There's only no large scale distribution of obsolete systems because there's no financial advantage - more modern stuff is cheaper. Even if a customer requested it, the manufacturer would probably refuse because keeping open obsolete fabs is a waste of resources.
Even if the OLPC specs stay the same (which they won't - the guys involved will happily accept free upgrades), the high volume mainstream computer market will keep advancing and producing higher specced kit for the same or lower prices. Try buying a 32 Meg SIMM today - it's more than twice the price of a 256 Meg DIMM.
It's really easy to learn things as a small child, and it becomes progressively more difficult as one gets older. If we held off teaching basic pre-algebra until people were 16 years old, only the most utterly brilliant people would ever learn calculus.
On the other hand, with the way you're putting down computers, you might be one of the people who thinks that Math is overrated too. I've heard people say "I can't think of any reason I'd ever use Algebra, much less Calculus. We should cut Math budgets in schools and do more important things like offering work-studies and give kids credits for working a cash register."
There are a lot of things that are important. Kids are really good at learning things. Teaching them more things, and giving them more opportunities to learn, is a much better plan than trying to shelter them from "being exposed too early".
Who cares about a profit motive - if you can make 512 megs of RAM for $20 and 256 megs costs $25 because of low volume, you'll just stop making the 256 because it's pointless.
We're not talking about "data." We're talking about a shiny plastic disc, its content, and other copies of the content of that disc.
The shiny plastic disk holds data. That's what its content is: data. Talking about material instances of data is much less meaningful than you might intuitively think - once you have data, one of the natural things that happens is that you can make as many copies as you want. In fact - if you want to listen to a CD, that automatically makes at least one copy (in the RAM of the player). If you play a DVD on a computer - at least two automatic copies (RAM and VRAM). If you make a third copy on to the hard drive, you don't have to listen to the DVD drive whir. Copies aren't something that can be avoided, they're a technical detail.
Restricting copying is misunderstanding the nature of data. Redistribution is different - restricting redistribution is merely forcing people to be mean and antisocial for no good reason.
The government is supposed to be in the business of whatever the people tell it to be in the business of.
The federal government of the United States is *supposed* to be in the business of a limited set of things that it was granted power over by the constitution. I guess that video games are relevant to "interstate commerce", in the same way that medical marijuana in California and growing wheat for personal use are, but...
I own a computer, scanner, paper and printer... printing my own money is my own business
Any law that makes certain actions illegal is a tradeoff. I'm actually not happy with the law that says that printing things that look like money is illegal - there are probably other options that are less restrictive (perhaps stop using paper for money)... but it's a hell of a lot more reasonable than a ban on personal data copying.
If you loan your CD to your friend the content of that CD is still limited to being played in a single location.
Data simply doesn't have this property. Any argument based on the premise that it does is fallacious.
If I own a hammer I am not allowed to freely hit people simply because they are on my property.
Ahh... but you are allowed to hit a nail, or your TV, or whatever else you want that won't hurt anyone.
It's true that making a copy of a CD for a friend in the United States is currently illegal. I would say that this is ethically equivalent to a law that says that says that it's illegal to walk anywhere - sure it helps the sales of cars and gasoline, but it's not a good law.
Copying and distributing is infringement. However, if you lend your friend your CD and they make a copy of it and return your CD, THAT is fully legal under Canadian law.
Emphasizing that difference is silly.
The whole idea that this "intellectual property" farce can interfere with my *real* property rights is absurd. If you want to control data, don't share it with anyone. Like any secret, once it's public that's it - it's public and you don't have any control. Contorting the law to try to simulate an imagined "ownership" of information is foolish - and when that contortion interferes with actual property rights it turns into a major problem.
If that were really the case then why make a copy? Just loan your friend the CD.
And then have to worry about them remembering to return it?
Sure, the difference is "only" convenience, but - contrary to the belief of certain Slashdot trolls - there's nothing wrong with making things easier for yourself. The realities of technology are such that making a copy of a CD for a friend is trivially easy. The belief that anyone even has a right to know that you've done so, much less to prevent it, is absurd. I own the CD, I own the blank CD, I own the burner, it's in my house, what I do with my property on my property - including giving the burned CD to a friend - is my business.
Okay, the distro-provided package cripples my display capabilities for (to the best of my knowledge) no immediately apparent reason. The proprietary driver doesn't.
You're completely missing the point of the post you're responding to.
He agrees that the default "nv" driver has less functionality than the proprietary "nvidia" driver. He then suggests that you install the official Debian or Ubuntu package *of the proprietary driver*. You didn't know that there was an official package of the proprietary driver? There is, it works better with the package system, and even gets automatically upgraded occasionally.
Want to use a serial port? Got to set up permissions. If it is a USB serial port, then you have to do this every time you boot/plug in (unless you're hairy chested enough to write a script).
That was true. For Slackware. In 1999.
My last use of a USB port involved a digital camera on Ubuntu 6.10. I plugged in the camera and a window popped up asking if I wanted to import photos. I clicked "Import". There definitely weren't any permissions involved.
If the laws of the universe were such that they could have had infinite free copies of the tea, you can be damn sure they would have. In fact, if it were possible to make an unlimited amount of tea for free, anyone who was denied tea on the basis that they hadn't paid would be really pissed off.
A absolutely agree with you that the DMCA and 100+ year copyright terms are a gigantic injustice worthy of protest. Separately, I believe that a restriction on non-commercial copying of *any* data is also an injustice worthy of protest. I don't actually listen to much music (mostly just the trash-pop station on the radio and some KOMPRESSOR mp3s), but I encourage others to pirate music because it will encourage a "non-commercial copying is OK" mindset that I approve of.
The guys who participated in the Boston Tea Party hid their identities and never got caught, but they made damn clear that their action was public knowledge and we still learn about it in history class today.
"Pirating" music is about breaking the law in order to save yourself some change.
People don't push for political change that doesn't benifit them. I'm not sure what you're really getting at here. The implication that if it's possible to pay money for something one is ethically obligated to do so... that's absurd.
Copyright infringement is not stealing. It's not even *like* stealing.
Say I do two things: I build a car and I write a book.
If you steal my car, I no longer have the awesome car I built. I will be very sad.
If you make a copy of my book without my permission, I still have my copy of the book. Sure, you didn't give me any money... but you normally don't give me any money. The case where you have a copy of my book isn't special.
People complaining about the money they lose because people violate their copyright are basically the same as Ford complaining because I bought a Honda instead. "Buying a Honda Civic is THEFT. We lost $8,000 because you didn't buy a Ford Focus. We here at Ford lose billions of dollars a year because of those damn pirates at Honda."
Data has a natural price of near $0. If you want to compete with that, you'll need a business model that works. Government protectionism isn't a valid business model, unless you're Verizon. Sorry.
Engaging in illegal activity, however, is not a good way to express dissent.
So Rosa Parks should have stayed in the back of the bus? Some guys dressed up as "Indians" shouldn't have thrown a bunch of tea into Boston harbour?
Civil disobedience has been a core technique in the expression of political dissent for as long as there have been laws and politics. Yes - it's a calculated risk to violate the law to make a political statement, but it's also one of the few ways to be heard at all.
For practical purposes even SHA-1 is still reasonably safe.
That's a very dangerous statement. It can be much easier to extend theoretical attacks into practical attacks than you might think. Cryptographic algorithms only provide any security at all because they are supposed to have specific mathematical properties. SHA-1 doesn't have the ones it's supposed to.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from, but it's largely false.
You hear a lot about cryptographic breaks because they make good news on Slashdot, but the fact of the matter is that if you encrypted something in 1978 using 3-DES it'd still be 100% secure today. If you encrypt something today using a secure 256-bit symmetric key encryption algorithm it will remain secure forever unless something really unexpected happens in computing (and no, quantum computers aren't unexpected enough).
Now, we don't yet have a good enough understanding of the math behind encryption to prove that a given algorithm is secure, so someone could always discover a serious design fuckup and crack an algorithm. That happens pretty rarely with major algorithms. We understand cryptographic hash algorithms even less than symmetric key encryption algorithms... that's why MD5 and SHA1 got cracked, and why this hash contest is really valuable.
I can't say that our crypto is secure, but I can say that it's not "temporarily secure". If it's broken, it will be because of a design flaw, not because computers got faster.
Slashdot Mirror
There's only no large scale distribution of obsolete systems because there's no financial advantage - more modern stuff is cheaper. Even if a customer requested it, the manufacturer would probably refuse because keeping open obsolete fabs is a waste of resources.
So how do you get 12 volt, 5 volt, 3.3 volt, and 1.5 volt DC from that?
Oh god no. Have you seen what Microsoft Word outputs for HTML? Can you imagine the monstrosity that Microsoft-Generated TeX would be?
Even if the OLPC specs stay the same (which they won't - the guys involved will happily accept free upgrades), the high volume mainstream computer market will keep advancing and producing higher specced kit for the same or lower prices. Try buying a 32 Meg SIMM today - it's more than twice the price of a 256 Meg DIMM.
It's pointless if you could sell them twice the capacity in a compatible RAM module for 20% less money.
It's really easy to learn things as a small child, and it becomes progressively more difficult as one gets older. If we held off teaching basic pre-algebra until people were 16 years old, only the most utterly brilliant people would ever learn calculus.
On the other hand, with the way you're putting down computers, you might be one of the people who thinks that Math is overrated too. I've heard people say "I can't think of any reason I'd ever use Algebra, much less Calculus. We should cut Math budgets in schools and do more important things like offering work-studies and give kids credits for working a cash register."
There are a lot of things that are important. Kids are really good at learning things. Teaching them more things, and giving them more opportunities to learn, is a much better plan than trying to shelter them from "being exposed too early".
Who cares about a profit motive - if you can make 512 megs of RAM for $20 and 256 megs costs $25 because of low volume, you'll just stop making the 256 because it's pointless.
You've never played a good game of "Pick a number" D&D.
Player: So, what level are we?
GM: Pick a number.
Player: 321.
GM: Ok. I'll be checking your math.
Player: Shit. 18.
GM: Ok.
(Not that I'm one of the loser players who can't handle genning a 321st level D&D character).
The shiny plastic disk holds data. That's what its content is: data. Talking about material instances of data is much less meaningful than you might intuitively think - once you have data, one of the natural things that happens is that you can make as many copies as you want. In fact - if you want to listen to a CD, that automatically makes at least one copy (in the RAM of the player). If you play a DVD on a computer - at least two automatic copies (RAM and VRAM). If you make a third copy on to the hard drive, you don't have to listen to the DVD drive whir. Copies aren't something that can be avoided, they're a technical detail.
Restricting copying is misunderstanding the nature of data. Redistribution is different - restricting redistribution is merely forcing people to be mean and antisocial for no good reason.
The federal government of the United States is *supposed* to be in the business of a limited set of things that it was granted power over by the constitution. I guess that video games are relevant to "interstate commerce", in the same way that medical marijuana in California and growing wheat for personal use are, but...
Any law that makes certain actions illegal is a tradeoff. I'm actually not happy with the law that says that printing things that look like money is illegal - there are probably other options that are less restrictive (perhaps stop using paper for money)... but it's a hell of a lot more reasonable than a ban on personal data copying.
Data simply doesn't have this property. Any argument based on the premise that it does is fallacious.
Ahh... but you are allowed to hit a nail, or your TV, or whatever else you want that won't hurt anyone.
It's true that making a copy of a CD for a friend in the United States is currently illegal. I would say that this is ethically equivalent to a law that says that says that it's illegal to walk anywhere - sure it helps the sales of cars and gasoline, but it's not a good law.
Emphasizing that difference is silly.
The whole idea that this "intellectual property" farce can interfere with my *real* property rights is absurd. If you want to control data, don't share it with anyone. Like any secret, once it's public that's it - it's public and you don't have any control. Contorting the law to try to simulate an imagined "ownership" of information is foolish - and when that contortion interferes with actual property rights it turns into a major problem.
New Zealand - still the safe choice.
And then have to worry about them remembering to return it?
Sure, the difference is "only" convenience, but - contrary to the belief of certain Slashdot trolls - there's nothing wrong with making things easier for yourself. The realities of technology are such that making a copy of a CD for a friend is trivially easy. The belief that anyone even has a right to know that you've done so, much less to prevent it, is absurd. I own the CD, I own the blank CD, I own the burner, it's in my house, what I do with my property on my property - including giving the burned CD to a friend - is my business.
Did you even open the package manager and search for "nvidia"?
If you had, you would have seen that both the binary driver and the nvidia-settings are available as official packages.
You're completely missing the point of the post you're responding to.
He agrees that the default "nv" driver has less functionality than the proprietary "nvidia" driver. He then suggests that you install the official Debian or Ubuntu package *of the proprietary driver*. You didn't know that there was an official package of the proprietary driver? There is, it works better with the package system, and even gets automatically upgraded occasionally.
That was true. For Slackware. In 1999.
My last use of a USB port involved a digital camera on Ubuntu 6.10. I plugged in the camera and a window popped up asking if I wanted to import photos. I clicked "Import". There definitely weren't any permissions involved.
If the laws of the universe were such that they could have had infinite free copies of the tea, you can be damn sure they would have. In fact, if it were possible to make an unlimited amount of tea for free, anyone who was denied tea on the basis that they hadn't paid would be really pissed off.
A absolutely agree with you that the DMCA and 100+ year copyright terms are a gigantic injustice worthy of protest. Separately, I believe that a restriction on non-commercial copying of *any* data is also an injustice worthy of protest. I don't actually listen to much music (mostly just the trash-pop station on the radio and some KOMPRESSOR mp3s), but I encourage others to pirate music because it will encourage a "non-commercial copying is OK" mindset that I approve of.
The guys who participated in the Boston Tea Party hid their identities and never got caught, but they made damn clear that their action was public knowledge and we still learn about it in history class today.
People don't push for political change that doesn't benifit them. I'm not sure what you're really getting at here. The implication that if it's possible to pay money for something one is ethically obligated to do so... that's absurd.
Let's go over this again:
Copyright infringement is not stealing. It's not even *like* stealing.
Say I do two things: I build a car and I write a book.
If you steal my car, I no longer have the awesome car I built. I will be very sad.
If you make a copy of my book without my permission, I still have my copy of the book. Sure, you didn't give me any money... but you normally don't give me any money. The case where you have a copy of my book isn't special.
People complaining about the money they lose because people violate their copyright are basically the same as Ford complaining because I bought a Honda instead. "Buying a Honda Civic is THEFT. We lost $8,000 because you didn't buy a Ford Focus. We here at Ford lose billions of dollars a year because of those damn pirates at Honda."
Data has a natural price of near $0. If you want to compete with that, you'll need a business model that works. Government protectionism isn't a valid business model, unless you're Verizon. Sorry.
So Rosa Parks should have stayed in the back of the bus? Some guys dressed up as "Indians" shouldn't have thrown a bunch of tea into Boston harbour?
Civil disobedience has been a core technique in the expression of political dissent for as long as there have been laws and politics. Yes - it's a calculated risk to violate the law to make a political statement, but it's also one of the few ways to be heard at all.
That's a very dangerous statement. It can be much easier to extend theoretical attacks into practical attacks than you might think. Cryptographic algorithms only provide any security at all because they are supposed to have specific mathematical properties. SHA-1 doesn't have the ones it's supposed to.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from, but it's largely false.
You hear a lot about cryptographic breaks because they make good news on Slashdot, but the fact of the matter is that if you encrypted something in 1978 using 3-DES it'd still be 100% secure today. If you encrypt something today using a secure 256-bit symmetric key encryption algorithm it will remain secure forever unless something really unexpected happens in computing (and no, quantum computers aren't unexpected enough).
Now, we don't yet have a good enough understanding of the math behind encryption to prove that a given algorithm is secure, so someone could always discover a serious design fuckup and crack an algorithm. That happens pretty rarely with major algorithms. We understand cryptographic hash algorithms even less than symmetric key encryption algorithms... that's why MD5 and SHA1 got cracked, and why this hash contest is really valuable.
I can't say that our crypto is secure, but I can say that it's not "temporarily secure". If it's broken, it will be because of a design flaw, not because computers got faster.