The RIAA and MPAA has deeper pockets than the nerd crowd and they have a lot more to lose.
Exactly wrong. The RIAA and MPAA are trivially small compared to the set of people and companies that can benefit from cultural freedom. As an example, consider just the electronics manufacturers that sell devices that are used to share. And as for "a lot more to lose", the group that stands to lose the most here is humanity itself if the absurd idea manages to persist that culture can be owned and people can be excluded from it so some few can make a few more dollars.
What is so bad about wanting your linage to remain pure and not become some sort of grey amalgam?
It actually makes the gene pool worse. It's the equivalent of breeding show dogs. Sure, you can get them to look exactly like the breed standard and win your blue ribbon - but it's at the cost of intelligence, temperament, and motor skills other than walking around a show stage. In contrast, smart and useful dogs almost never look purebred.
With dogs, it's a stupid hobby. With humans, it's strictly a bad trade off. Even if we accept that breeding humans is a good idea, breeding them for appearance is still a bad plan.
Much like a (I live in Israel, so bear with me) Palestinian male will be "Isolated" from Tel Aviv and "Not interbreed" with his Jewish female counterpart
And if that remained reasonably consistent with two separate stable populations for (say) a hundred thousand years, the populations would diverge enough genetically that they'd lose their ability to interbreed. In reality, the Israelis and Palestinians probably *do* interbreed enough - even in the current political climate - to prevent this, and there's no way the situation will stay the way it is long enough to matter evolutionarily anyway, but conceptually a cultural divide could lead to the human species splitting if it prevented interbreeding for thousands of generations.
If you don't want to embrace vendor lock in and digital restrictions for the convenience that the ebook provides, then you're completely free to not buy one.
The problem here is that if enough people trade freedom for convenience in this way, it will become a social norm. At that point you haven't just hurt yourselves.
So... nuclear reactors are a security threat not because they are dangerous, but because "nuclear" has been overhyped so much that anything involving the word will be overhyped again in the future? Wow... lamest argument ever.
Further, "an organized terrorist raid on a couple dozen" is going to be newsworthy in any case, even if it's followed by "apple orchards". The fact of the matter is that if there is a terrorist group that organized that wants to cause mischief, they'll find something to do. If we slow down and worry about it, they don't even have to *exist* to win.
I seriously don't understand. Do you wake up in the morning and think "I'm going to spend $400 for vendor lock-in and digital restrictions, I'm so glad that some company is going to get a ton of my money and get to make my choices for me in the future"?
I mean, for that much money you could buy one of the various mini-laptops and read whatever you want on it or buy something like 50 paper books. I just can't understand how option C, "make Amazon's wet dreams come true", is even worth consideration in comparison.
man, I've got thousands of books I bought used and I'm planning on getting an eBook reader in 2008.
The question isn't "Is an ebook reader a good deal for me today?", it's the much more interesting "What will the social result be if everyone gets an ebook reader with DRM?". The answer is simply that the publishers will have the full control over your use of written human knowledge that they've always wanted - which should be a prospect that makes the convenience argument seem largely irrelevant.
This is a very simple question of ethics, and it fails the Kantian "can I universalize this choice" test. Buying a DRM-infested ebook reader simply isn't an ethical choice.
Hydro, geothermal, tidal and wave, wind and solar energy are all cleaner.
Every one of those has the same basic set of problems: They only work well in some specific places and those places only support so many power plants. Further, every one of them (except maybe solar-thermal in deserts) has it's own set of environmental issues. Further, the environmental problems of nuclear power are vastly overhyped - most of the complaints simply aren't real given modern nuclear technology.
I absolutely agree that we should favor these renewable energy sources over non-renewable sources, but the simple fact is that we use more energy than these sources can economically and practically provide - even just the rate at which our usage increases is faster than generation using these sources can be built out. That leaves us with a simple choice: Coal or Nuclear. I'll happily argue that Nuclear is more environmentally friendly than some renewable methods. You can argue that coal is cleaner than that if you want to, but you'd sound like an idiot.
It would be fine with me if the entire system was government regulated and always watched over by armed guards.
Why so paranoid?
We let immigrants who don't speak English actually *own* gas stations with no background check or anything. Do you realize how much damage you could do with a gas station worth of gasoline if you made a fuel-air explosive out of it? Hint: It's about the same order of magnitude energy-wise as a small tactical nuke, and a fuel-air explosion may be more efficient at damaging structures.
This is a civilian nuclear reactor. The worst realistic case is that someone would crack it open and poison people with the uranium inside. Making a bomb out of it is basically impossible. You'd have to build exactly the sort of nuclear program that nations like Iran have trouble with. Some random guys don't have the budget or the equipment to even think about it.
So, to be realistic, this thing is strictly less dangerous than a gas station. It therefore deserves about the same security measures as a gas station - maybe a padlock on the maintenance hatch.
Sure, I'm sitting here on a 6 Mb/s connection, but a lot of folks still aren't.
In the civilized world - like, say, the Czech Republic - that's considered damn slow.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
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A malicious user could submit invalid input containing comments or CDATA sections which would confuse every regex-based system I've seen.
Can you give an example? The filter that I'm visualizing simply changes every instance of "<", ">" or "&" to an entity reference unless the character is part of a whitelisted tag. Comments and CDATA sections both start with "<", so I'm not seeing how they would cause problems.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
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CDATA sections and comments seem blatantly unnecessary. Why does a website comment system want to be allowing HTML any more complicated than the list of allowed tags here on Slashdot?
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
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Does the problem in this case actually require parsing HTML?
It seems to me that we don't care about the parse tree at all - we just want to be sure that the output of the filter doesn't contain any potentially dangerous tags.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
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How can you not do it with a regex (or two)? You just entity encode any tag or entity not on the whitelist.
I'm not seeing the category difference. One is a general purpose computer operating system intended for Desktops, Workstations, and Servers. The other is a... general purpose computer operating system intended for Desktops, Workstations, and Servers.
There are really only two relevant distinctions between them: Freedom and specific application compatibility. If you must have freedom, or must have ET:Quake Wars, or must have Photoshop then only one of them will work for you. But we're not comparing applications, and as usual we're ignoring freedom, so the systems are easily similar enough to be compared.
Realistically speaking, about 99% of all stability problems (regardless of OS) are caused by defective hardware.
You're ignoring the other 99% of stability problems caused by malware, and the 5% of stability problems caused by known buggy multimedia application/driver interactions.
But I do agree with your base point. If you're having consistent stability problems on a fresh OS install, you probably have a hardware issue.
The parts didn't even need to be smuggled - neither the UAE or Iran is interested in searching vechicles at border crossings to enforce US trade sanctions. Seriously - your average underaged keg party in the US probably required a more detailed scheme than this (the person buying the servers in the UAE didn't even need to be 21).
The turn of the millennium is *way* too late, and the DMCA is pretty tame compared to the major contenders for "which law made it obvious".
Here are some historical points to consider:
The civil war, when states were prevented from leaving the union by force.
After the civil war, when courts ruled that the 14th amendment applied to corporations.
Right after WWII, when the massive new arms industry wasn't dismantled and instead came to have massive post-war political and economic influence.
The Vietnam War, where the US invaded a country to prevent it from democratically selecting a socialist economic system.
Note the two patterns here. Points one and four are the US deciding that we have the right to use military force to impose our opinions on others. Points two and three gave large corporations the political clout to form those opinions for us.
Sure - you personally may not have noticed that large corporations control our political system until after they gave themselves ownership of all major cultural works for the past century and then tried to take the obvious next step (if they own culture then people shouldn't get to use it without their permission), but that's really pretty minor compared to the damage that US corporate influence has done outside the US over the last 50 years. They're just messing with your life directly now rather than just bombing poor people you'll never meet.
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Exactly wrong. The RIAA and MPAA are trivially small compared to the set of people and companies that can benefit from cultural freedom. As an example, consider just the electronics manufacturers that sell devices that are used to share. And as for "a lot more to lose", the group that stands to lose the most here is humanity itself if the absurd idea manages to persist that culture can be owned and people can be excluded from it so some few can make a few more dollars.
It actually makes the gene pool worse. It's the equivalent of breeding show dogs. Sure, you can get them to look exactly like the breed standard and win your blue ribbon - but it's at the cost of intelligence, temperament, and motor skills other than walking around a show stage. In contrast, smart and useful dogs almost never look purebred.
With dogs, it's a stupid hobby. With humans, it's strictly a bad trade off. Even if we accept that breeding humans is a good idea, breeding them for appearance is still a bad plan.
And if that remained reasonably consistent with two separate stable populations for (say) a hundred thousand years, the populations would diverge enough genetically that they'd lose their ability to interbreed. In reality, the Israelis and Palestinians probably *do* interbreed enough - even in the current political climate - to prevent this, and there's no way the situation will stay the way it is long enough to matter evolutionarily anyway, but conceptually a cultural divide could lead to the human species splitting if it prevented interbreeding for thousands of generations.
The problem here is that if enough people trade freedom for convenience in this way, it will become a social norm. At that point you haven't just hurt yourselves.
So... nuclear reactors are a security threat not because they are dangerous, but because "nuclear" has been overhyped so much that anything involving the word will be overhyped again in the future? Wow... lamest argument ever.
Further, "an organized terrorist raid on a couple dozen" is going to be newsworthy in any case, even if it's followed by "apple orchards". The fact of the matter is that if there is a terrorist group that organized that wants to cause mischief, they'll find something to do. If we slow down and worry about it, they don't even have to *exist* to win.
I seriously don't understand. Do you wake up in the morning and think "I'm going to spend $400 for vendor lock-in and digital restrictions, I'm so glad that some company is going to get a ton of my money and get to make my choices for me in the future"?
I mean, for that much money you could buy one of the various mini-laptops and read whatever you want on it or buy something like 50 paper books. I just can't understand how option C, "make Amazon's wet dreams come true", is even worth consideration in comparison.
The question isn't "Is an ebook reader a good deal for me today?", it's the much more interesting "What will the social result be if everyone gets an ebook reader with DRM?". The answer is simply that the publishers will have the full control over your use of written human knowledge that they've always wanted - which should be a prospect that makes the convenience argument seem largely irrelevant.
This is a very simple question of ethics, and it fails the Kantian "can I universalize this choice" test. Buying a DRM-infested ebook reader simply isn't an ethical choice.
Every one of those has the same basic set of problems: They only work well in some specific places and those places only support so many power plants. Further, every one of them (except maybe solar-thermal in deserts) has it's own set of environmental issues. Further, the environmental problems of nuclear power are vastly overhyped - most of the complaints simply aren't real given modern nuclear technology.
I absolutely agree that we should favor these renewable energy sources over non-renewable sources, but the simple fact is that we use more energy than these sources can economically and practically provide - even just the rate at which our usage increases is faster than generation using these sources can be built out. That leaves us with a simple choice: Coal or Nuclear. I'll happily argue that Nuclear is more environmentally friendly than some renewable methods. You can argue that coal is cleaner than that if you want to, but you'd sound like an idiot.
Not always. Mostly just since people started hyping terrorists in the 80's.
Why so paranoid?
We let immigrants who don't speak English actually *own* gas stations with no background check or anything. Do you realize how much damage you could do with a gas station worth of gasoline if you made a fuel-air explosive out of it? Hint: It's about the same order of magnitude energy-wise as a small tactical nuke, and a fuel-air explosion may be more efficient at damaging structures.
This is a civilian nuclear reactor. The worst realistic case is that someone would crack it open and poison people with the uranium inside. Making a bomb out of it is basically impossible. You'd have to build exactly the sort of nuclear program that nations like Iran have trouble with. Some random guys don't have the budget or the equipment to even think about it.
So, to be realistic, this thing is strictly less dangerous than a gas station. It therefore deserves about the same security measures as a gas station - maybe a padlock on the maintenance hatch.
Since you're manually typing a constant number of cases, the if-else tree has O(1) complexity. Always.
Lambda-calculus is in no way high level, it just doesn't happen to correspond to a machine model.
In the civilized world - like, say, the Czech Republic - that's considered damn slow.
Can you give an example? The filter that I'm visualizing simply changes every instance of "<", ">" or "&" to an entity reference unless the character is part of a whitelisted tag. Comments and CDATA sections both start with "<", so I'm not seeing how they would cause problems.
CDATA sections and comments seem blatantly unnecessary. Why does a website comment system want to be allowing HTML any more complicated than the list of allowed tags here on Slashdot?
Does the problem in this case actually require parsing HTML?
It seems to me that we don't care about the parse tree at all - we just want to be sure that the output of the filter doesn't contain any potentially dangerous tags.
How can you not do it with a regex (or two)? You just entity encode any tag or entity not on the whitelist.
You've already heard Microsoft's entire planned response (i.e. nothing).
If Microsoft were cornered on the question, their response would be "RAM is cheap and anything other than our software is crap anyway".
I'm not seeing the category difference. One is a general purpose computer operating system intended for Desktops, Workstations, and Servers. The other is a... general purpose computer operating system intended for Desktops, Workstations, and Servers.
There are really only two relevant distinctions between them: Freedom and specific application compatibility. If you must have freedom, or must have ET:Quake Wars, or must have Photoshop then only one of them will work for you. But we're not comparing applications, and as usual we're ignoring freedom, so the systems are easily similar enough to be compared.
You're ignoring the other 99% of stability problems caused by malware, and the 5% of stability problems caused by known buggy multimedia application/driver interactions.
But I do agree with your base point. If you're having consistent stability problems on a fresh OS install, you probably have a hardware issue.
When Iran annexes Poland, I'll support attacking them.
The parts didn't even need to be smuggled - neither the UAE or Iran is interested in searching vechicles at border crossings to enforce US trade sanctions. Seriously - your average underaged keg party in the US probably required a more detailed scheme than this (the person buying the servers in the UAE didn't even need to be 21).
Seriously, to get that many computers into Iran they might have needed *a second truck*.
Don't worry. I'm sure it won't come to that. I'm sure we'll manage to start the war first, undeclared.
The turn of the millennium is *way* too late, and the DMCA is pretty tame compared to the major contenders for "which law made it obvious".
Here are some historical points to consider:
Note the two patterns here. Points one and four are the US deciding that we have the right to use military force to impose our opinions on others. Points two and three gave large corporations the political clout to form those opinions for us.
Sure - you personally may not have noticed that large corporations control our political system until after they gave themselves ownership of all major cultural works for the past century and then tried to take the obvious next step (if they own culture then people shouldn't get to use it without their permission), but that's really pretty minor compared to the damage that US corporate influence has done outside the US over the last 50 years. They're just messing with your life directly now rather than just bombing poor people you'll never meet.