Presenting information in a way that's flexible and elegant across platforms, screen sizes, color depths, and layout types (e.g. text only vs. graphical) is a hard problem, and that's why it takes some effort to do it right.
Designing for the web is fundamentally different from designing for a static medium such as a printed page. That's something too few people seem to realize.
Perhaps, if it's so hard to get designs to work across browsers, people should focus on calling for more work in getting the existing standards to work well and uniformly across browsers, rather than complaining about a lack of "innovation."
Anyway, I'm not sure I get the author's premise. If IE's market share recedes because Microsoft is no longer developing it for platforms other than Longhorn, that can only be a good thing for the web and for web standards, as it means that other browsers will get more attention and users.
I think this is the biggest issue, and here's where the ISPs are shooting themselves in the feet: by stunting their connections, limiting upstream bandwidth, blocking ports, and otherwise placing restrictions on what their users can do with their connections (essentially viewing the Internet as the web and email and nothing more), the ISPs are preventing more interesting uses for those broadband connections from being developed.
If everyone had a T1 class or better connection to his or her home, interesting new uses for such connections would pop up, thereby spurring demand for more bandwidth and increasing the value of that bandwidth. If all you get is web pages that load a few milliseconds faster, a lot of people will find that's not a compelling reason to spend more money.
[Subtext: for those who already want high-speed access, get it from a carrier that doesn't do these things, such as Speakeasy! That's the only way the situation will change. You vote with your dollars, whether you intend to or not. (I have no affiliation with Speakeasy, other than as a happy customer who got sick of dealing with the blunders of cable companies (yes, I went through several).)]
No kidding. I've been hoping someone would do this for years. It always makes me a bit confused when I go to other countries and see American TV shows shown without those annoying blurry patches over the fun parts. Why is it that in the land of the free I can't make my own choices about what's objectionable?
Instead of cracking down and making sure that nobody can see parts of the human body or hear a few strange words, the FCC should be adopting a system whereby everyone can get what they want. Put this stuff into every TV, and all these silly debates will be over. Mom and pop can "protect" their kids from those horribly damaging nipples, and I can leer lecherously at all the skin I want.
The advent of digital TV seems like the perfect time to do something like this, but I've never seen a suggestion of anything of the sort. Perhaps they're too caught up with crap like the broadcast flag to actually think about giving us consumers added value.
Please. Black and white it most certainly is not. While the information should make us Linux zealots sit up and pay attention, this article doesn't really say anything at all. They didn't tell us the proportions of systems tested, and they threw away automated breaches (and they might have thrown away targeted attacks accomplished through automated/worm means--they didn't give enough information to tell). Without knowing how many systems of each type were present, it's pretty meaningless to give figures based on numbers of systems breached.
For example, the results in the article could be describing a scenario where all machines on their network were breached, and each of those attacks corresponds to a different machine. So they have 13k Linux machines and 2k Windows machines. Would that tell you that Linux is less secure? Not really. It would have been slightly more meaningful to tell us what percentage of attacks on any given system succeeded and failed. It could also be the case that they keep all their important data on the Linux servers, so not many people are trying to break into the Windows boxes. We just don't know, because the article doesn't tell us anything.
Yes, Linux folks should work harder on security. No, this article doesn't really say anything in particular definitively.
P.S. I just looked at the article again, and it says they, "discounted the recent wave of worms, viruses and other attacks that have affected Windows systems worldwide" [emphasis mine]. So yes, from that statement, they actually just discarded all the data on Windows. I kind of doubt that they actually did that, but that's what the article tells us. I guess from that you could say that Linux hackers rely on holes that aren't widely known, whereas Windows hackers just use the same holes that everyone else is using.
Exactly. This is just how things should work with respect to such things.
Internet access is a business that inherently forms monopolies because of the very nature of it---one can only run wires down everyone's streets a few times before the poles get crowded and ugly, and other problems start to arise. The government or some regulated non-profit should run and control the pipes, giving private companies access on a wholesale basis. You get the best of both worlds: cheap, efficient infrastructure combined with choice in the marketplace, enabling companies to compete on quality of service, features, etc.
This seems to be what they're doing in Utah, and what they should be doing in the rest of the country.
I'm sick of liberals like you making us seem to be the bad guys. We have said all along that we will not try to rule Iraq. This is not Victorian English or the brief period of American Imperialism. We are not colonists anymore. Wake up. You may not like Bush or Blair, but their plan all along has NOT been to take over Iraq. People like you are always looking to start trouble.
Umm...I think someone else needs to wake up here. Perhaps you didn't notice that nearly the entirety of the Arab world bears animosity directed at us? It's not exactly going to help our campaign against terrorism if we wantonly disregard our recurring appearance of self-interest in this conflict.
While we're onto the name calling... (Why is it that one always hears people labelling "liberals" as such as if it were a dirty word? What part of "free", and "not narrow or contracted in mind" do you find to be so sinister?) Are you conservatives really so feeble-minded that you can't imagine any subtlety in a situation? Time and time again I hear arguments such as yours, that essentially state, "we are not making Iraq a formal province of the United States, therefore everything is fine and good, and our plans clearly have no imperialist or sinister consequence."
Guess what? This war is about oil. The US and Britain are displaying characteristics of imperialism. No, we're not going to simply take over the Iraqi oil fields and run them by American corporations, but you'd have to be a fool to suggest that this war won't have an impact on the availability and pricing of oil in the future. American and British companies are getting enormous contracts for rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure that our forces destroyed. We are taking Iraqi assets by force and injecting them into the American and British economies.
Of course, a portion of this is just a simple consequence of war, but there are some huge conflicts of interest involved, and in many cases they are being handled with an extraordinary lack of grace. The fact is, this war primarily serves American interests. It is not an altruistic liberation of the Iraqi people. In the end, we will most likely leave the majority of the Iraqi people better off than they were before the war, but no matter how many times you try to say otherwise, this war still is primarily about using American military might to secure American interests. Again, that's not the only factor, but it's unavoidably the primary driving influence.
Businesses make money. That's what they do. In fact, it's almost the very definition of "business." All the threads saying that it's not a priority, you are right. This isn't about a priority. This is about a business venture.
Well, it's just a business venture from the ISP's perspective. They're proposing to use Iraq's national assets to fund it, though, which is at least cause for some concern. If I was an Iraqi, I might be kind of pissed a few years down the road, when my country was gaining some stability again, to hear that a foreign company sold off all the lucrative names in my country's domain in order to fund its own contract, during the time in which its country's military was running my government.
Whether or not it's a priority certainly comes into play when you're talking about a foreign occupying force deciding to dole out a country's assets and resources to fund business ventures in which the profit is reaped by companies in the occupying countries.
I wonder when ISPs are going to stop soft-pedaling the anti-NATing provisions in their terms of service
When people stop paying them to do so and start paying ISPs who don't get a kick out of deceiving and walking all over their customers, as AT&T and RCN have done to me. I can't even begin to express the comfort it has given me to switch to Speakeasy.
It's not that they don't care about wireless access. They actually encourage it. Imagine that, a company that wants you to get the most out of the service you're paying them for, unlike most of the rest of the industry, which wants you to use your connection as little as possible, so that they don't have to spend any of the money you're giving them on their network, and browbeats you when you try to do anything more than passively read web pages and email.
How long before it is a crime to release software (or make available source code) that contains known security flaws?
Won't happen. That wouldn't further the interests of the big businesses that have paid for our politicians. Outlawing open wireless nets only hurts the consumers, who aren't organized enough, and aren't informed enough to object meaningfully. It certainly helps out the ISP-megacorps who want to retain control of access.
The only way this kind of thing will stop happening is when our politicians stop having their primary source of funding/perks come from big businesses, making them more accountable to the people they are supposed to represent.
Perhaps Iraq isn't the only place due for a "regime change."
No, more like walking into your friend's house and photocopying the textbook.
Yes, that's probably a better example, although it depends on how you're using that music - and is still a far cry from the RIAA example. Further, some photocopying of that nature is allowed by copyright law. Is copying a track from a CD really much different from photocopying an excerpt from a book? There are certainly legitimate, compelling uses which P2P (uniquely, at the moment) enables. This is to completely ignore the travesty of the intent of the original copyright clause, "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts," to essentially a promotion of large businesses' earnings potential.
In any case, unless you go buy your own copy, you have somthing you did not pay for.
This is also the case when I record from the radio, pick up a discarded newspaper in the subway, or am given a CD a friend no longer wants. The most obvious difference is the method of transfer, and the possibility for more than one copy to be made from the first. Again, the issue is not clear-cut. To claim it is (which is what we're talking about here) would be simply fraudulent.
"`Theft' is a harsh word, but that it is, pure and
simple," the letter stated. "... It is no different from walking into
the campus bookstore and in a clandestine manner walking out with a
textbook without paying for it."
Not that it's any surprise around here, but this statement is a
flat out lie. It would be one thing if the recording industry was
engaging in a constructive debate somewhere, or at least sticking to
facts, but instead they've chosen to deceive and lie to protect their
way of doing business. Why can't our government recognize this and
stop catering to this corruption? (I have a few ideas, but that's
another story.)
This is very different from "walking into the campus
bookstore and in a clandestine manner walking out with a textbook
without paying for it." For one thing, it's not very clandestine - or
at least there's no specific effort to make it such. Secondly there
is no tangible good being "walked out" with. A closer analogy would
be walking into a campus bookstore (better yet, a friend's house), and
reading a textbook without paying for it. But, of course, that wouldn't serve
their interests. Obviously this isn't a clear-cut issue, but lying to
the public to get their way is just disgusting, and displays a
remarkable lack of integrity, IMO.
Re:It's not just laziness...
on
Due Diligence?
·
· Score: 2
There's no excuse for this. I'll refrain from saying that everyone should just use Debian, because that's not really true, but my system was patched within a few hours with a simple apt-get, with almost no effort on my part.
What I will say is that more distributions and operating systems should implement systems like apt, and vendors should keep up with patches as well as the Debian security team does. It really shouldn't be a big effort on any administrator's part. (Though that doesn't absolve administrators from having to be mindful of security issues.)
My post was a mean-spirited joke at the expense of the previous poster, implying that he had sinister ulterior motives. Coherent analysis takes all the fun out of it!
Sorry to rain on your parade, my friend. And not a bad one, at that! I got a little bit more carried away with that one than I intended, but your post served as a good spring-board for what I wanted to say about the subject anyway. Of course, at this point, you and I are probably just about the only ones reading it this far down the comment/moderation tree.
...in practice it can be quite difficult to separate innocuous nudity from eroticism...I think there's a good argument to be made for insulating the young from the world of eroticism and all its passions and complications.
I think you're right. There are definitely things out there that I wouldn't want my kids to see. My only point is that it's the parent's job to decide what those things are, and you would probably make those decisions differently than I, even if we happened to agree on a lot of things. I further think that it's detrimental to society to allow the government to make those decisions for parents.
That still leaves room for educating parents on how better to make and enforce these decisions, and for making them aware that they need to be made. (Though I'm not convinced that even that is a good function of the government, other than in the context of schools and libraries.)
On another note, I'd guess that the existence of systems like this increase the ratio of non-innocuous nudity (nekkidness - nakedness with intent) to innocuous nudity, increasing the chance that whenever one is exposed to nudity it is of the former kind, thus creating strange associations with nudity in the mind of the developing child.
Censor Cen"sor, n. L. censor, fr. censere to value, tax. 2. One who is empowered to examine manuscripts before they
are committed to the press, and to forbid their
publication if they contain anything obnoxious; -- an
official in some European countries.
1913 Webster
Censorship Cen"sor*ship, n.
The office or power of a censor; as, to stand for a
censorship. --Holland.
1913 Webster
Moderate Mod"er*ate, v. t. imp. & p. p. Moderated; p. pr. &
vb. n. Moderating.
1. To restrain from excess of any kind; to reduce from a
state of violence, intensity, or excess; to keep within
bounds; to make temperate; to lessen; to allay; to
repress; to temper; to qualify; as, to moderate rage,
action, desires, etc.; to moderate heat or wind.
Apparently it's not the difference you think it is.
Maybe we could get a domain where only people who have some vague basis of fact behind what they're talking about could post.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but I suspect most atheists will put the fear of God in you real quick if you try to show their kids "the Dick or the Nipple".
Most American atheists, perhaps, but those narrow views fortunately aren't shared by the rest of the world (in its entirety). There are plenty of places in the world where nudity is perfectly acceptable. (As it should be - think seriously for a while about how ridiculous it is to say that a nipple is evil, or what effect this might have on peoples' body image issues, for example.)
The last time I was in Switzerland, for example, there was a giant billboard with a topless woman on it in the train station. I didn't notice anyone trying to "put the fear of God" into the poster.
This is exactly the issue that makes this sort of proposal scary. I wouldn't have any problem with my children being exposed to nudity at any age. In fact, I think my childhood would have been a bit saner if I had been exposed to more of it when I was younger (no I'm not a pervert or sex criminal or anything). I would, however, object to my children being exposed to a lot of other things which aren't covered by the government's proposal. Rampant material consumerism, ruthless advertising which plays on base, selfish desires, even things like the inane banality of Barney and the like; these are all things that I would have more concern about exposing my kids to than nudity.
I don't expect you, or even most people here, to agree with me. The point is that people have differing opinions about these things, the recognition of which is concomitant to the spirit of the foundation of American government. Thus, the American government has no place establishing a system like this, which implicitly values certain (possibly majority) peoples' opinions over others, imposing the founding group's value judgements on everyone else.
You can say that no one is required to use it, but its very existence gives unfair promotion to the values of the people that create it. Bottom line: the government makes an incredibly poor parent. Parents' these days seem to be trying to let the government do their parenting for them, which I think poses a tremendous danger to society.
It's not that people are compelled to upgrade to keep their existing system and apps working, but that in the space of five years people find that they use their PCs for more and different things, and find that they need to upgrade in order to do these news things.
That's not the case we're talking about here. Also, people are compelled to upgrade to keep their existing system working, because of bugs and security. Some of this is unavoidable, but...
As for the charge of planned obsolescence, you are assuming that MS are omniscient
Not at all. MS certainly has the resources to make a product that is more reliable, more secure, and nearly bug-free. They make a choice not to do so, and admit that this is the case, because a product fitting the above description would impede sales of future "upgrades." The fact that MS dominates the market makes it easier for them to get away with this.
I mean, come on. When they do something right, you just GOTTA change it around to make it a negative. And you wonder why MS is after Linux, right? Who's being childish now?
Microsoft has quite a long record of acting very irresponsibly in the security arena, and acting hideously in general. I don't spend my money on companies that I don't consider to be ethical, if I can help it. Further, you're naive if you think that a single announcement that on the surface appears well-intentioned, even if in fact it is, demonstrates cause for anyone to begin trusting Microsoft. They have shown us many times in the past their ulterior motives, and sneaky behavior when it comes to purporting to do one thing when underneath something else altogether - almost invariably self-serving - is accomplished.
It is certainly not unreasonable to be suspicious of their actions, and critical of their performance. As recently as a few weeks ago we were discussing the DRM that MS was sneaking in with "security updates." And you think that MS deserves our good faith? Come on!
Oh, and it's a bit preposterous to suggest that Microsoft is going after Linux because of childish comments on Slashdot. You might want to think that one through a little more.
Most companies and people like to upgrade their computers at least every five years (and especially over the 1999-2001 tech boom, there's no excuse to still be running computers made so long ago).
That's a bit of a sick attitude. Why should I have to re-buy something every five years? Shouldn't something I buy continue to work, as long as it doesn't wear out from use? Companies like Microsoft design in obsolescence, because they know it will sell more software, when they fix bugs, add new features, etc. This is part of the inherent conflict of interest in commercial software.
It's a new technology which allows people to accomplish things which weren't previously possible.
Way too many people think P2P access is an inalienable right.
No, I think that if I'm paying a premium for lots of bandwidth, and that bandwidth was marketed to me as supporting bandwidth-intensive applications such as multimedia, etc., then I should be able to use that bandwidth. By marketing the bandwidth and then saying that users will be punished for using it, the providers are lying to their customers. It's certainly a right if I'm paying for it.
If people could use P2P on my network and not decrease my bandwidth to about 10K, then I'd allow it.
If it's your network, use priority queueing and put the P2P traffic at a lower priority. That would be reasonable at a University, but not at an ISP where I'm paying for bandwidth to do with as I like.
The fundamental issue here is that ISPs made a miscalculation when offering broadband service. They hoped and expected that people would not use most of the bandwidth they were being sold, and made business decisions based on that assumption. Now people are actually using the bandwidth they're paying for, and rather than admitting to their own mistakes, the ISPs villify their customers to address their problems.
If there was sufficient competition in the market, they wouldn't be able to get away with this, as people would simply move to a different provider - or the people who only wanted web surfing would go with a discount provider that only allowed web surfing, and the users that wanted more would go with a different provider. As it is, there's not much stopping the ISPs from behaving this way, and there's not a hell of a lot we can do about it, other than using political power (which the rich ISP conglomerates certainly seem to have more of than their customers) to change the system.
The irony is that the people who pirate professionaly will probably benifit from this.
The people that "pirate"* professionally aren't fucking around with P2P. They're buying a CD and mass-producing it, which isn't hindered in the least by any of the mechanisms the industry claims to be putting into place to prevent "piracy."
Honest and ethical business practices are what will get me to start buying music again. I don't spend money on CDs anymore because I believe that what the music industry companies are trying to get away with is deplorable.
* I know piracy is easier to say than "obtaining through illegitimate means," but using that term is really only contributing to the music industry's fraud. People downloading music on the Internet aren't plundering ships on the high seas, they're trying to listen to music by the most convenient means. There are lots of things that I can do with music available through P2P that I can't do otherwise. There are many songs/artists that I've found through P2P, by searching for lyrics and downloading songs until I find the one I was looking for. This would have lead to my buying many more CDs than I otherwise would have, if I wasn't so opposed to spending my money on depriving the world of a just copyright system.
Yes, I just love how they redifine english words for the purpose of advertising. Somehow they find a way to limit even the unlimited. Must be, er, innovation.
Free* Internet Access!!!!!
* - Free refers to the customer's ability to use the service without a straightjacket and legirons. The cost to the customer is $9.95/minute.
It won't hurt them in the short run, which seems to be all most companies think about these days. In the long run, the type customer they're shutting out will bring about the competitor that will crush them.
As the new ISP conglomerates alienate the very customers that helped make their new products viable - the early adopters - they drive these customers to find new providers that support more interesting uses of the technology, rather than simply catering to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Presenting information in a way that's flexible and elegant across platforms, screen sizes, color depths, and layout types (e.g. text only vs. graphical) is a hard problem, and that's why it takes some effort to do it right.
Designing for the web is fundamentally different from designing for a static medium such as a printed page. That's something too few people seem to realize.
Perhaps, if it's so hard to get designs to work across browsers, people should focus on calling for more work in getting the existing standards to work well and uniformly across browsers, rather than complaining about a lack of "innovation."
Anyway, I'm not sure I get the author's premise. If IE's market share recedes because Microsoft is no longer developing it for platforms other than Longhorn, that can only be a good thing for the web and for web standards, as it means that other browsers will get more attention and users.
I think this is the biggest issue, and here's where the ISPs are shooting themselves in the feet: by stunting their connections, limiting upstream bandwidth, blocking ports, and otherwise placing restrictions on what their users can do with their connections (essentially viewing the Internet as the web and email and nothing more), the ISPs are preventing more interesting uses for those broadband connections from being developed.
If everyone had a T1 class or better connection to his or her home, interesting new uses for such connections would pop up, thereby spurring demand for more bandwidth and increasing the value of that bandwidth. If all you get is web pages that load a few milliseconds faster, a lot of people will find that's not a compelling reason to spend more money.
[Subtext: for those who already want high-speed access, get it from a carrier that doesn't do these things, such as Speakeasy! That's the only way the situation will change. You vote with your dollars, whether you intend to or not. (I have no affiliation with Speakeasy, other than as a happy customer who got sick of dealing with the blunders of cable companies (yes, I went through several).)]
No kidding. I've been hoping someone would do this for years. It always makes me a bit confused when I go to other countries and see American TV shows shown without those annoying blurry patches over the fun parts. Why is it that in the land of the free I can't make my own choices about what's objectionable?
Instead of cracking down and making sure that nobody can see parts of the human body or hear a few strange words, the FCC should be adopting a system whereby everyone can get what they want. Put this stuff into every TV, and all these silly debates will be over. Mom and pop can "protect" their kids from those horribly damaging nipples, and I can leer lecherously at all the skin I want.
The advent of digital TV seems like the perfect time to do something like this, but I've never seen a suggestion of anything of the sort. Perhaps they're too caught up with crap like the broadcast flag to actually think about giving us consumers added value.
Please. Black and white it most certainly is not. While the information should make us Linux zealots sit up and pay attention, this article doesn't really say anything at all. They didn't tell us the proportions of systems tested, and they threw away automated breaches (and they might have thrown away targeted attacks accomplished through automated/worm means--they didn't give enough information to tell). Without knowing how many systems of each type were present, it's pretty meaningless to give figures based on numbers of systems breached.
For example, the results in the article could be describing a scenario where all machines on their network were breached, and each of those attacks corresponds to a different machine. So they have 13k Linux machines and 2k Windows machines. Would that tell you that Linux is less secure? Not really. It would have been slightly more meaningful to tell us what percentage of attacks on any given system succeeded and failed. It could also be the case that they keep all their important data on the Linux servers, so not many people are trying to break into the Windows boxes. We just don't know, because the article doesn't tell us anything.
Yes, Linux folks should work harder on security. No, this article doesn't really say anything in particular definitively.
P.S. I just looked at the article again, and it says they, "discounted the recent wave of worms, viruses and other attacks that have affected Windows systems worldwide" [emphasis mine]. So yes, from that statement, they actually just discarded all the data on Windows. I kind of doubt that they actually did that, but that's what the article tells us. I guess from that you could say that Linux hackers rely on holes that aren't widely known, whereas Windows hackers just use the same holes that everyone else is using.
Exactly. This is just how things should work with respect to such things.
Internet access is a business that inherently forms monopolies because of the very nature of it---one can only run wires down everyone's streets a few times before the poles get crowded and ugly, and other problems start to arise. The government or some regulated non-profit should run and control the pipes, giving private companies access on a wholesale basis. You get the best of both worlds: cheap, efficient infrastructure combined with choice in the marketplace, enabling companies to compete on quality of service, features, etc.
This seems to be what they're doing in Utah, and what they should be doing in the rest of the country.
Umm...I think someone else needs to wake up here. Perhaps you didn't notice that nearly the entirety of the Arab world bears animosity directed at us? It's not exactly going to help our campaign against terrorism if we wantonly disregard our recurring appearance of self-interest in this conflict.
While we're onto the name calling... (Why is it that one always hears people labelling "liberals" as such as if it were a dirty word? What part of "free", and "not narrow or contracted in mind" do you find to be so sinister?) Are you conservatives really so feeble-minded that you can't imagine any subtlety in a situation? Time and time again I hear arguments such as yours, that essentially state, "we are not making Iraq a formal province of the United States, therefore everything is fine and good, and our plans clearly have no imperialist or sinister consequence."
Guess what? This war is about oil. The US and Britain are displaying characteristics of imperialism. No, we're not going to simply take over the Iraqi oil fields and run them by American corporations, but you'd have to be a fool to suggest that this war won't have an impact on the availability and pricing of oil in the future. American and British companies are getting enormous contracts for rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure that our forces destroyed. We are taking Iraqi assets by force and injecting them into the American and British economies.
Of course, a portion of this is just a simple consequence of war, but there are some huge conflicts of interest involved, and in many cases they are being handled with an extraordinary lack of grace. The fact is, this war primarily serves American interests. It is not an altruistic liberation of the Iraqi people. In the end, we will most likely leave the majority of the Iraqi people better off than they were before the war, but no matter how many times you try to say otherwise, this war still is primarily about using American military might to secure American interests. Again, that's not the only factor, but it's unavoidably the primary driving influence.
Well, it's just a business venture from the ISP's perspective. They're proposing to use Iraq's national assets to fund it, though, which is at least cause for some concern. If I was an Iraqi, I might be kind of pissed a few years down the road, when my country was gaining some stability again, to hear that a foreign company sold off all the lucrative names in my country's domain in order to fund its own contract, during the time in which its country's military was running my government.
Whether or not it's a priority certainly comes into play when you're talking about a foreign occupying force deciding to dole out a country's assets and resources to fund business ventures in which the profit is reaped by companies in the occupying countries.
When people stop paying them to do so and start paying ISPs who don't get a kick out of deceiving and walking all over their customers, as AT&T and RCN have done to me. I can't even begin to express the comfort it has given me to switch to Speakeasy.
It's not that they don't care about wireless access. They actually encourage it. Imagine that, a company that wants you to get the most out of the service you're paying them for, unlike most of the rest of the industry, which wants you to use your connection as little as possible, so that they don't have to spend any of the money you're giving them on their network, and browbeats you when you try to do anything more than passively read web pages and email.
Won't happen. That wouldn't further the interests of the big businesses that have paid for our politicians. Outlawing open wireless nets only hurts the consumers, who aren't organized enough, and aren't informed enough to object meaningfully. It certainly helps out the ISP-megacorps who want to retain control of access.
The only way this kind of thing will stop happening is when our politicians stop having their primary source of funding/perks come from big businesses, making them more accountable to the people they are supposed to represent.
Perhaps Iraq isn't the only place due for a "regime change."
It's always nice to see those people doing useful work for a change.
Yes, that's probably a better example, although it depends on how you're using that music - and is still a far cry from the RIAA example. Further, some photocopying of that nature is allowed by copyright law. Is copying a track from a CD really much different from photocopying an excerpt from a book? There are certainly legitimate, compelling uses which P2P (uniquely, at the moment) enables. This is to completely ignore the travesty of the intent of the original copyright clause, "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts," to essentially a promotion of large businesses' earnings potential.
This is also the case when I record from the radio, pick up a discarded newspaper in the subway, or am given a CD a friend no longer wants. The most obvious difference is the method of transfer, and the possibility for more than one copy to be made from the first. Again, the issue is not clear-cut. To claim it is (which is what we're talking about here) would be simply fraudulent.
Not that it's any surprise around here, but this statement is a flat out lie. It would be one thing if the recording industry was engaging in a constructive debate somewhere, or at least sticking to facts, but instead they've chosen to deceive and lie to protect their way of doing business. Why can't our government recognize this and stop catering to this corruption? (I have a few ideas, but that's another story.)
This is very different from "walking into the campus bookstore and in a clandestine manner walking out with a textbook without paying for it." For one thing, it's not very clandestine - or at least there's no specific effort to make it such. Secondly there is no tangible good being "walked out" with. A closer analogy would be walking into a campus bookstore (better yet, a friend's house), and reading a textbook without paying for it. But, of course, that wouldn't serve their interests. Obviously this isn't a clear-cut issue, but lying to the public to get their way is just disgusting, and displays a remarkable lack of integrity, IMO.
There's no excuse for this. I'll refrain from saying that everyone should just use Debian, because that's not really true, but my system was patched within a few hours with a simple apt-get, with almost no effort on my part.
What I will say is that more distributions and operating systems should implement systems like apt, and vendors should keep up with patches as well as the Debian security team does. It really shouldn't be a big effort on any administrator's part. (Though that doesn't absolve administrators from having to be mindful of security issues.)
Sorry to rain on your parade, my friend. And not a bad one, at that! I got a little bit more carried away with that one than I intended, but your post served as a good spring-board for what I wanted to say about the subject anyway. Of course, at this point, you and I are probably just about the only ones reading it this far down the comment/moderation tree.
I think you're right. There are definitely things out there that I wouldn't want my kids to see. My only point is that it's the parent's job to decide what those things are, and you would probably make those decisions differently than I, even if we happened to agree on a lot of things. I further think that it's detrimental to society to allow the government to make those decisions for parents.
That still leaves room for educating parents on how better to make and enforce these decisions, and for making them aware that they need to be made. (Though I'm not convinced that even that is a good function of the government, other than in the context of schools and libraries.)
On another note, I'd guess that the existence of systems like this increase the ratio of non-innocuous nudity (nekkidness - nakedness with intent) to innocuous nudity, increasing the chance that whenever one is exposed to nudity it is of the former kind, thus creating strange associations with nudity in the mind of the developing child.
Censor Cen"sor, n. L. censor, fr. censere to value, tax.
2. One who is empowered to examine manuscripts before they
are committed to the press, and to forbid their
publication if they contain anything obnoxious; -- an
official in some European countries.
1913 Webster
Censorship Cen"sor*ship, n.
The office or power of a censor; as, to stand for a
censorship. --Holland.
1913 Webster
Moderate Mod"er*ate, v. t. imp. & p. p. Moderated; p. pr. &
vb. n. Moderating.
1. To restrain from excess of any kind; to reduce from a
state of violence, intensity, or excess; to keep within
bounds; to make temperate; to lessen; to allay; to
repress; to temper; to qualify; as, to moderate rage,
action, desires, etc.; to moderate heat or wind.
Apparently it's not the difference you think it is.
Maybe we could get a domain where only people who have some vague basis of fact behind what they're talking about could post.
Most American atheists, perhaps, but those narrow views fortunately aren't shared by the rest of the world (in its entirety). There are plenty of places in the world where nudity is perfectly acceptable. (As it should be - think seriously for a while about how ridiculous it is to say that a nipple is evil, or what effect this might have on peoples' body image issues, for example.)
The last time I was in Switzerland, for example, there was a giant billboard with a topless woman on it in the train station. I didn't notice anyone trying to "put the fear of God" into the poster.
This is exactly the issue that makes this sort of proposal scary. I wouldn't have any problem with my children being exposed to nudity at any age. In fact, I think my childhood would have been a bit saner if I had been exposed to more of it when I was younger (no I'm not a pervert or sex criminal or anything). I would, however, object to my children being exposed to a lot of other things which aren't covered by the government's proposal. Rampant material consumerism, ruthless advertising which plays on base, selfish desires, even things like the inane banality of Barney and the like; these are all things that I would have more concern about exposing my kids to than nudity.
I don't expect you, or even most people here, to agree with me. The point is that people have differing opinions about these things, the recognition of which is concomitant to the spirit of the foundation of American government. Thus, the American government has no place establishing a system like this, which implicitly values certain (possibly majority) peoples' opinions over others, imposing the founding group's value judgements on everyone else.
You can say that no one is required to use it, but its very existence gives unfair promotion to the values of the people that create it. Bottom line: the government makes an incredibly poor parent. Parents' these days seem to be trying to let the government do their parenting for them, which I think poses a tremendous danger to society.
That's not the case we're talking about here. Also, people are compelled to upgrade to keep their existing system working, because of bugs and security. Some of this is unavoidable, but...
Not at all. MS certainly has the resources to make a product that is more reliable, more secure, and nearly bug-free. They make a choice not to do so, and admit that this is the case, because a product fitting the above description would impede sales of future "upgrades." The fact that MS dominates the market makes it easier for them to get away with this.
Microsoft has quite a long record of acting very irresponsibly in the security arena, and acting hideously in general. I don't spend my money on companies that I don't consider to be ethical, if I can help it. Further, you're naive if you think that a single announcement that on the surface appears well-intentioned, even if in fact it is, demonstrates cause for anyone to begin trusting Microsoft. They have shown us many times in the past their ulterior motives, and sneaky behavior when it comes to purporting to do one thing when underneath something else altogether - almost invariably self-serving - is accomplished.
It is certainly not unreasonable to be suspicious of their actions, and critical of their performance. As recently as a few weeks ago we were discussing the DRM that MS was sneaking in with "security updates." And you think that MS deserves our good faith? Come on!
Oh, and it's a bit preposterous to suggest that Microsoft is going after Linux because of childish comments on Slashdot. You might want to think that one through a little more.
That's a bit of a sick attitude. Why should I have to re-buy something every five years? Shouldn't something I buy continue to work, as long as it doesn't wear out from use? Companies like Microsoft design in obsolescence, because they know it will sell more software, when they fix bugs, add new features, etc. This is part of the inherent conflict of interest in commercial software.
It's a new technology which allows people to accomplish things which weren't previously possible.
No, I think that if I'm paying a premium for lots of bandwidth, and that bandwidth was marketed to me as supporting bandwidth-intensive applications such as multimedia, etc., then I should be able to use that bandwidth. By marketing the bandwidth and then saying that users will be punished for using it, the providers are lying to their customers. It's certainly a right if I'm paying for it.
If it's your network, use priority queueing and put the P2P traffic at a lower priority. That would be reasonable at a University, but not at an ISP where I'm paying for bandwidth to do with as I like.
The fundamental issue here is that ISPs made a miscalculation when offering broadband service. They hoped and expected that people would not use most of the bandwidth they were being sold, and made business decisions based on that assumption. Now people are actually using the bandwidth they're paying for, and rather than admitting to their own mistakes, the ISPs villify their customers to address their problems.
If there was sufficient competition in the market, they wouldn't be able to get away with this, as people would simply move to a different provider - or the people who only wanted web surfing would go with a discount provider that only allowed web surfing, and the users that wanted more would go with a different provider. As it is, there's not much stopping the ISPs from behaving this way, and there's not a hell of a lot we can do about it, other than using political power (which the rich ISP conglomerates certainly seem to have more of than their customers) to change the system.
The people that "pirate"* professionally aren't fucking around with P2P. They're buying a CD and mass-producing it, which isn't hindered in the least by any of the mechanisms the industry claims to be putting into place to prevent "piracy."
Honest and ethical business practices are what will get me to start buying music again. I don't spend money on CDs anymore because I believe that what the music industry companies are trying to get away with is deplorable.
* I know piracy is easier to say than "obtaining through illegitimate means," but using that term is really only contributing to the music industry's fraud. People downloading music on the Internet aren't plundering ships on the high seas, they're trying to listen to music by the most convenient means. There are lots of things that I can do with music available through P2P that I can't do otherwise. There are many songs/artists that I've found through P2P, by searching for lyrics and downloading songs until I find the one I was looking for. This would have lead to my buying many more CDs than I otherwise would have, if I wasn't so opposed to spending my money on depriving the world of a just copyright system.
Yes, I just love how they redifine english words for the purpose of advertising. Somehow they find a way to limit even the unlimited. Must be, er, innovation.
Free* Internet Access!!!!!
* - Free refers to the customer's ability to use the service without a straightjacket and legirons. The cost to the customer is $9.95/minute.
It won't hurt them in the short run, which seems to be all most companies think about these days. In the long run, the type customer they're shutting out will bring about the competitor that will crush them.
As the new ISP conglomerates alienate the very customers that helped make their new products viable - the early adopters - they drive these customers to find new providers that support more interesting uses of the technology, rather than simply catering to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize profits.
I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.
There will always be bugs, whether your software is open source, free, or otherwise. What matters is how you deal with them.