You're wrong. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of Nader voters. We see virtually no difference between Gore and Bush. Sure, in word they are different, but in deed they are almost identitical. Their records prove that.
Do you really think you can speak for all those who voted for Nader?
As I mentioned in an earlier reply, this is false, according to what the networks are reporting according to the exit polls. The networks report that 1/4 of those voting for Nader would've stayed home Nader was not in the race. Even 1/2 of the 3/4 left voting for Gore would be enough difference to swing Florida to Gore.
The facts are, as it seems, that the majority of Nader's votes come from people who wouldn't have voted anyway. The rest are would-be democrats;)
This is false, according to what the networks are reporting. The networks report that 1/4 of those voting for Nader would've stayed home Nader was not in the race. The rest would have voted for Gore. This 3/4 difference would have been enough to swing Florida to Gore.
Week, by week, by week the great Gods of Slashdot deliver upon us editorialized half-rants about privacy concerns---and it just does not seem like that big a deal to me.
I absolutely agree that the editorializing that goes on in the headlines concerning alleged privacy concerns at every step in the road needs to be slowed. We get enough bad Slashdot comments as it is, without the editorials.
Food for thought: we should be able to moderate down the editorials. Then hopefully my filter (at level 3) would drop all but the best.
Doesn't the W3C release standards to promote this effect?
Yes, but the problem is, there is no good browser for Linux that follows these standards.
You forget that any product that uses Gecko, including Mozilla and Galeon among others, is capable of using many of the W3C's latest standards, as well as the more long-standing ones, such as CSS2.
Technology changes, and we don't have time to code backward compatibility for a fraction of our customers. We target the 98%, not the 2% who use a platform without a W3C compliant browser.
First of all, you don't have to worry about backwards compatibility if you write according to a W3C standards; they are, in general, automatically backwards-compatible. Sure, you might not get the same experience if you are using an older browser, but that's the reason for using newer browsers.
Web developers write markup documents that are 98% invalid, not conforming to any W3C standard. They ignore W3C standards completely. In fact, if you could show me 5 sites that have valid, strict HTML of any version, or XHTML, I would be impressed. And you can't use any page I've written (which are all valid XHTML 1.0 and valid CSS2) nor the W3C pages as any of the 5.
Web developers target those without W3C-compliant browsers; this is why they write Javascript, to help workaround, circumventing standards to help those with non-compliant browsers such as Netscape 4.x, and IE.
The subscription would not be about Napster making money. It would be about leaving financial trails to find users. Electronic payments to Napster would most likely take the place in credit cards, which have a high correlation to user ids, and real people behind them. Once the RIAA can track what real people are doing, and not just IP addresses, things will start getting real rough.
It costs a doctor nothing to look at a rash on my hand or listen to my cough and get a diagnosis, but it costs money for me to get this service. Guess why? It cost a lot of money to imbue the doctor with his knowledge and to provide the doctor with medical equipment.
Yes, it is reasonable for the doctor to charge for the exam, but it is not reasonable for the doctor to forcibly gain monetarily from patients who later use the knowledge they gained from being examined to help others. Note, this sort of patients-advising-patients isn't practically good thing to do anyways, because there is not a perfect transfer of information; there are many contextual issues that a patient is not aware of that the doctor is.
PS: Supporting Napster is no different from supporting w4r3z d00d5. If it is OK to pirate music then it is OK to pirate software after all the rhetoric is the same and information wants to be free.
You're right, it is no different. However, I think that eventually all information should be unrestricted in it's spread. But I'll settle for one battle at a time.
It's a matter of pipes
on
GPG vs. PGP?
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· Score: 3
As a person who has written a couple Perl modules to handle both PGP and GnuPG, most recently GnuPG::Interface, I can honestly say GnuPG is a much, much more well-designed program for those who want to interact with it on a higher level.
GnuPG has a great system of interaction via pipes, which are the means to to pass in the passphrase, get status output, interact with terminal-ish interfaces, and much more. To know more about these, look up status-fd, passphrase-fd, and several others in the GnuPG manpage.
GnuPG also has a well-thought-out syntax for interaction. Each option has a long, useful name, and the more-used ones have useful shortcuts.
Also, GnuPG uses cool things like command-completion, so that you don't have to type all of --list-keys; you can just type --list and it will work fine.
PGP, on the other hand, has commands like -a meaning armor, and -ka meaning add-key, which is confusing, if you are used to bundled parameters.
Re:PGPing your email?
on
GPG vs. PGP?
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· Score: 1
Why are people signing their e-mail with PGP/GPG?
The point is, if people sign their data, we can do a lot more things with information, and we can scale better. For instance, I can be much more confident I am filtering my mail properly if all data is authenticated, and I are not just relying on mail headers (which don't work anyways with anonymous remailers.
Personally, I currently sign about 50% of my mails, depending on whether or not I felt the mail was important. Often I'll sign when I post to the gnugp-users list, or in reply to person's personal mail. But I don't sign for trivial mails.
And now, for a bit of spam. Try pgpenvelope, a great filter for Pine.
In SGML-based HTML 4 certain elements were permitted to omit the end tag; with the elements that followed implying
closure. This omission is not permitted in XML-based XHTML. All elements other than those declared in the DTD as
EMPTY must have an end tag.
ssuming away reality, for the moment, if there were a magic device that you could pull your car into and have exact replicas made at no (or extremely minimal) cost to yourself, should that be permitted? is that right? is it OK for ford to invest millions to develope a new car only to have somebody spew out an infinite number of replicas of it?
I would argue that it OK to do such a thing. The morals in American society are pretty much based on the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you don't trample on the rights of others; the law is what prevents this trampling. There is nothing inherently wrong with replicating what you have; you are using your resources to share what you have. IMO, the fact that capitalism doesn't inherently give rights to everyone who contributed to something (and hence the originator/creator of ideas) never comes into play. I could go on an on about this (and I have), but I'll stop here for now; I'm currently writing an article fully explaining this argument.
Upon looking at Stallman's own views, I still fail to see how licensing your work "deprives" people. Ford isn't "depriving" people of transportation by demanding that you pay money for one of their cars. If you cant afford it, that's your problem, not Ford's. How is this evil? The whole thing smells a little weird.
There is a huge difference between selling and licensing things. The key difference is that you pay Ford for an object, and you are in general then free to use that object as you see fit; Ford places no restrictions on its use. When one purchases licensed software, however, one is not free to use that object as one sees fit; e.g., if I puchase a copy of Windows, I cannot make copies and give it to others; I am restricted by the license.
The issue, as I see it, is not about money at all. As Richard Stallman often uses it, it is about the freedom to do what you want with what you have, without restricting other's freedom.
I cannot emphasize it enough. This book doesn't only tell how to create object-oriented Perl, but how to create strong object-oriented Perl. You will not regret getting this book. This book is my all-time favorite Perl book.
This book revamped my Perl OO module creation
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Object Oriented Perl
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· Score: 3
If you write serious Perl modules, get this book. I cannot emphasize this enough. I am an author of a couple CPAN modules, most importantly GnuPG::Interface, and I must say that this book entirely revamped my object-oriented Perl module design.
It is the best Perl book I have (and I have quite a few). The most important thing I learned from this book was existence of a very important module, Class::MethodMaker, again available from CPAN. That module and this book will teach you how to write maintainable, powerful modules. It teaches tieing in a clear manner, what modules are available for use, and what pitfalls to avoid.
I have to repeat this again: if you are a serious Perl module writer, get this book!. You will not regret it!
Looking at beautiful buildings? Freely sharing pictures of beautiful buildings?? Just whose "architecture" do you think it is to share? This isn't mathematical equations or obvious development techniques. This is an artform not everyone can create. They deserve to get paid for it.
Sharing photographs of beautiful buidings is just flat out wrong. It's explotation of other people's hard effort. You think all information should be free? Well here's a piece of wisdom worth remembering: "You get what you pay for." Just try looking for good pictures on buildings.com sometime. I swear, I've only liked less than 10% of what I've seen. These people have talent and want to be recognized for it. What the heck is so wrong about that?
What is wrong is that you aren't abstracting what information is enough. You're still stuck in the mud thinking that information-sharing is a discrete, finite, even traceable event, where copying it is not the norm. It's not. A new awareness is needed. Karl Marx may be dead, but we all have the right and civic duty to challenge the system we are presented with to make sure it is rational.
Well here's a piece of wisdom worth remembering: "You get what you pay for."
Jeezus f*** C**** this is a lame argument. Slashdot is free, the software that runs Slashdot is free, Linux is free, Perl is free, *BSD is free, Apache is free. Need I go on?
Sure sounds like you are advocating allowing people no rights to limit in any way their own creations. Or at least significantly reducing what rights they will have in the future.
I'm advocating minimizing people's rights to limit the natural process of information flow. You do not have a 'right' to limit information, any more than you have a 'right' to limit who can see an architectural work (from public premises, at least, such as a sidewalk), becuase you you 'own' the work of architecture art. It's a natural process that people see the building.
Hmm, too many acronyms in too many concepts:) Just because I can take your intellectional property doesn't mean I have a right to. In fact, I'm not even talking about rights. I'm talking about what society accepts as normal practice. Note that you can do X != X is a norm.
Just because you can steal my IP doesn't mean that you have the right and the responsibility to do so.
That's because stealing IP addresses isn't the norm. I'm not talking about might that makes right, I'm talking about entire shifts due to society adapting to new technologies. New technologies show what is and what is not ridculous to try to prevent.
And so any limits s/he might want to impose on his work, is completely unforgivable, and unallowable?
I'm not saying any limits; just those that go strongly against the nature of information flow.
Let me try this example on you. Suppose I were to write something in a newspaper article, but said "You can't read any of this article out loud, because I own this information, and you would be reproducing this information and other people might here it!" Hopefully, these restrictions seem pretty silly. However, if all I said was that you coldn't copy my information in print for others to see, my restrictions don't seem that silly. So what's going on here?
The key difference is the notions we have about information permanence, and the ability to reproduce it. With previous technologies, information was either naturally hindered from flowing, such as with speech, or laws could be enacted to restrict its flow, such as with print, because the act of copying was such a noticeable event.
However, now that reproducing information is so much less of a noticeable task, there are no longer reasonable means to restrict information copying. The reason that we don't seem that adverse to saying people can't reproduce our information in print is because we are still clinging to old notions of information existing in discrete elements, and hence 'copying' still is a notion that many of us still have. Since we don't have a strong concept of owning 'copies' of speech restricting it borders on ludicrous.
Do you really expect us to equate infringing on the rights of IP creators, to protesting against the governments limitations on the use of crypto?
Infringing on the rights of IP creators is an extremely vague statement. I believe in copyright, but I don't believe in copyrights which go directly against the nature of technology. Case in point: I believe strongly in the rights of open-source software creators of BSD'd or GPL'd to demand that their software be used in accordance with the copyleft/right license, as there is no strong technological pressure to break these. However, I do not support the overly-restrictive copyrights of closed-source applications which demand no copying whatsoever, as the the technology makes this to apparent.
My stance is not permanent; it changes with technology. Our views of 'justice' and 'right' concerning information have changed with time in accordance with current technology. I guess you could say that I favor a 'natural law' stance concerning technological issues. The 'nature' of technology is continually being discovered, and we need to adapt to new-found truths.
This is not censorship, this is not about how Metallica has sold out to The Man, it's about a bunch of annoying little \/\/4R3Z d00dZ and their inablility to either stay within the law or stay out of sight. The sooner Napster dies, the better; all napster does is make theft accessable to the terminally lame, and give the government(s) more reason to monitor and control the internet.
If you want to fight the good fight for rights online, try to pick a fight that doesn't involve somebody's right to be a thief. (the DMCA, openDVD, and UTICTA spring to mind)
I agree it's not about censorship, but it is about changing the way we view information. Anyone can tell that we are moving towards an age where information spread without restriction will be the norm, rather than the exception it is today. Certainly, currently many of are breaking the laws, but we do so in order to change society's perception of what the norms should be. Ten years from now, I believe we will all look back at strides taken such as Gnutella and Napster and say "Of course they were justified!"
Look at all the people that exported strong cryptographic software from the US while the stringent regulations were still in effect. They were breaking the law, but now it's clear to pretty much anyone that what they were doing was not immoral by any stretch of the imagination.
The times are changing, and fast. It is now that you have to become educated, and fight the good fights. I am confident I am.
Hellooo? Encryption need not have anything to do with authentication, particularly of credit card information. Encryption and digital signing are two separate processes. Look how OpenPGP works.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think you can speak for all those who voted for Nader?
As I mentioned in an earlier reply, this is false, according to what the networks are reporting according to the exit polls. The networks report that 1/4 of those voting for Nader would've stayed home Nader was not in the race. Even 1/2 of the 3/4 left voting for Gore would be enough difference to swing Florida to Gore.
This is false, according to what the networks are reporting. The networks report that 1/4 of those voting for Nader would've stayed home Nader was not in the race. The rest would have voted for Gore. This 3/4 difference would have been enough to swing Florida to Gore.
I absolutely agree that the editorializing that goes on in the headlines concerning alleged privacy concerns at every step in the road needs to be slowed. We get enough bad Slashdot comments as it is, without the editorials.
Food for thought: we should be able to moderate down the editorials. Then hopefully my filter (at level 3) would drop all but the best.
Nope, Transitional doesn't count; I specifically stated strict HTML for a reason.
You forget that any product that uses Gecko, including Mozilla and Galeon among others, is capable of using many of the W3C's latest standards, as well as the more long-standing ones, such as CSS2.
First of all, you don't have to worry about backwards compatibility if you write according to a W3C standards; they are, in general, automatically backwards-compatible. Sure, you might not get the same experience if you are using an older browser, but that's the reason for using newer browsers.
Web developers write markup documents that are 98% invalid, not conforming to any W3C standard. They ignore W3C standards completely. In fact, if you could show me 5 sites that have valid, strict HTML of any version, or XHTML, I would be impressed. And you can't use any page I've written (which are all valid XHTML 1.0 and valid CSS2) nor the W3C pages as any of the 5.
Web developers target those without W3C-compliant browsers; this is why they write Javascript, to help workaround, circumventing standards to help those with non-compliant browsers such as Netscape 4.x, and IE.
The subscription would not be about Napster making money. It would be about leaving financial trails to find users. Electronic payments to Napster would most likely take the place in credit cards, which have a high correlation to user ids, and real people behind them. Once the RIAA can track what real people are doing, and not just IP addresses, things will start getting real rough.
Yes, it is reasonable for the doctor to charge for the exam, but it is not reasonable for the doctor to forcibly gain monetarily from patients who later use the knowledge they gained from being examined to help others. Note, this sort of patients-advising-patients isn't practically good thing to do anyways, because there is not a perfect transfer of information; there are many contextual issues that a patient is not aware of that the doctor is.
You're right, it is no different. However, I think that eventually all information should be unrestricted in it's spread. But I'll settle for one battle at a time.
As a person who has written a couple Perl modules to handle both PGP and GnuPG, most recently GnuPG::Interface, I can honestly say GnuPG is a much, much more well-designed program for those who want to interact with it on a higher level.
GnuPG has a great system of interaction via pipes, which are the means to to pass in the passphrase, get status output, interact with terminal-ish interfaces, and much more. To know more about these, look up status-fd, passphrase-fd, and several others in the GnuPG manpage.
GnuPG also has a well-thought-out syntax for interaction. Each option has a long, useful name, and the more-used ones have useful shortcuts. Also, GnuPG uses cool things like command-completion, so that you don't have to type all of --list-keys; you can just type --list and it will work fine.
PGP, on the other hand, has commands like -a meaning armor, and -ka meaning add-key, which is confusing, if you are used to bundled parameters.
The point is, if people sign their data, we can do a lot more things with information, and we can scale better. For instance, I can be much more confident I am filtering my mail properly if all data is authenticated, and I are not just relying on mail headers (which don't work anyways with anonymous remailers.
Personally, I currently sign about 50% of my mails, depending on whether or not I felt the mail was important. Often I'll sign when I post to the gnugp-users list, or in reply to person's personal mail. But I don't sign for trivial mails.
And now, for a bit of spam. Try pgpenvelope, a great filter for Pine.
Exactly.
I would argue that it OK to do such a thing. The morals in American society are pretty much based on the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you don't trample on the rights of others; the law is what prevents this trampling. There is nothing inherently wrong with replicating what you have; you are using your resources to share what you have. IMO, the fact that capitalism doesn't inherently give rights to everyone who contributed to something (and hence the originator/creator of ideas) never comes into play. I could go on an on about this (and I have), but I'll stop here for now; I'm currently writing an article fully explaining this argument.
There is a huge difference between selling and licensing things. The key difference is that you pay Ford for an object, and you are in general then free to use that object as you see fit; Ford places no restrictions on its use. When one purchases licensed software, however, one is not free to use that object as one sees fit; e.g., if I puchase a copy of Windows, I cannot make copies and give it to others; I am restricted by the license.
The issue, as I see it, is not about money at all. As Richard Stallman often uses it, it is about the freedom to do what you want with what you have, without restricting other's freedom.
I cannot emphasize it enough. This book doesn't only tell how to create object-oriented Perl, but how to create strong object-oriented Perl. You will not regret getting this book. This book is my all-time favorite Perl book.
If you write serious Perl modules, get this book. I cannot emphasize this enough. I am an author of a couple CPAN modules, most importantly GnuPG::Interface, and I must say that this book entirely revamped my object-oriented Perl module design.
It is the best Perl book I have (and I have quite a few). The most important thing I learned from this book was existence of a very important module, Class::MethodMaker, again available from CPAN. That module and this book will teach you how to write maintainable, powerful modules. It teaches tieing in a clear manner, what modules are available for use, and what pitfalls to avoid.
I have to repeat this again: if you are a serious Perl module writer, get this book!. You will not regret it!
Looking at beautiful buildings? Freely sharing pictures of beautiful buildings?? Just whose "architecture" do you think it is to share? This isn't mathematical equations or obvious development techniques. This is an artform not everyone can create. They deserve to get paid for it.
Sharing photographs of beautiful buidings is just flat out wrong. It's explotation of other people's hard effort. You think all information should be free? Well here's a piece of wisdom worth remembering: "You get what you pay for." Just try looking for good pictures on buildings.com sometime. I swear, I've only liked less than 10% of what I've seen. These people have talent and want to be recognized for it. What the heck is so wrong about that?
What is wrong is that you aren't abstracting what information is enough. You're still stuck in the mud thinking that information-sharing is a discrete, finite, even traceable event, where copying it is not the norm. It's not. A new awareness is needed. Karl Marx may be dead, but we all have the right and civic duty to challenge the system we are presented with to make sure it is rational.
Jeezus f*** C**** this is a lame argument. Slashdot is free, the software that runs Slashdot is free, Linux is free, Perl is free, *BSD is free, Apache is free. Need I go on?
I'm advocating minimizing people's rights to limit the natural process of information flow. You do not have a 'right' to limit information, any more than you have a 'right' to limit who can see an architectural work (from public premises, at least, such as a sidewalk), becuase you you 'own' the work of architecture art. It's a natural process that people see the building.
Hmm, too many acronyms in too many concepts :) Just because I can take your intellectional property doesn't mean I have a right to. In fact, I'm not even talking about rights. I'm talking about what society accepts as normal practice. Note that you can do X != X is a norm.
That's because stealing IP addresses isn't the norm. I'm not talking about might that makes right, I'm talking about entire shifts due to society adapting to new technologies. New technologies show what is and what is not ridculous to try to prevent.
I'm not saying any limits; just those that go strongly against the nature of information flow.
Let me try this example on you. Suppose I were to write something in a newspaper article, but said "You can't read any of this article out loud, because I own this information, and you would be reproducing this information and other people might here it!" Hopefully, these restrictions seem pretty silly. However, if all I said was that you coldn't copy my information in print for others to see, my restrictions don't seem that silly. So what's going on here?
The key difference is the notions we have about information permanence, and the ability to reproduce it. With previous technologies, information was either naturally hindered from flowing, such as with speech, or laws could be enacted to restrict its flow, such as with print, because the act of copying was such a noticeable event.
However, now that reproducing information is so much less of a noticeable task, there are no longer reasonable means to restrict information copying. The reason that we don't seem that adverse to saying people can't reproduce our information in print is because we are still clinging to old notions of information existing in discrete elements, and hence 'copying' still is a notion that many of us still have. Since we don't have a strong concept of owning 'copies' of speech restricting it borders on ludicrous.
Infringing on the rights of IP creators is an extremely vague statement. I believe in copyright, but I don't believe in copyrights which go directly against the nature of technology. Case in point: I believe strongly in the rights of open-source software creators of BSD'd or GPL'd to demand that their software be used in accordance with the copyleft/right license, as there is no strong technological pressure to break these. However, I do not support the overly-restrictive copyrights of closed-source applications which demand no copying whatsoever, as the the technology makes this to apparent.
My stance is not permanent; it changes with technology. Our views of 'justice' and 'right' concerning information have changed with time in accordance with current technology. I guess you could say that I favor a 'natural law' stance concerning technological issues. The 'nature' of technology is continually being discovered, and we need to adapt to new-found truths.
Look at all the people that exported strong cryptographic software from the US while the stringent regulations were still in effect. They were breaking the law, but now it's clear to pretty much anyone that what they were doing was not immoral by any stretch of the imagination.
The times are changing, and fast. It is now that you have to become educated, and fight the good fights. I am confident I am.
Hellooo? Encryption need not have anything to do with authentication, particularly of credit card information. Encryption and digital signing are two separate processes. Look how OpenPGP works.