Oh waah. In light of the topic at hand, let me be the first to say cry me a fucking (glacial) river. If using a different kind of lightbulb, taking public transit, driving a more fuel efficient car (when necessary), buying energy efficient appliances &c &c &c comprises the sum total of your "free individual life," you are the most pathetic individual I have ever come across. Or is this just some sort of pent-up spew from back when the gub'ment told you you can't have any more AK-47s to hunt deer with? The sacrifices being asked of you in order that we have a livable planet in 50 years are for the most part, minor. Equating them with (?) communism and fascism is coming it a trifle high, mm?
Also, there was another post earlier characterizing all global warming skeptics as backward-thinking fundamentalist christians who believe in intelligent design.
I agree completely with your point, but... no MMORPG? Man, you must have been born in, like, a year that I can remember or something:-) Long, long before Diablo, EverQuest and WoW (like, in the dark ages called the 1970s) there were the original 'console' games: text-based MUDs that you played over telnet. Many are still thriving to this day and are pretty much the only games I intentionally avoid for fear of getting sucked in again and later wondering where a year of my life disappeared to. Devilish fun in a way that video games just aren't.
It's always telling when a question is answered with more questions. To answer all of them, nope. Rather than appealing to the nebulous smokescreen of "harming democracy" and foisting up the specter of President Bush, let's have some concrete evidence of these iniquitous reporters running roughshod over our democracy. Surely in the 35 years this had been going one, you could cite just one example of malfeasance. Yes?
And nice try on the 6th amendment, which begins, "In all criminal prosecutions," and is completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Libel laws already restrain the press from saying whatever they want. This is a totally different issue. And let's put that issue in perspective: we're not giving anyone a license to kill here. This is one very specific, beneficent liberty that reporters are (or rather, were) allowed. So I beg of you: one example to the contrary.
In fact the law (as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Branzburg v. Hayes) says exactly that. Journalists aren't any different than anyone else. That ruling was handed down in 1972, just as a couple of intrepid young reporters were about to change the course of history due in large part to their ability to guarantee Mark Felt's confidentiality until he died. One couldn't help but notice that giving reporters this leeway, even if it wasn't statute, was in the public interest. Thus began the DOJ tradition of not hauling reporters into court and forcing them to testify.
Your point would be a lot more convincing if you could provide me with a single factual instance where allowing reporters to protect their sources has turned out to be a "bad" thing for democracy. Personally I don't think there are any.
Well, the subpoena was sort of a formality. If he showed up they would have simply tossed him in jail when he refused to identify his sources.
This case has a long and storied history but basically it's part of an emerging pattern by the US DOJ of eliminating confidentiality for journalism sources. Say what you will about whether journalists have a legal privilege to protect sources or not, the fact remains that this is a deliberate break from 35 years of tradition dating back to (and this is not a coincidence) Watergate. The reason this case is troubling is because the Feds shouldn't even be involved--their argument is that because a city squad car which was partially funded by federal dollars was damaged during the protest, it's a federal case. In other words, they have no other reason to butt in other than to fuck with this kid. To me that's disturbing.
Moreover, even if you feel that this is an acceptable practice for national security matters (Judy Miller, Matt Cooper), the government is doing the same thing in cases that have no national security purview whatsoever. You might have heard about the two SF reporters who were jailed for refusing to identify their sources in the steroids/BALCO case? Same deal. To me that's really disturbing.
If anyone is interested, there's a 4-part series on PBS frontline which discusses all these issues, including this specific case.
your line of thought seems to imply we should have less of an impact. that's absurd
How the hell is that an absurdity? It's lines like that that make me and a lot of other conservationists just sputter with rage. None of this was put here for our amusement and how dare you treat it like it was. Yes, I am saying we should have less of an impact on the world around us. I've spent years searching for some philosophical, moral, or logical justification for living in any other manner and have come up short. Because guess what? Absent humans, everything was running just fine! Isn't obvious that the safest way to restore the planetary organism back to equilibrium is to simply stop fucking with it? How can you deny such a simple truth?
It's this notion--as if we could really conceptualize an infinite-order system, infinite levels of cause and effect, and then "tweak" it to do what to want--that I was alluding to in the above post. More abstractly, this idea that we're somehow "different"--it's laughable. You, me, everyone writing things here, were just primates with slightly larger brains. We're not outsiders looking in, we don't exist outside the rules of the system. We're not special. (Any primate zoologist could tell you your claim that "homo sapiens is the first creature to evolve on this planet that, instead of adapting its needs to its environment, adapts its environment to homo sapiens needs" is ludicrous.) Laughable. All of it.
I would like to challenge you to a physical fight. I am serious. Every time I read people like you carping about your "quality of life," which is entirely the fruit of 200 years of unsustainable raping and pillaging of our natural resources, I just want to reach out and beat the everliving shit out of you. I am a six foot white male, 190 lbs, no martial arts training but I box. Once again, this is completely serious. I am on the east coast but would be willing to travel to meet you. Write me back here so we can work out the details. Hope to hear from you soon.
It's precisely this sort of dominion-over-nature mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. The (annoyingly American) idea that we can solve any problem by simply throwing enough money and ingenuity at it needs to be extinguished, and fast. If we can't even figure out the precise extent of the damage we've already done to our ailingplanet, I shudder to think what nth-order unseen repercussions would result from reducing the level of solar radiation reaching the atmosphere by any meaningful amount. This "fix" is a complete nonstarter and every moment we waste discussing it as if it were a serious option just digs us further into the already deep hole we're in.
No, that is wrong. Read the original post more carefully--getting caught in the swarm nets you an instant denuncation to your ISP. A tracker may host thousands of swarms. If you are downloading legitimate content then BayTSP should have no interest in that particular swarm. This blog post makes a valid point in a strictly legal sense, but it's really splitting hairs. If a tracker lists you as part of the swarm, there is a 99.9% chances that you are exchanging the data in question. Perpetrating a DOS attack using this guy's script lies at the extreme end of the improbability spectrum.
I think the whole mentality here is a load of crap, starting with the rather slanted writeup of the article and filtering down to all the other comments. If you're going to download copyrighted material, fine. I do it. But at least take a little fscking responsibility for your actions. If you get nailed, it's no one's fault but your own. Everyone around here seems to want to perpetuate the lie that BitTorrent is "mostly" used for legitimate purposes. Bullshit. Go look at any of the index sites and you'll find the ratio of copyrighted:free content is about 100:1. That's not an argument for banning it altogether--I freely acknowledge there are many legitimate uses--but enough with the persecution complex, already.
I think one thing that everyone might be overlooking is training. I'll bet half the people at Pixar already use gmail. Pixar won't have to spend squat retraining them on something else. As I'm sure anyone who has worked in corporate IT will tell you, don't underestimate how much lost productivity can result from a well-intentioned new rollout, or even just an upgrade. I witnessed this effect firsthand when I had to move a small office off of Outlook Express (bleh) and onto something else. At first I considered Thunderbird, but then I noticed every person checking their gmail. Google Apps it was, and the transition went way smoother as a result.
I've had this happen to me plenty of times on many different laptops. It if has metal leads on the bottom, towards the back (I think they are for charging a docking station) you will notice a slight tingling if you place it on your lap while wearing no clothing. (Yeah yeah. Admit it. You code naked too.) This is especially true if you've just taken a shower. It's not unbearable but you certainly notice it.
The Daily Show is already on BitTorrent within about 2 hours of its East Coast airing. It takes me about a half hour to download, it's a digital satellite rip and when I play it on my television it actually looks better than cable since I don't have digital cable. Ditto the Colbert Report. I'm a cable subscriber but I don't have TiVo and not having to stay up late to watch the episodes, and/or being able to take them on the road with me, makes all the difference. I don't know if what I'm doing is illegal but it's insanely easy and convenient. I certainly don't feel like it's immoral. I have a hard time seeing Viacom or any other corporation being able to put a stop this sort of thing. It certainly isn't working for the music industry. Or should I say didn't.
You don't even have to really look. Colbert Report and Daily Show via RSS, downloaded automatically in the middle of the night and ready hot and steaming when I wake up each morning. Ta-da!
I give you RTFA credit, but it sounds like they want to use the other process which, if actually feasible, would make fuckall money, to keep the malaria thing economic.
Well, instead of trolling for Postgres, let's mosey on over to the MySQL website and see if we can figure out why someone might want to pay, hrm? Ahh yes, here we go, MySQL Enterprise. Mmm. Let's click that. Iiiinteresting. Says here you get 24x7 web and phone support plus 30 minute emergency response time. Eat that, pgsql-bugs. You also get consultative support from people who spend all day tuning MySQL installations for max performance and reliability. I can't even find the Postgres analogue of that to make fun of. Lots of other goodies too numerous to mention that might be worth paying for.
If you're tossing Wankr 2.1 together in your bedroom then MySQL free, pgsql, or even sqlite is more than enough to meet your needs. If you run a large business that relies on MySQL to actually make some $$, then purchasing support is a rational choice. Especially since TCO is still about an order of magnitude less than competition.
I'm afraid I don't have one:-) I just thought it was funny, and perhaps mildly ironic. Although that's such a loaded term these days that who knows, really.
But I titled it "Sergey Brin turns into a corporate douchebag." "On a business level, that decision to censor... was a net negative." I think I speak for a lot of people here when I say, wtf is that shit? I can think of a few more, say, pressing reasons why abetting the oppressive regime in China is fucked than the good ol' bottom line. Don't be evil my ass.
I second that.. convenience is totally underrated when it comes to the factors driving DVD adoption. I was stunned when my girlfriend couldn't see the difference between VHS and DVD, or distinguish between 128kb MP3 and FLAC. "Oh sure I can tell the difference now, but I never would have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out." I know it's a hard sell for the/. crowd but a lot of people don't care about audio and video quality that much. Or at least, not nearly enough to justify the $3,000 investment that it takes to get a decent HDTV/digital cable/HD-DVD setup.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh waah. In light of the topic at hand, let me be the first to say cry me a fucking (glacial) river. If using a different kind of lightbulb, taking public transit, driving a more fuel efficient car (when necessary), buying energy efficient appliances &c &c &c comprises the sum total of your "free individual life," you are the most pathetic individual I have ever come across. Or is this just some sort of pent-up spew from back when the gub'ment told you you can't have any more AK-47s to hunt deer with? The sacrifices being asked of you in order that we have a livable planet in 50 years are for the most part, minor. Equating them with (?) communism and fascism is coming it a trifle high, mm?
Also, there was another post earlier characterizing all global warming skeptics as backward-thinking fundamentalist christians who believe in intelligent design.
I agree, that's going way too far.
Most of them believe in creationism.
I agree completely with your point, but ... no MMORPG? Man, you must have been born in, like, a year that I can remember or something :-) Long, long before Diablo, EverQuest and WoW (like, in the dark ages called the 1970s) there were the original 'console' games: text-based MUDs that you played over telnet. Many are still thriving to this day and are pretty much the only games I intentionally avoid for fear of getting sucked in again and later wondering where a year of my life disappeared to. Devilish fun in a way that video games just aren't.
That's strange, I wasn't aware it had a first life.
It's always telling when a question is answered with more questions. To answer all of them, nope. Rather than appealing to the nebulous smokescreen of "harming democracy" and foisting up the specter of President Bush, let's have some concrete evidence of these iniquitous reporters running roughshod over our democracy. Surely in the 35 years this had been going one, you could cite just one example of malfeasance. Yes?
And nice try on the 6th amendment, which begins, "In all criminal prosecutions," and is completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Libel laws already restrain the press from saying whatever they want. This is a totally different issue. And let's put that issue in perspective: we're not giving anyone a license to kill here. This is one very specific, beneficent liberty that reporters are (or rather, were) allowed. So I beg of you: one example to the contrary.
In fact the law (as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Branzburg v. Hayes) says exactly that. Journalists aren't any different than anyone else. That ruling was handed down in 1972, just as a couple of intrepid young reporters were about to change the course of history due in large part to their ability to guarantee Mark Felt's confidentiality until he died. One couldn't help but notice that giving reporters this leeway, even if it wasn't statute, was in the public interest. Thus began the DOJ tradition of not hauling reporters into court and forcing them to testify.
Your point would be a lot more convincing if you could provide me with a single factual instance where allowing reporters to protect their sources has turned out to be a "bad" thing for democracy. Personally I don't think there are any.
Well, the subpoena was sort of a formality. If he showed up they would have simply tossed him in jail when he refused to identify his sources.
This case has a long and storied history but basically it's part of an emerging pattern by the US DOJ of eliminating confidentiality for journalism sources. Say what you will about whether journalists have a legal privilege to protect sources or not, the fact remains that this is a deliberate break from 35 years of tradition dating back to (and this is not a coincidence) Watergate. The reason this case is troubling is because the Feds shouldn't even be involved--their argument is that because a city squad car which was partially funded by federal dollars was damaged during the protest, it's a federal case. In other words, they have no other reason to butt in other than to fuck with this kid. To me that's disturbing.
Moreover, even if you feel that this is an acceptable practice for national security matters (Judy Miller, Matt Cooper), the government is doing the same thing in cases that have no national security purview whatsoever. You might have heard about the two SF reporters who were jailed for refusing to identify their sources in the steroids/BALCO case? Same deal. To me that's really disturbing.
If anyone is interested, there's a 4-part series on PBS frontline which discusses all these issues, including this specific case.
your line of thought seems to imply we should have less of an impact. that's absurd
How the hell is that an absurdity? It's lines like that that make me and a lot of other conservationists just sputter with rage. None of this was put here for our amusement and how dare you treat it like it was. Yes, I am saying we should have less of an impact on the world around us. I've spent years searching for some philosophical, moral, or logical justification for living in any other manner and have come up short. Because guess what? Absent humans, everything was running just fine! Isn't obvious that the safest way to restore the planetary organism back to equilibrium is to simply stop fucking with it? How can you deny such a simple truth?
It's this notion--as if we could really conceptualize an infinite-order system, infinite levels of cause and effect, and then "tweak" it to do what to want--that I was alluding to in the above post. More abstractly, this idea that we're somehow "different"--it's laughable. You, me, everyone writing things here, were just primates with slightly larger brains. We're not outsiders looking in, we don't exist outside the rules of the system. We're not special. (Any primate zoologist could tell you your claim that "homo sapiens is the first creature to evolve on this planet that, instead of adapting its needs to its environment, adapts its environment to homo sapiens needs" is ludicrous.) Laughable. All of it.
Hello AC,
I would like to challenge you to a physical fight. I am serious. Every time I read people like you carping about your "quality of life," which is entirely the fruit of 200 years of unsustainable raping and pillaging of our natural resources, I just want to reach out and beat the everliving shit out of you. I am a six foot white male, 190 lbs, no martial arts training but I box. Once again, this is completely serious. I am on the east coast but would be willing to travel to meet you. Write me back here so we can work out the details. Hope to hear from you soon.
Repeat after me: no no no NO
It's precisely this sort of dominion-over-nature mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. The (annoyingly American) idea that we can solve any problem by simply throwing enough money and ingenuity at it needs to be extinguished, and fast. If we can't even figure out the precise extent of the damage we've already done to our ailingplanet, I shudder to think what nth-order unseen repercussions would result from reducing the level of solar radiation reaching the atmosphere by any meaningful amount. This "fix" is a complete nonstarter and every moment we waste discussing it as if it were a serious option just digs us further into the already deep hole we're in.
Or we could just plant fewer humans...
No, that is wrong. Read the original post more carefully--getting caught in the swarm nets you an instant denuncation to your ISP. A tracker may host thousands of swarms. If you are downloading legitimate content then BayTSP should have no interest in that particular swarm. This blog post makes a valid point in a strictly legal sense, but it's really splitting hairs. If a tracker lists you as part of the swarm, there is a 99.9% chances that you are exchanging the data in question. Perpetrating a DOS attack using this guy's script lies at the extreme end of the improbability spectrum.
I think the whole mentality here is a load of crap, starting with the rather slanted writeup of the article and filtering down to all the other comments. If you're going to download copyrighted material, fine. I do it. But at least take a little fscking responsibility for your actions. If you get nailed, it's no one's fault but your own. Everyone around here seems to want to perpetuate the lie that BitTorrent is "mostly" used for legitimate purposes. Bullshit. Go look at any of the index sites and you'll find the ratio of copyrighted:free content is about 100:1. That's not an argument for banning it altogether--I freely acknowledge there are many legitimate uses--but enough with the persecution complex, already.
I think one thing that everyone might be overlooking is training. I'll bet half the people at Pixar already use gmail. Pixar won't have to spend squat retraining them on something else. As I'm sure anyone who has worked in corporate IT will tell you, don't underestimate how much lost productivity can result from a well-intentioned new rollout, or even just an upgrade. I witnessed this effect firsthand when I had to move a small office off of Outlook Express (bleh) and onto something else. At first I considered Thunderbird, but then I noticed every person checking their gmail. Google Apps it was, and the transition went way smoother as a result.
I've had this happen to me plenty of times on many different laptops. It if has metal leads on the bottom, towards the back (I think they are for charging a docking station) you will notice a slight tingling if you place it on your lap while wearing no clothing. (Yeah yeah. Admit it. You code naked too.) This is especially true if you've just taken a shower. It's not unbearable but you certainly notice it.
First global warming, now galactic crowding? I seriously wish I was born 300 years ago.
The Daily Show is already on BitTorrent within about 2 hours of its East Coast airing. It takes me about a half hour to download, it's a digital satellite rip and when I play it on my television it actually looks better than cable since I don't have digital cable. Ditto the Colbert Report. I'm a cable subscriber but I don't have TiVo and not having to stay up late to watch the episodes, and/or being able to take them on the road with me, makes all the difference. I don't know if what I'm doing is illegal but it's insanely easy and convenient. I certainly don't feel like it's immoral. I have a hard time seeing Viacom or any other corporation being able to put a stop this sort of thing. It certainly isn't working for the music industry. Or should I say didn't.
You don't even have to really look. Colbert Report and Daily Show via RSS, downloaded automatically in the middle of the night and ready hot and steaming when I wake up each morning. Ta-da!
I give you RTFA credit, but it sounds like they want to use the other process which, if actually feasible, would make fuckall money, to keep the malaria thing economic.
Well, instead of trolling for Postgres, let's mosey on over to the MySQL website and see if we can figure out why someone might want to pay, hrm? Ahh yes, here we go, MySQL Enterprise. Mmm. Let's click that. Iiiinteresting. Says here you get 24x7 web and phone support plus 30 minute emergency response time. Eat that, pgsql-bugs. You also get consultative support from people who spend all day tuning MySQL installations for max performance and reliability. I can't even find the Postgres analogue of that to make fun of. Lots of other goodies too numerous to mention that might be worth paying for.
If you're tossing Wankr 2.1 together in your bedroom then MySQL free, pgsql, or even sqlite is more than enough to meet your needs. If you run a large business that relies on MySQL to actually make some $$, then purchasing support is a rational choice. Especially since TCO is still about an order of magnitude less than competition.
I'm afraid I don't have one :-) I just thought it was funny, and perhaps mildly ironic. Although that's such a loaded term these days that who knows, really.
Hidden referrals are weak.
Part of this guy's research involved Googling "alternative search engines."
But I titled it "Sergey Brin turns into a corporate douchebag." "On a business level, that decision to censor... was a net negative." I think I speak for a lot of people here when I say, wtf is that shit? I can think of a few more, say, pressing reasons why abetting the oppressive regime in China is fucked than the good ol' bottom line. Don't be evil my ass.
Sigh. Sergey, we barely knew ye.
I second that.. convenience is totally underrated when it comes to the factors driving DVD adoption. I was stunned when my girlfriend couldn't see the difference between VHS and DVD, or distinguish between 128kb MP3 and FLAC. "Oh sure I can tell the difference now, but I never would have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out." I know it's a hard sell for the /. crowd but a lot of people don't care about audio and video quality that much. Or at least, not nearly enough to justify the $3,000 investment that it takes to get a decent HDTV/digital cable/HD-DVD setup.
All three legs, even...