As for defending the democracy with guns, I happen to live in decadent Europe, where we're lucky enough not to have as many religious freaks as in the US, BTW. And, nope, no free access to God, and last time I checked, no tyranny either.
Re: your god thingie. I suggest you try reading Voltaire, and Sade maybe too, it's fun. And watch a few documentaries about your fellow god-fearing idiots in Iran and Afghanistan. You might actually learn something.
Monopolies suck. Here I have a 512/128 ADSL at home. Fine, you'd think. WAIT! How long will it take you to roll on the floor laughing when I tell you that the minimum ping I get i s... taddam... 130ms!!! And averages more around 300ms. That's right! Worse than a 28.8 modem! But wait, it gets funnier! Last nite at ~1AM, I was at 600ms with 20kbps throughput. Impressive isn't it? And no, it's not the ISP, since connecting via my good old 28.8 yielded much, much better numbers.
No, it's the infrastructure laid out by France Telecom that sucks big time. Behind the DSLAMs lie a totally overloaded ATM network that links to the ISPs. FT allows them 3.6kbps per subscriber!!! Of course, not everybody uses them at the same time. STILL! It's a completely fucked up estimate they made
People are complaining: there is an estimate 4000 subscribers to this "service". Over 1000 have registered on this ADSL users website.
WRT SDSL: there is one company in Paris (Proxad) that does the same as our guy: they rent copper cables, and put SDSL modem at each ends. Very competitive compared with LL here, still very expensive though. ~$600 for a 256k.
Well as atheist and anti christian as I am, I did'nt think of that. That being said, that Wave things looks so surprisingly similar to the Sekuritat and Stasi (use of the phone, etc...) that the parallel is more striking.
I second Signail11's question. I have another question: do you realize that in Europe a plan such as yours would raise much concern, so much as to throw hundreds of thousands of protesters in the street? Do you realize that anonymously denouncing people has been only used by the harshest dictatorships in this century? Do KGB, Stasi, Gestapo and Sekuritat ring a bell to you? Ever heard of the concept of yellow star?
As for the marketing angle to your website (and as I understand it, whole program). Do you know that Europeans would never let their kids be exposed to the kind of advertising that's widely used in american schools? Maybe here again that's a reminiscence of dictatorships: I believe the nazis pioneered the use of propaganda towards children.
Having drawn those parallels, do you share my (our) concerns? If you do, and I hope you do, how come you did'nt think of it before?
What if a racist antisemitic crack-dealing pimp saved your kid's life?
Re:Can't we re-reverse engineer CSS?
on
More on LinDVD
·
· Score: 3
It seems like there are a few problems with DeCSS, like that it was partially based on Xing's player against a perhaps effective click-through license, and that it was packaged in a way that effectively made it a piracy tool.
An unenforceable click-through license that is also probably illegal in several countries as it does'nt respect the consumers' rights. It does'nt take a lawyer to guess that there must be a few countries where trying to impose an illegal clause to the contractee is illegal in itself.
As a sidenote, drifting topics: I was wondering about the comments I've read lately re: the GPL being unenforceable as no money were changing hands. First of all, were that true, click-through licenses would be even weaker than that, and even shrinkwrap licenses for that matter (you pay BEFORE you're able to read the license, and even when you're allowed to read it, it's so unpractical that it must be on shaky legal grounds). And then, the GPL states clearly "since you have not signed [this license] However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works."
By current copyright law, anything you publish is under your copyright, and therefore falls under its restrictions, namely that you can claim rights to derivative works and distribution. As such distribution and modification are usually prohibited, it's foolish to claim you are not aware of the rest of the provisions in it as soon as you start exercising them.
Freedom or death. I'm being a bit extreme, but that's it: I'm not going to alienate *my* freedom, *our* freedom, just to allow the corporate bastards in hollywood to buy a few more benzos. And save me the bit about paying the artists -- Valenti and co. have no problem screwing other countries' cinema industries and artists. But hey, they're doing it "legally".
As a sidenote: I'm not being nationalistic here. French cinema sucks as of late. I've only seen one passable french movie lately (Peut-Etre) and it was'nt that good anyway.
The MPAA is a cartel, a monopoly, they should be treated the same way Microsoft is being treated, there is no question about it. Getting moral lessons from those bastards is beyond any kind of decency. They are infringing laws as much, if not more, than your average Joe-w4r3z kiddie. The fact that they have power and money to get away with it does'nt make a difference.
Now there's one thing that bothers me above all, it's the message they're trying to pass, that *us* free software advocates/users are just freeloaders. Listen: I barely have any illegal MP3z, I don't have *any* so-called "pirated" software with their illegal End-User Lick my Ass, and I've even managed to lose my only ripped-off movie: SW Phantom Menace -- one of the crappiest movies I've seen last year. I use Free Software, and I have a whole bunch of CDs I bought at the monopolistically inflated street price in shops.
SO GET OFF MY BACK WITH THE MORALIZING BULLSHIT
The MPAA and friends are just like those conservatives politicians you find fucking in brothels with 16 year old girls.
1) You see a menu item is grayed out, meaning "You can't do that." Sometimes, it simply makes no sense that you can't. Well, just like "balloon help" or whatever they call it, if you leave your mouse pointer on the grayed-out item, up pops a small windowlet that explains why you can't, concisely. A first-rate user interface trains the user as it does what the user wants.
Balloon help on Macs used to implement this. The balloon help "feature" was'nt worth shit anyway because there was no convenient/automatic way to turn it on/off (you could'nt use your computer for more than 30 secs with balloon help on without going Amok), and because, as in current MS programes, Help message were 90% stupid. Stupid as in: File > Open = "Open a file".
So I've worked on this web site, SkiIn, for a few years, until last year. Mostly a labor of love (duh!), I started it at a time where I did'nt even really know Perl, in those old ages MySQL did'nt exist yet, no Apache but the venerable and buggy NCSA server. Long time ago... I had some experience with Linux, just fiddling around with that bloody slackware thing, but I was'nt a convert at that time. Actually, I remember that at this time I was waiting eagerly for the official release of NT4.0. (I was young and innocent!) Let me drift out of the topic for a minute.
I had been hired as a contractor to write some tools to generate the pages automatically from a FileMaker database. My tools were in Metrowerks C++, with some experimental object oriented GUI (what was the name of this funky framework again?). Oh and a few clumsy MacPerl scripts.
Then we bought a PC to run some piece of sh^Hoftware on it. I install that very first NT4.0, limited 30 day versions. Spent a whole day installing it (the bloody 3 floppies thing...) I left late in the evening... and when I came back the next day... the bloody thing had BSOD'ed. Duh. So I reboot. It would'nt!! We thought of bringing it back to the shop, but before I wanted to try that funky RedHat distro (4.0?) I just got ahold of. Later I installed the first 2.0 kernel, then it stayed there as our inhouse testsite running 2.0.something up until now I think. It's probably rolled over the jiffies a couple of times. I was a convert. Anyway.
Back on topic: we did quite a good job on the site, had lots of good ideas, the graphic designer did a very good job, I did'nt do too bad, and we won an award or too.
Now at that time, finding paying customers (advertisers, etc...) for a website in Europe was a real bitch. And we did'nt even really think of venture capital either to begin with. When we started, even with the CEO's connections, it was a real bitch too.
So now I'm back on topic... what have I learned at that point? Well when the Internet actually hit France (2 years ago), we could actually start talking with investors. They would all praise our business plan, which was original and well thought out at the time. And the talks went quite far, as far as to the investors and potential buyers to talk seriously in the $10 million range maybe. However... and that's the bottom line, none of the potential deals succeeded. It was all or nothing. They were interested in our business, would have put a lot of money, or nothing.
I left the company a bit more than a year ago, now they have merged with another one, so it's not lost; and I really don't know what to advise you, besides talking to as many people as possible. Investors might help you valuate it, but that value does'nt mean shit: it means that, if someone buys it, they will gladly pay that much, or not buy it at all. Cause there's no real point, I guess, in buying such a business too cheap (since they're likely to pay in overvaluated stock anyway).
All work has been abandoned since the 1948 on the amazing endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline. Why? Why does the DoD repeatedly kill any attempt to figure how resublimated Thiotimoline seems to dissolve BEFORE it is actually put in a solvant? Are the risks too high? Do they have something to hide?
Actually older versions are GPLed. Newer version are free enough IMO: you can modify, redistribute and use at will, you're just not allowed to sell them for a profit (as in selling a product that would only work with it). So for me it's Free, if not in the general sense. Then, Monty in an interview hinted that he was trying to have it fully FREEed (Open Source'd).
Hey I'm developping a B2B exchange portal as well. I'm using MySQL. But damn, the thing sucks for everything more than simple selects. Plus selects are sometimes NOT optimised at all. Computing some basic stats on the content of the DB brings it down to its knees. I had to add another server duplicating the content in a very hackish way so that users would'nt be slowed down to a crawl every time we had to compute the stats (often). Duh.
I had the chance to see him "live" at a conference in Grenoble. He's one of those few people who manage to communicate the most abstract concepts in the most entertaining way. Even to the layman -- you know, those who don't even know that there is actually research being done in mathematics (most people, actually, as strange as it might seem to us geeks).
Penrose suggests that because humans can always solve halting problems(will a given program terminate) and turing machines can't, that the human brain is doing more than mere computation.
Well apparently Penrose has never dealt with any government offices. Maybe he should read Kafka. Or try to apply for a Green Card.
They should have figured that out *before* moving into the dorm. Or are we to do away with laws entirely for college students? Nothing like moral relativism to instill a little respect for society, eh?
They should have? You don't know shit about their situation. Maybe the other dorms with connectivity are twice as expensive. Maybe the other dorms were already full so they could'nt get there. Maybe those dorms were full because the campus authorities reserved them for their friends & family. What do you know? The fact is, for all we know, those kids are being criminally prosecuted, put under much stress, for an act that is, at most, benign, and that, as far as we know so far, has not caused any kind of damages. I guess that, had their hacked caused a week long outage on the campus network, they would have mentioned it in the article, would'nt they? Now stop being overlegalist, and get a bit rational.
The law started well. It was first designed to solve the altern.org vs. Estelle "Bimbo" Halliday scandal. So it started well. But then... as the law was being passed in the parliament, some zealot deputy or senator ammended with delirious requirements. Somehow, as that usually happens, those went unnoticed and passed.
But there is worse than what Valentin points out in his small blurb. Here's a fucking insane part of it: you may get 6 months of jail and/or $100k of fines if you misidentify yourself on a bulletin board. Now isn't that insane? Or just plain ridiculous.
Plus that's the kind of law the Scientology will loooooove. They'll be able to get the name and addresses of their opponent, they won't have to spend money researching them to send their hordes of drone picketing outside their home with "XX is a pedophile" signs.
Anyway, everything is not lost, the law might be challenged before the constitutional council. But I'm extremely disappointed by the weak coverage in the press.
Slashdot Mirror
I am god, miscreant. Bown down.
As for defending the democracy with guns, I happen to live in decadent Europe, where we're lucky enough not to have as many religious freaks as in the US, BTW. And, nope, no free access to God, and last time I checked, no tyranny either.
Re: your god thingie. I suggest you try reading Voltaire, and Sade maybe too, it's fun. And watch a few documentaries about your fellow god-fearing idiots in Iran and Afghanistan. You might actually learn something.
s/morally/superstitiously/
Religion is not moral. I'm not religious; I'm not immoral either. Thank you.
Monopolies suck. Here I have a 512/128 ADSL at home. Fine, you'd think. WAIT! How long will it take you to roll on the floor laughing when I tell you that the minimum ping I get i s... taddam ... 130ms!!! And averages more around 300ms. That's right! Worse than a 28.8 modem! But wait, it gets funnier! Last nite at ~1AM, I was at 600ms with 20kbps throughput. Impressive isn't it? And no, it's not the ISP, since connecting via my good old 28.8 yielded much, much better numbers.
No, it's the infrastructure laid out by France Telecom that sucks big time. Behind the DSLAMs lie a totally overloaded ATM network that links to the ISPs. FT allows them 3.6kbps per subscriber!!! Of course, not everybody uses them at the same time. STILL! It's a completely fucked up estimate they made
People are complaining: there is an estimate 4000 subscribers to this "service". Over 1000 have registered on this ADSL users website.
WRT SDSL: there is one company in Paris (Proxad) that does the same as our guy: they rent copper cables, and put SDSL modem at each ends. Very competitive compared with LL here, still very expensive though. ~$600 for a 256k.
I suggest you take a look at Linux's source code. Or even funnier: QMail's source code. Some good programmers do hate comments.
Well as atheist and anti christian as I am, I did'nt think of that. That being said, that Wave things looks so surprisingly similar to the Sekuritat and Stasi (use of the phone, etc ...) that the parallel is more striking.
And what if the saved kid becomes the next Jerry Falwell?
I second Signail11's question. I have another question: do you realize that in Europe a plan such as yours would raise much concern, so much as to throw hundreds of thousands of protesters in the street? Do you realize that anonymously denouncing people has been only used by the harshest dictatorships in this century? Do KGB, Stasi, Gestapo and Sekuritat ring a bell to you? Ever heard of the concept of yellow star?
As for the marketing angle to your website (and as I understand it, whole program). Do you know that Europeans would never let their kids be exposed to the kind of advertising that's widely used in american schools? Maybe here again that's a reminiscence of dictatorships: I believe the nazis pioneered the use of propaganda towards children.
Having drawn those parallels, do you share my (our) concerns? If you do, and I hope you do, how come you did'nt think of it before?
What if a racist antisemitic crack-dealing pimp saved your kid's life?
It seems like there are a few problems with DeCSS, like that it was partially based on Xing's player against a perhaps effective click-through license, and that it was packaged in a way that effectively made it a piracy tool.
An unenforceable click-through license that is also probably illegal in several countries as it does'nt respect the consumers' rights. It does'nt take a lawyer to guess that there must be a few countries where trying to impose an illegal clause to the contractee is illegal in itself.
As a sidenote, drifting topics: I was wondering about the comments I've read lately re: the GPL being unenforceable as no money were changing hands. First of all, were that true, click-through licenses would be even weaker than that, and even shrinkwrap licenses for that matter (you pay BEFORE you're able to read the license, and even when you're allowed to read it, it's so unpractical that it must be on shaky legal grounds). And then, the GPL states clearly "since you have not signed [this license] However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works."
By current copyright law, anything you publish is under your copyright, and therefore falls under its restrictions, namely that you can claim rights to derivative works and distribution. As such distribution and modification are usually prohibited, it's foolish to claim you are not aware of the rest of the provisions in it as soon as you start exercising them.
Freedom or death. I'm being a bit extreme, but that's it: I'm not going to alienate *my* freedom, *our* freedom, just to allow the corporate bastards in hollywood to buy a few more benzos. And save me the bit about paying the artists -- Valenti and co. have no problem screwing other countries' cinema industries and artists. But hey, they're doing it "legally".
As a sidenote: I'm not being nationalistic here. French cinema sucks as of late. I've only seen one passable french movie lately (Peut-Etre) and it was'nt that good anyway.
The MPAA is a cartel, a monopoly, they should be treated the same way Microsoft is being treated, there is no question about it. Getting moral lessons from those bastards is beyond any kind of decency. They are infringing laws as much, if not more, than your average Joe-w4r3z kiddie. The fact that they have power and money to get away with it does'nt make a difference.
Now there's one thing that bothers me above all, it's the message they're trying to pass, that *us* free software advocates/users are just freeloaders. Listen: I barely have any illegal MP3z, I don't have *any* so-called "pirated" software with their illegal End-User Lick my Ass, and I've even managed to lose my only ripped-off movie: SW Phantom Menace -- one of the crappiest movies I've seen last year. I use Free Software, and I have a whole bunch of CDs I bought at the monopolistically inflated street price in shops.
SO GET OFF MY BACK WITH THE MORALIZING BULLSHIT
The MPAA and friends are just like those conservatives politicians you find fucking in brothels with 16 year old girls.
It's cheap, and there's plenty of cracks available so you don't have to pay their TAX. Plus you own the fucking thing.
1) You see a menu item is grayed out, meaning "You can't do that." Sometimes, it simply makes no sense that you can't. Well, just like "balloon help" or whatever they call it, if you leave your mouse pointer on the grayed-out item, up pops a small windowlet that explains why you can't, concisely. A first-rate user interface trains the user as it does what the user wants.
Balloon help on Macs used to implement this. The balloon help "feature" was'nt worth shit anyway because there was no convenient/automatic way to turn it on/off (you could'nt use your computer for more than 30 secs with balloon help on without going Amok), and because, as in current MS programes, Help message were 90% stupid. Stupid as in: File > Open = "Open a file".
So I've worked on this web site, SkiIn, for a few years, until last year. Mostly a labor of love (duh!), I started it at a time where I did'nt even really know Perl, in those old ages MySQL did'nt exist yet, no Apache but the venerable and buggy NCSA server. Long time ago ... I had some experience with Linux, just fiddling around with that bloody slackware thing, but I was'nt a convert at that time. Actually, I remember that at this time I was waiting eagerly for the official release of NT4.0. (I was young and innocent!) Let me drift out of the topic for a minute.
I had been hired as a contractor to write some tools to generate the pages automatically from a FileMaker database. My tools were in Metrowerks C++, with some experimental object oriented GUI (what was the name of this funky framework again?). Oh and a few clumsy MacPerl scripts.
Then we bought a PC to run some piece of sh^Hoftware on it. I install that very first NT4.0, limited 30 day versions. Spent a whole day installing it (the bloody 3 floppies thing ...) I left late in the evening ... and when I came back the next day ... the bloody thing had BSOD'ed. Duh. So I reboot. It would'nt!! We thought of bringing it back to the shop, but before I wanted to try that funky RedHat distro (4.0?) I just got ahold of. Later I installed the first 2.0 kernel, then it stayed there as our inhouse testsite running 2.0.something up until now I think. It's probably rolled over the jiffies a couple of times. I was a convert. Anyway.
Back on topic: we did quite a good job on the site, had lots of good ideas, the graphic designer did a very good job, I did'nt do too bad, and we won an award or too.
Now at that time, finding paying customers (advertisers, etc ...) for a website in Europe was a real bitch. And we did'nt even really think of venture capital either to begin with. When we started, even with the CEO's connections, it was a real bitch too.
So now I'm back on topic ... what have I learned at that point? Well when the Internet actually hit France (2 years ago), we could actually start talking with investors. They would all praise our business plan, which was original and well thought out at the time. And the talks went quite far, as far as to the investors and potential buyers to talk seriously in the $10 million range maybe. However ... and that's the bottom line, none of the potential deals succeeded. It was all or nothing. They were interested in our business, would have put a lot of money, or nothing.
I left the company a bit more than a year ago, now they have merged with another one, so it's not lost; and I really don't know what to advise you, besides talking to as many people as possible. Investors might help you valuate it, but that value does'nt mean shit: it means that, if someone buys it, they will gladly pay that much, or not buy it at all. Cause there's no real point, I guess, in buying such a business too cheap (since they're likely to pay in overvaluated stock anyway).
You didn't say anything about the sex life. Oups, sorry, I'm off-topic.
Here's a link for you.
All work has been abandoned since the 1948 on the amazing endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline. Why? Why does the DoD repeatedly kill any attempt to figure how resublimated Thiotimoline seems to dissolve BEFORE it is actually put in a solvant? Are the risks too high? Do they have something to hide?
Not sure about the frog thing, but I know French scientists in Grenoble managed to get a mouse to levitate, through an intense magnetic field.
MySql is neither Free nor is it (yet) an RDBMS
Actually older versions are GPLed. Newer version are free enough IMO: you can modify, redistribute and use at will, you're just not allowed to sell them for a profit (as in selling a product that would only work with it). So for me it's Free, if not in the general sense. Then, Monty in an interview hinted that he was trying to have it fully FREEed (Open Source'd).
Hey I'm developping a B2B exchange portal as well. I'm using MySQL. But damn, the thing sucks for everything more than simple selects. Plus selects are sometimes NOT optimised at all. Computing some basic stats on the content of the DB brings it down to its knees. I had to add another server duplicating the content in a very hackish way so that users would'nt be slowed down to a crawl every time we had to compute the stats (often). Duh.
Those libertarians are soooo naive.
Why? Probably to do some good skiing.
I had the chance to see him "live" at a conference in Grenoble. He's one of those few people who manage to communicate the most abstract concepts in the most entertaining way. Even to the layman -- you know, those who don't even know that there is actually research being done in mathematics (most people, actually, as strange as it might seem to us geeks).
When will we have a Slashdot interview?
Penrose suggests that because humans can always solve halting problems(will a given program terminate) and turing machines can't, that the human brain is doing more than mere computation.
Well apparently Penrose has never dealt with any government offices. Maybe he should read Kafka. Or try to apply for a Green Card.
They should have figured that out *before* moving into the dorm. Or are we to do away with laws entirely for college students? Nothing like moral relativism to instill a little respect for society, eh?
They should have? You don't know shit about their situation. Maybe the other dorms with connectivity are twice as expensive. Maybe the other dorms were already full so they could'nt get there. Maybe those dorms were full because the campus authorities reserved them for their friends & family. What do you know? The fact is, for all we know, those kids are being criminally prosecuted, put under much stress, for an act that is, at most, benign, and that, as far as we know so far, has not caused any kind of damages. I guess that, had their hacked caused a week long outage on the campus network, they would have mentioned it in the article, would'nt they? Now stop being overlegalist, and get a bit rational.
The law started well. It was first designed to solve the altern.org vs. Estelle "Bimbo" Halliday scandal. So it started well. But then ... as the law was being passed in the parliament, some zealot deputy or senator ammended with delirious requirements. Somehow, as that usually happens, those went unnoticed and passed.
But there is worse than what Valentin points out in his small blurb. Here's a fucking insane part of it: you may get 6 months of jail and/or $100k of fines if you misidentify yourself on a bulletin board. Now isn't that insane? Or just plain ridiculous.
Plus that's the kind of law the Scientology will loooooove. They'll be able to get the name and addresses of their opponent, they won't have to spend money researching them to send their hordes of drone picketing outside their home with "XX is a pedophile" signs.
Anyway, everything is not lost, the law might be challenged before the constitutional council. But I'm extremely disappointed by the weak coverage in the press.