue is with the law, and discussions about how evil the company is for just wanting money and running over the little guy are not only futile, but stupid.
AOL did not introduce the instant messenger, ICQ had been around a long time and was a great little program at the time. Then AOL bought it and turned it into the huge, screaming piece of bloatware it is today (BY DEFAULT IT SOUNDS LIKE A TYPEWRITER WHEN YOU TYPE!!!)
Just wait 1 year, and pressing the eject button in Winamp will lead you to an AOL page with songs for download (sporting a big fat banner add).
Luckily, I don't see myself ever booting to Windows in one year...
Wow, hold it on the socialism a little will ya. Before we start the march toward a marxist state, consider what you are giving up.
Of course companies care only for money, as entities, that is what companies do, and attacking them for it is about as stupid as attacking a fruitfly for wanting to fuck.
The issue is not that companies want to make money, everyone knows that, but that this is another example of what software patents are allowing companies to do to the little guy.
Commersialism is thankfully rather self regualting in this respect: screwed up laws are discovered and exploited by the companies fast, so they also can be fixed fast. Now we just need the government that enforces the laws to do something...
... or we could just get rid of the whole thing...
Well, you only need the xterms in Linux FOR the extended functionality. If you were using it like you use a palm pilot, of course you could get away with only the gui. And for the cases when you simply can't survive without them (setting up, compiling software etc) you could always use Telnet and run the commands from your PC.
I don't know about the rest of you, but the idea of Telneting to my PDA make me feel all warm and fuzzy...
And besides, I said "next generation" and there is (as always) a lot of cool interfaces (voice rec etc) just around the corner.
Shhh Cmdr, don't give it all away. Let the music industry spend their billions of dollars developing SDMI and making it the only format available in portable audio devices, only to have us to playing audio in whatever format we want (probably streaming) on our next-generation Linux based PDAs...
Of course your portal media player of any kind will merge with your portable/wearable computer/PDA. This is why the whole format control issue is bound to fail : the future is not in embedded cips capable of only one simple task. Sooner or later, all electronics in ones house and outside it will be part of computer systems.
About the wormhole that goes back in time, I heard a refutation of this based on the issue that if the distance between the mouths is less than the time it takes light to travel from the back in time mouth to the forward in time mouth, then you would get energy going around (like a bad microphone - speaker setup), and infinitly much energy would be created instantly, destroying either the wormhole or the Universe.
Is this just bullshit, because it seems rather logical?
I don't believe that one second. Redbook CDs still have to follow the same format or old players won't play them, and that format has no copy protection.
Booby trapping encoders and decoders is a joke, because its not like they can make existing MP3 encoders and decoders "go away" if the new ones won't do what people want them do to. Sure they can watermark (at the cost of sound quality), but what are they going to do, burn the CD with my name in the watermark AFTER I purchase it?
The RIAAs only hope is that they develop a copy protection scheme for the SDMI format that is 10 x smarter than anything that has been done before, and that people actually let themselves be fucked over by the new format.
Did I say I doubt it?
Re:Why movies are not released at the same time
on
TPM movie reel stolen
·
· Score: 1
While the economic reasons for trying to keep the number of prints down might hold to some extent, it is something they are just going to have to get over. Piracy is not a real issue (or it is, but not the extent it is to the big league Music industry) for the movie bis' even when we get the bandwidth for copying 4-5 gig DVD ISOs, since even the best home theatres are nothing compared to the real thing.
But by this sort of action, they are INCITING piracy. I don't want to watch a crummy Camcorder version of TPM, but if my options are a trip to the US that I can't afford and waiting until late August, you can bet your ass I will.
Also, movies here are subtitled (yes, it is annoying) so they need new prints anyways, right? (Some movies come pretty much right away, so I know they can handle subtitleing fast).
Em, I live in Sweden and that is the market I was reffering to. If you think telederegulation has gotten anywhere here you are either blind or in a dream world.
Cable modems have not been widely deployed (so if you have access you are very lucky).
Slashdot Mirror
The pigs wearing clothes thing is a rash simplification of the inherent problems with communism. Communism is fundamentally flawed as a political and social philosophy because it puts the communal and needs and goods over the freedom of the individual. Even the most enlightened and philanthropic leader(s) could not produce a communist state in which I would want to live.
The "Linux Movement" (I know, I know, I know) might be a communal effort, but it reminds much more of the voluntary cooperations of Anarchist socialists, then anything Marx and Engels spoke of.
One of the truly great things about Linux is that it gives almost complete freedom to the (informed) individual user, while other operative systems tend to dictate what someone "above" has found is "for the general best".
I believe both Matrox and ATI have daughterboards for their new cards that allow for realtime mpeg-2 (DVD quality) encoding on => Pentium 2 systems.
:-) ).
With one of these cards and a $ 500 25 gig harddisk, you could be doing this already (except of course, you can't expect to use the computer for anything else while you are at it).
Maybe when the current P2 gets replaced this is what I will do with it, like the old Pentium is playing MP3s today (and 486 is, em, printing
From reading the protocols bit in Applied Cryptography I got the feeling that all public key systems relied on good and trusted servers for distributing public keys. How do the current systems handle public key management?
Is that not the real area where the land of the free (and the home of the brave) is screwing us over?
Is it just me, or does the idea that something like this is possible just stem from the fact popular misconception that the easily proxied and filterable Web is the Internet. I mean, they can have all ISPs block off http ports so people have tp use the filtering proxies (I think) but to be realistic, they will have to block off all other ports as well.
I mean, how will they stop my naughty pic DCC file bot? How will they keep people from joining my Q3 server where I replaced the wall textures for pornography?
So far I have yet to here of program that scans tcp packets looking for dirty bits...
- All spelling errors are deliberate and for the sake of effect.
The times are seldom and far between, but sometimes I am really proud of my country...
Which is Ironic, because Math is my field, so if the world worked the way they say it does, I should be angry that I can't monopolize whatever I should happen to be the first to stumble upon.
Patents are an infringement on the freedom of thought.
I thought this was a well known English proverb, but maybe I am mistaking (proverbs are a bitch to bilingualism, I can never remember which come from what language).
More clearly stated it would be - "You have to decide whether you want to eat your cake or have it later - you can't do both."
Yes, I know, and this is part of the issue. The point I am trying to make is that the Broadband ISPs can't afford to supply unlimited bandwidth to people who are going to run servers on it. This is fact, it has nothing to do with what the stupid companies said or didn't say.
So as it is, you have a choice between a ratecap, a firewall, and generally bad service. That @HOME are a bunch of idiots who couldn't do the elementary math of guessing that their network would be overloaded when they launched it is really a moot point. You should have done that math...
Their is a certain group of people (who I seem to find are more predominant in America then here) who are always whining about whether things are right, fair, instead of just looking at the situation and trying to make the best out of it. This is the same philosophy that has turned the American legal system into the great cludge of stupidity it has become.
I'm sorry to take the side of the big bad corporation in this issue, but I definitely don't agree with all the whining.
You can't have your cake and eat it too people, if you super cheap flat rate broadband, you just can't expect that they will let you run a 100 channel shoutcast server off it as well.
Yeah, it has its disadvantages if you want to send large files around or remote heavy x applications, but for all other purposes this is enough for home usage, well enough in fact.
I know that several Cable Modem and ADSL services here in Sweden have taken it one step further in combating the server problem and put every user behind an ip masquerading firewall instead (goodbye ICQ, goodbye DCC, goodbye Telnetting/SSHing to the home machine, goodbye any kind of server what so ever). If that is the option, I know what I would choose (if I wasn't stuck on a stupid minute metered ISDN that is)...
I can't remember the page right now, but there was actually a Java port of Quake somewhere on the web at one time. It ran in a Java applett i Netscape and allowed you to walk through one level and even play something like multiplayer.
I believe id software made them close it, but that it popped up again under a different name...
And we are a bunch of little chipmunks bating the bear as loud as we can with our collective high pitched little chipmunk voices. Same difference.
To think that Microsoft is not going to rise to the bait is being very naive...
Creative wrote the glide wrapper for the sole purpose of screwing 3dfx over as revenge for the whole STB affair (3dfx suddenly going from supplier to competitor).
It is a rather childish way to run a company, and they had to have been expecting this...
As a rule of thumb, I would feel happy using any crypto that the NSA doesn't want me using...
Unless they are doing a whole reverse psychology thing to make us feel safe with strong crypto by making a big deal about it. But, no matter how many mathemticians they have indoctrinated, they are still government, and as such, by defenition, stupid.
I'm falling for a troll here, but you are making the assumption that Microsoft acts rationally with respect to competition. History has shown they do not.
Microsoft is the most paranoid company on the face of the earth, and whenever they see ANYTHING that even remotely in a million years on a distant planet in Alpha Centauri might threaten their domination of "every desk in every home" (Netscape, Java, DrDos, etc) they go in super defense mode - regardless of whether it is actually a threat or not.
Paranoia is the #1 sign that something is very wrong in Redmond...
>> You can buy Red Hat stock, theoretically this gives you a say in how the company is run (assuming their IPO is preferred voting shares)
You are either very rich or very naive.
I bet you're one of those people who votes too...
As far as I know, China does not offer Internet access at all. Sure, they offer a select number of Internet services that they can monitor and censor.
You think China is censoring people running programs remotely using X? I think they simply closed that port...
The Web is not the Internet people, people attempting to censor the Web (see Australia) are just driving the adoption of other protocols and services (fine by me).
Anyone else remember the early Ninetees when EVERYTHING (even ftp servers) were to be available via email...
Mirabilis did not call people on your contact list your "buddies". Need I say more?
Yes, of course all things seek to survive, but a corporation is by its nature not a complex system like a society. The beauty of the corporation is that it seeks only one thing, money. This is why they are (comparatively) easily controled and regulated.
The issue here is not whether a free market will cure its own evils, because these laws (patents) are not induced by the market, but by the state to begin with. The company is not threatening to dump prices or send hit men over to the startups: they are threatening to use the law against them.
When the law can be used in this respect, the issue is with the law, and discussions about how evil the company is for just wanting money and running over the little guy are not only futile, but stupid.
AOL did not introduce the instant messenger, ICQ had been around a long time and was a great little program at the time. Then AOL bought it and turned it into the huge, screaming piece of bloatware it is today (BY DEFAULT IT SOUNDS LIKE A TYPEWRITER WHEN YOU TYPE!!!)
Just wait 1 year, and pressing the eject button in Winamp will lead you to an AOL page with songs for download (sporting a big fat banner add).
Luckily, I don't see myself ever booting to Windows in one year...
Wow, hold it on the socialism a little will ya. Before we start the march toward a marxist state, consider what you are giving up.
Of course companies care only for money, as entities, that is what companies do, and attacking them for it is about as stupid as attacking a fruitfly for wanting to fuck.
The issue is not that companies want to make money, everyone knows that, but that this is another example of what software patents are allowing companies to do to the little guy.
Commersialism is thankfully rather self regualting in this respect: screwed up laws are discovered and exploited by the companies fast, so they also can be fixed fast. Now we just need the government that enforces the laws to do something...
... or we could just get rid of the whole thing...
Well, you only need the xterms in Linux FOR the extended functionality. If you were using it like you use a palm pilot, of course you could get away with only the gui. And for the cases when you simply can't survive without them (setting up, compiling software etc) you could always use Telnet and run the commands from your PC.
I don't know about the rest of you, but the idea of Telneting to my PDA make me feel all warm and fuzzy...
And besides, I said "next generation" and there is (as always) a lot of cool interfaces (voice rec etc) just around the corner.
Shhh Cmdr, don't give it all away. Let the music industry spend their billions of dollars developing SDMI and making it the only format available in portable audio devices, only to have us to playing audio in whatever format we want (probably streaming) on our next-generation Linux based PDAs...
Of course your portal media player of any kind will merge with your portable/wearable computer/PDA. This is why the whole format control issue is bound to fail : the future is not in embedded cips capable of only one simple task. Sooner or later, all electronics in ones house and outside it will be part of computer systems.
About the wormhole that goes back in time, I heard a refutation of this based on the issue that if the distance between the mouths is less than the time it takes light to travel from the back in time mouth to the forward in time mouth, then you would get energy going around (like a bad microphone - speaker setup), and infinitly much energy would be created instantly, destroying either the wormhole or the Universe.
Is this just bullshit, because it seems rather logical?
I don't believe that one second. Redbook CDs still have to follow the same format or old players won't play them, and that format has no copy protection.
Booby trapping encoders and decoders is a joke, because its not like they can make existing MP3 encoders and decoders "go away" if the new ones won't do what people want them do to. Sure they can watermark (at the cost of sound quality), but what are they going to do, burn the CD with my name in the watermark AFTER I purchase it?
The RIAAs only hope is that they develop a copy protection scheme for the SDMI format that is 10 x smarter than anything that has been done before, and that people actually let themselves be fucked over by the new format.
Did I say I doubt it?
While the economic reasons for trying to keep the number of prints down might hold to some extent, it is something they are just going to have to get over. Piracy is not a real issue (or it is, but not the extent it is to the big league Music industry) for the movie bis' even when we get the bandwidth for copying 4-5 gig DVD ISOs, since even the best home theatres are nothing compared to the real thing.
But by this sort of action, they are INCITING piracy. I don't want to watch a crummy Camcorder version of TPM, but if my options are a trip to the US that I can't afford and waiting until late August, you can bet your ass I will.
Also, movies here are subtitled (yes, it is annoying) so they need new prints anyways, right? (Some movies come pretty much right away, so I know they can handle subtitleing fast).
Em, I live in Sweden and that is the market I was reffering to. If you think telederegulation has gotten anywhere here you are either blind or in a dream world.
Cable modems have not been widely deployed (so if you have access you are very lucky).