So we can say that the Inquisitors and Conquistadores weren't true Christians, and that the USSR and China weren't truly Communist. And where does that get us?
In both cases at least some of people that you mentioned adhered to their doctrines and therefore were true Christians or Communists. I won't comment on the first, however in the second case goals and means are turned upside down by anti-communist propaganda -- socialist states were the means, choosen by communists (to be exact, some of communists) to achieve their goal in the future, yet I have yet to find an American who is not convinced that USSR is a completed implementation of Communism doctrine.
Labels are slippery things. Though two things that can be inferred: states which call themselves Communist
No country ever called itself Communist -- communist doctrine doesn't even have a definition of "communist country". Those countries called themselves Socialist, and it is even prominently placed in most of their full names. Dominant (or the only) political party in those countries was Communist, yet country never was claimed to be an implementation of Communism.
are likely to be horrendously oppressive, and organised religion is a tempting justification for all manner of atrocity.
In my personal experience oppression in capitalist country (US) is at the same order of magnitude as in socialist one (USSR), just means and directions of oppression differ -- in socialist countries government is corrupt by its own means, and oppresses everyone, while in capitalist countries big business corrupts government and oppresses the population with the help of the corrupt government. I admit that countries in the state of political/economical disorder (current Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) are much worse than both systems in their stable state, however I hardly can see it as a valid excuse.
How is communism a better system? It doesn't solve the problem of allocation of scarce resources as well as a decentralised system would, and then there's the small matter of it breaking down if central control is subverted (which means that all attempts to realise it require totalitarian authority).
I have never said that communism is a better system (previous poster said it, not me), but communism's main idea is that resources don't have to be scarce -- by communists' theory improvements in technology and society can cause abundance of all kinds of resources, and only greed can prevent people from using such resources responsibly, thus causing artificial scarcity for much longer time than it would be "natural". Therefore they claim that before abundance will be actually achieved people should become "better", more responsible and cooperative and less driven by primitive search of wealth and power (then in the case of true abundance people would feel guilty or even can become too bored if they would become worse slackers than the level where society sustains the abundance).
Countries that west called "communist" never claimed to achieve "communism" -- they called themselves "socialist" countries, and centralized control of the economy was claimed to be necessary only in socialist but not communist society. Communist governments of socialist countries were supposed to achieve the goal of building and advancing society that consists of those more responsible/cooperative people until the advancement of society will produce both abundant resources and responsible enough population to handle the abundance in the way that will allow true "comminism" to be self-supporting.
If by "better" you mean nicer in an abstract, non-practical sense, that could be argued. But an even nicer system would be for everybody to have as much of everything they want. It looks quite peachy, unless you actually try to implement it.
I agree with that. One can doubt that their goal was practical or achievable, and one can certainly point out that the way, "socialism" was implemented created totalitarian and corrupt governments. However they definitely weren't the first political movement facing this problem. Christian religion also taught that only development of virtues (whatever "virtues" are) can improve the life of people, and the same Christian religion caused quite a lot of violations of personal freedom, produced corrupt hierarchy of organized religion that supported the worst governments of the world, etc. Dominant ideologies of "capitalism", while probably being the most stable currently, have shown that they are, too, capable of producing social structures and political mechanisms that defeat their original purpose, reduce personal freedom, give people disincentive for productive work, and I believe that libertarian ideas, if implemented, will not be immune to this disease either (IMHO they are actually more vulnerable -- libertarians, even more than communists, ignore the fact that society always has forces that destabilize it, and even though stability is desirable for most of society members, without a mechanism that supports such a stability it can be easily turned into something that has a stabilizing mechanism -- anything between feudalism, military rule and current form of capitalism, dominated by few players with blatantly anti-consumer policy).
Communism may be a disagreeable philosophy, and it produced a large amount of grief and suffering, however your criticism of it shows that you are attacking some imaginary view of "communism", established by anti-communist propaganda, not the real thing. Any intelligent supporter of communism would point it out, and it probably would be a tough argument for "rah-rah, communism is bad" crowd.
You can't exactly think that communists would want say their political beliefs being challenged would you? I can't say that you would. This is bad for keeping control.
All political movements are bad at handling open discussions of their doctrines -- one thing is preaching to the converted and booing at small number of opponents in presence of huge crowd of supporters, and another one is a discussion where both supporters and opponents have comparable opportunity to explain their views and challenge each other. Actually I have seen communists defending their views in open discussion with stronger arguments and in much more intelligent manner than libertarians ever did when placed in unfriendly environment.
Why would it be really silly to decrypt it first? Decrpyting it allows it to be distributed to anyone on any media that you choose. It allows it to be used in players that don't respect Region Enconding. Lastly, it allows you to compress it into another format with near perfect results.
Because no other existing media can store this amount of information without either being extremely expensive (hard drives) or slow (tapes), and?
With an encrypted DVD, your limited to making byte for byte copies to another DVD that only play in MPAA blessed DVD players.
For the purpose of piracy it makes no sense because buyers have the same DVDCCA-blessed players -- and copying data for playing on other devices by legal owner of the copy is legitimate use under existing copyright law -- as legitimate as playing it.
Moreover, he said, some of the perceived problems with the legislation are unenforceable. Critics, for example, have said the law would allow companies to suppress critical reviews of their projects.
Is it a confession that part of that law is specifically designed to assist frivolous litigation?
...on finding actual crackers? What will it accomplish? They already seen machines that were broken into, so they know (and the rest of people can make educated guess, and most likely would be right), which holes were exploited, and what DoS tools were used. At this point the only thing that can improve the situation is writing short HOWTO about anti-spoof routing and security updates, and using media to make sure that even the most pointy-haired PHB of all PHBs, and laziest head of department in university will get the idea that he should demand it from local sysadmin and ISP that he uses ("Hey, remember that I asked you last year about Y2K updates? Now make sure that spoof-protection is in place, too.").
Even if they will find someone, no one will believe them that they got the right people (=> bad publicity for FBI), and no one who would want to repeat this attack would be stopped by that. They can't lock in the cell the knowledge about bugs and DoS tools -- it's already everywhere, and if it wasn't, it could be easily found again, so why waste the money, time and effort on finding some (bad) people if it can be spent by making things invulnerable to them?
- it's great for me as a SysAdmin, wonderful server platform for internet applications, and so on. But desktops? Bullshit. Come back when you've got a productivity suite HALF as good as MS Office, or even WordPerfect.
^^And that was the proof -- WordPerfect runs on Linux, troll.
And still the everything works quite well... I get my salary every month even though my bank is using MS products.
Don't be too sure about it -- banks don't run any of their actual operations on Windows. If they will switch to Windows in some "upgrade", handled by the next generation of managers, we will all start having a lot of questions, where are our money.
However, lots of times you need an OS that allows for low level manipulation of the IP stack. IIRC, you can't do this in Win95 so spoofing packets like a worm on crack just won't work in win95.
False. One doesn't need any special interface in the IP stack implementation to send bogus packets -- he needs an access to the network interface at the IP level or anywhere below it. MS-DOS with Ethernet or PPP driver is enough to do that -- hell, PalmPilot with a modem is enough to do that.
You would want tiny antennas (at least in terms of the active elements) and very close range to the target of interception.
Or long range, still tiny active element and huge, perfectly paraboloid reflector. Telescopes have reflectors up to few meters in diameter, and they have no problems receiving "signals" at the wavelength of hundreds nanometers.
Damn right that's what I'm saying. If you have a community full of uncompassionate penny-pinchers who don't want to provide public access to the Internet....well hey: it's their local tax dollars. With that decision they'll have to deal with the stigma of being [insert negative term here], which in turn could have an impact on tourism, etc. etc. In the end, they'll lie in the bed they make.
Indeed, "community" can decide if there will be any computers in the library. However if there will be any, it's not a "community"'s right to put restrictions on those computers' use if those restrictions contradict with First Amendment -- "community" can't change Constitution how it applies to the library. If "community" will manage to change Constitution, then they can apply their version of First Amendment in the library, and if "community" will build a private library, owned and funded entirely by their members, they can establish their own rules -- but as long as library is built, funded and managed by government, and Constitution prohibits government from restricting speech, libraries can't place such restriction even if every person who lives in the radius of 50 miles around them thinks that they must.
http://mapserver.esri.com/si/html/main.htm ("browse our imagery" link) says "You need Internet Explorer 3.02 or Netscape version 3 or newer!" in response to every attempt to enter something, www.spaceimaging.com consists of two boxes that run Windows, some links from them point to "bare" IP address of the same server, http://www.spaceimaging.com/level2/level2buy.htm has "We're still working on this section." message... lame, especially compared to the technology involved in actually getting images.
Most Russians are at least decently educated, and probably wouldn't fall for ranting about superiority of the Russian people...etc.
Nazi-like movements in Russia are well-known, however a lot of "Russians" aren't even Russians by origin, so those nationalists have really hard time getting support even among stupid people. Antisemitism however is very widespread.
The USA isn't frightened of invasion by the Godless Reds anymore (they can hardly kick ass in a country still barely out of the stone age).
While Russians still haven't managed to make such advanced things as unprofitable companies with stock going up for years, they had companies' email addresses on ads long before US started mentioning anything Internet-related (even before WWW became mainstream, so there weren't URLs to mention). So even though economy is in ruins, "stone age" is definitely something from American propaganda.
You always were as bad as Soviet Union -- but now you have lost a "justification" for being as bad, and slowly coming to realization that you need to actually improve things.
The MPAA says that companies are lossing millions of dollars of revenue. Don't they mean they are lossing a chance to make millions of dollars of revenue by controlling all information?
Precisely. I am losing few billions of dollars per year because I am not the owner of all oil industry in some Middle East country. Can I sue them?
Can somebody clear something up for me? I'm sure I read somewhere that it wasn't that easy to copy a DVD, since recordable DVD's had the place where the keys go pre-burned with zeros.
No equipment currently available to consumers can produce DVDs that can be played on DVD players. There is a theoretically possible way of circumventing that by writing unencrypted DVD (that will also require multiple disks for the content that can fit on one normal DVD -- writable DVDs have lower capacity) that can be played only on computers with MPEG2 players. I don't see, who will bother to go through such a trouble though.
Another question while I'm thinking about it - how do independent DVD producers get their DVD's encrypted, since they don't have the keys either?
What "independent" producers ever made DVDs by themselves?
Or is that a members-only priviledge?
I have never seen DVD encoding equipment and software, so I don't know, what comes with it, however I suspect that it requires special kind of license from DVDCCA.
Re:You must be kidding - was Re:Blame Reagan.
on
NASA Gets Smart
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· Score: 2
Don't blame Russian economy either -- I lived there, and it worked just fine until governmental control was dismantled (1988-91). The problem was entirely political -- government managed to piss off intellectual elite so much, and corruption was so widespread, that nothing short of complete reconstruction of political system ("reconstruction" => "perestroika" in Russian) seemed to be sufficient to keep the society together, yet economy worked fine just like it worked for decades. When political changes started, government simply screwed up too much to do any kind of transition to society that was supposed to be more free and democratic in both politics and economy -- at that moment economy started going downhill very fast and came to the current sorry state.
Slashdot Mirror
So we can say that the Inquisitors and Conquistadores weren't true Christians, and that the USSR and China weren't truly Communist. And where does that get us?
In both cases at least some of people that you mentioned adhered to their doctrines and therefore were true Christians or Communists. I won't comment on the first, however in the second case goals and means are turned upside down by anti-communist propaganda -- socialist states were the means, choosen by communists (to be exact, some of communists) to achieve their goal in the future, yet I have yet to find an American who is not convinced that USSR is a completed implementation of Communism doctrine.
Labels are slippery things. Though two things that can be inferred: states which call themselves Communist
No country ever called itself Communist -- communist doctrine doesn't even have a definition of "communist country". Those countries called themselves Socialist, and it is even prominently placed in most of their full names. Dominant (or the only) political party in those countries was Communist, yet country never was claimed to be an implementation of Communism.
are likely to be horrendously oppressive, and organised religion is a tempting justification for all manner of atrocity.
In my personal experience oppression in capitalist country (US) is at the same order of magnitude as in socialist one (USSR), just means and directions of oppression differ -- in socialist countries government is corrupt by its own means, and oppresses everyone, while in capitalist countries big business corrupts government and oppresses the population with the help of the corrupt government. I admit that countries in the state of political/economical disorder (current Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) are much worse than both systems in their stable state, however I hardly can see it as a valid excuse.
How is communism a better system? It doesn't solve the problem of allocation of scarce resources as well as a decentralised system would, and then there's the small matter of it breaking down if central control is subverted (which means that all attempts to realise it require totalitarian authority).
I have never said that communism is a better system (previous poster said it, not me), but communism's main idea is that resources don't have to be scarce -- by communists' theory improvements in technology and society can cause abundance of all kinds of resources, and only greed can prevent people from using such resources responsibly, thus causing artificial scarcity for much longer time than it would be "natural". Therefore they claim that before abundance will be actually achieved people should become "better", more responsible and cooperative and less driven by primitive search of wealth and power (then in the case of true abundance people would feel guilty or even can become too bored if they would become worse slackers than the level where society sustains the abundance).
Countries that west called "communist" never claimed to achieve "communism" -- they called themselves "socialist" countries, and centralized control of the economy was claimed to be necessary only in socialist but not communist society. Communist governments of socialist countries were supposed to achieve the goal of building and advancing society that consists of those more responsible/cooperative people until the advancement of society will produce both abundant resources and responsible enough population to handle the abundance in the way that will allow true "comminism" to be self-supporting.
If by "better" you mean nicer in an abstract, non-practical sense, that could be argued. But an even nicer system would be for everybody to have as much of everything they want. It looks quite peachy, unless you actually try to implement it.
I agree with that. One can doubt that their goal was practical or achievable, and one can certainly point out that the way, "socialism" was implemented created totalitarian and corrupt governments. However they definitely weren't the first political movement facing this problem. Christian religion also taught that only development of virtues (whatever "virtues" are) can improve the life of people, and the same Christian religion caused quite a lot of violations of personal freedom, produced corrupt hierarchy of organized religion that supported the worst governments of the world, etc. Dominant ideologies of "capitalism", while probably being the most stable currently, have shown that they are, too, capable of producing social structures and political mechanisms that defeat their original purpose, reduce personal freedom, give people disincentive for productive work, and I believe that libertarian ideas, if implemented, will not be immune to this disease either (IMHO they are actually more vulnerable -- libertarians, even more than communists, ignore the fact that society always has forces that destabilize it, and even though stability is desirable for most of society members, without a mechanism that supports such a stability it can be easily turned into something that has a stabilizing mechanism -- anything between feudalism, military rule and current form of capitalism, dominated by few players with blatantly anti-consumer policy).
Communism may be a disagreeable philosophy, and it produced a large amount of grief and suffering, however your criticism of it shows that you are attacking some imaginary view of "communism", established by anti-communist propaganda, not the real thing. Any intelligent supporter of communism would point it out, and it probably would be a tough argument for "rah-rah, communism is bad" crowd.
You can't exactly think that communists would want say their political beliefs being challenged would you? I can't say that you would. This is bad for keeping control.
All political movements are bad at handling open discussions of their doctrines -- one thing is preaching to the converted and booing at small number of opponents in presence of huge crowd of supporters, and another one is a discussion where both supporters and opponents have comparable opportunity to explain their views and challenge each other. Actually I have seen communists defending their views in open discussion with stronger arguments and in much more intelligent manner than libertarians ever did when placed in unfriendly environment.
s/what/if/
Why would it be really silly to decrypt it first? Decrpyting it allows it to be distributed to anyone on any media that you choose. It allows it to be used in players that don't respect Region Enconding. Lastly, it allows you to compress it into another format with near perfect results.
Because no other existing media can store this amount of information without either being extremely expensive (hard drives) or slow (tapes), and?
With an encrypted DVD, your limited to making byte for byte copies to another DVD that only play in MPAA blessed DVD players.
For the purpose of piracy it makes no sense because buyers have the same DVDCCA-blessed players -- and copying data for playing on other devices by legal owner of the copy is legitimate use under existing copyright law -- as legitimate as playing it.
quote.com who? I have looked at it (never seen or knew about it before), and it looks like duplicate of finance.yahoo.com with more ads.
Moreover, he said, some of the perceived problems with the legislation are unenforceable. Critics, for example, have said the law would allow companies to suppress critical reviews of their projects.
Is it a confession that part of that law is specifically designed to assist frivolous litigation?
Even if they will find someone, no one will believe them that they got the right people (=> bad publicity for FBI), and no one who would want to repeat this attack would be stopped by that. They can't lock in the cell the knowledge about bugs and DoS tools -- it's already everywhere, and if it wasn't, it could be easily found again, so why waste the money, time and effort on finding some (bad) people if it can be spent by making things invulnerable to them?
Now people who want bad things to happen to this "ZicoKnows" (who is unlikely to be rich), please stand up...
Dude, people love to see bad things happen to people a lot more wealthy than themselves.
People who want bad things to happen to esr, please stand up.
I'm a linux user
No, you are not...
- it's great for me as a SysAdmin, wonderful server platform for internet applications, and so on. But desktops? Bullshit. Come back when you've got a productivity suite HALF as good as MS Office, or even WordPerfect.
^^And that was the proof -- WordPerfect runs on Linux, troll.
And still the everything works quite well... I get my salary every month even though my bank is using MS products.
Don't be too sure about it -- banks don't run any of their actual operations on Windows. If they will switch to Windows in some "upgrade", handled by the next generation of managers, we will all start having a lot of questions, where are our money.
However, lots of times you need an OS that allows for low level manipulation of the IP stack. IIRC, you can't do this in Win95 so spoofing packets like a worm on crack just won't work in win95.
False. One doesn't need any special interface in the IP stack implementation to send bogus packets -- he needs an access to the network interface at the IP level or anywhere below it. MS-DOS with Ethernet or PPP driver is enough to do that -- hell, PalmPilot with a modem is enough to do that.
You would want tiny antennas (at least in terms of the active elements) and very close range to the target of interception.
Or long range, still tiny active element and huge, perfectly paraboloid reflector. Telescopes have reflectors up to few meters in diameter, and they have no problems receiving "signals" at the wavelength of hundreds nanometers.
Since Linux is as much a flavor of Unix as *BSD or Solaris, shouldn't more honest table table be:
OS...........1998...1999
Windows NT.....38.....38
Unix...........35.....40
Netware........23.....19
Other...........4......3
?
Damn right that's what I'm saying. If you have a community full of uncompassionate penny-pinchers who don't want to provide public access to the Internet....well hey: it's their local tax dollars. With that decision they'll have to deal with the stigma of being [insert negative term here], which in turn could have an impact on tourism, etc. etc. In the end, they'll lie in the bed they make.
Indeed, "community" can decide if there will be any computers in the library. However if there will be any, it's not a "community"'s right to put restrictions on those computers' use if those restrictions contradict with First Amendment -- "community" can't change Constitution how it applies to the library. If "community" will manage to change Constitution, then they can apply their version of First Amendment in the library, and if "community" will build a private library, owned and funded entirely by their members, they can establish their own rules -- but as long as library is built, funded and managed by government, and Constitution prohibits government from restricting speech, libraries can't place such restriction even if every person who lives in the radius of 50 miles around them thinks that they must.
Actually, it just needs Java and Javascript. I'm running Mozilla , but usually have J&J turned off. Turning 'em back on made the nifty tool work OK.
Didn't for me ("Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.10 i686) ").
http://mapserver.esri.com/si/html/main.htm ("browse our imagery" link) says "You need Internet Explorer 3.02 or Netscape version 3 or newer!" in response to every attempt to enter something, www.spaceimaging.com consists of two boxes that run Windows, some links from them point to "bare" IP address of the same server, http://www.spaceimaging.com/level2/level2buy.htm has "We're still working on this section." message... lame, especially compared to the technology involved in actually getting images.
Most Russians are at least decently educated, and probably wouldn't fall for ranting about superiority of the Russian people...etc.
Nazi-like movements in Russia are well-known, however a lot of "Russians" aren't even Russians by origin, so those nationalists have really hard time getting support even among stupid people. Antisemitism however is very widespread.
The USA isn't frightened of invasion by the Godless Reds anymore (they can hardly kick ass in a country still barely out of the stone age).
While Russians still haven't managed to make such advanced things as unprofitable companies with stock going up for years, they had companies' email addresses on ads long before US started mentioning anything Internet-related (even before WWW became mainstream, so there weren't URLs to mention). So even though economy is in ruins, "stone age" is definitely something from American propaganda.
They are not gone after all. We have become them.
You always were as bad as Soviet Union -- but now you have lost a "justification" for being as bad, and slowly coming to realization that you need to actually improve things.
The MPAA says that companies are lossing millions of dollars of revenue. Don't they mean they are lossing a chance to make millions of dollars of revenue by controlling all information?
Precisely. I am losing few billions of dollars per year because I am not the owner of all oil industry in some Middle East country. Can I sue them?
big time
Can somebody clear something up for me? I'm sure I read somewhere that it wasn't that easy to copy a DVD, since recordable DVD's had the place where the keys go pre-burned with zeros.
No equipment currently available to consumers can produce DVDs that can be played on DVD players. There is a theoretically possible way of circumventing that by writing unencrypted DVD (that will also require multiple disks for the content that can fit on one normal DVD -- writable DVDs have lower capacity) that can be played only on computers with MPEG2 players. I don't see, who will bother to go through such a trouble though.
Another question while I'm thinking about it - how do independent DVD producers get their DVD's encrypted, since they don't have the keys either?
What "independent" producers ever made DVDs by themselves?
Or is that a members-only priviledge?
I have never seen DVD encoding equipment and software, so I don't know, what comes with it, however I suspect that it requires special kind of license from DVDCCA.
Don't blame Russian economy either -- I lived there, and it worked just fine until governmental control was dismantled (1988-91). The problem was entirely political -- government managed to piss off intellectual elite so much, and corruption was so widespread, that nothing short of complete reconstruction of political system ("reconstruction" => "perestroika" in Russian) seemed to be sufficient to keep the society together, yet economy worked fine just like it worked for decades. When political changes started, government simply screwed up too much to do any kind of transition to society that was supposed to be more free and democratic in both politics and economy -- at that moment economy started going downhill very fast and came to the current sorry state.