I'm going to throw this out there, but what are people's opinions about different DRM-free retailers?
I have liked Amazon for their ease of use, but their encodings are usually only 128-bit MP3s. I just found 7music, but haven't tried them yet. AudioLunchBox has nice encoding choices, but their music selection has been greatly limited in my experience. I used to have a subscription at Emusic, but the subscription model does not feed my desires.
The most important change with Wal-Mart offering DRM-free music is that it is clear customers will see music as having one of two different types of labels, WMA vs MP3. Customers tend to know that MP3's can be used technologically unrestricted, but WMA can be restricted; having this choice makes them aware that music can be sold legitimately under MP3's.
Given no direct benefit but only impediments for customers with WMA or DRM, they will attach negative connotations to DRM systems. As long as this negative connotation is implanted long enough, they will come to expect that things should only get better over time, and that WMA and DRM will eventually go away.
In this manner, the societally expected norm will change, and the anti-DRM side will win the war of minds.
Using a credit card wisely helps build your credit history; without a good history, one can have a difficult time getting a good mortgage or car loan. Yes, geeks and non-geeks alike can use credit unwisely, but wielding it wisely hints to society you can be entrusted with larger financial responsibilities.
MySQL is not bound by section 3a. The lead of section three states:
You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
The "you" referred to is the licensee, in this case MySQL's customers, not MySQL. Therefore, MySQL does not have any obligation to release anything with regards to section three.
As far as I can tell, there are no terms in the GPL that bind the licenser in any way.
You have a good point, but you're assuming that the risk is increasing as the filtering techniques get better. The risk only exists if your spam gets through, as I find it improbable that authorities will go after spam that gets blocked. So, similar numbers of pieces of spam have to still get through for the risk to remain level or increasing. It also might be true that if there is a correlation between spam getting through and prosecution, filtering among the less-likely-to-buy victims might induce less prosecution overall, if their voices are heard more by authorities than the more-likely-to-buy victims. If spam only successfully gets through to more susceptible victims, and they have less sway with prosecutors, the risk/reward ratio actually gets better from the spammer's perspective.
I tend to believe there is value in both sides' arguments. Completely restricting the data on informants could have side effects of allowing people to act unchecked. Public accountability for actions has a positive tempering effect on society. However, the safety of informants and agents is tantamount.
The question is how to strike a balance that can be made flexible for different circumstances. I would suspect that the timeliness of data has value for people who would wish to do harm to informants and agents. If the data was publicly restricted for some time, possibly years, this could provide an effective control mechanism to provide safety. Of course, some information might need to be permanently sealed, and provisions would remain in-tact for that.
I wish Slashdot had an easy-to-use search function to check to see if someone had suggested this already throughout this story's comments.
Your argument, in general, is correct. Closed source licenses are overall more strict in their allowances than open source. However, another important advantage that closed source licenses have is that they usually have one entity that is in control of the copyright. This allows one point of contact for re-negotiating the license, and possibly paying the owner for personal or business license. If there are many copyright owners for a software project, this is unfeasible.
Some open source software tries to follow the same route, mandating that all copyright be turned over, but even if this does happen, there is an assumption on the part of contributors that their software will remain open source, and not be taken closed; this can generate ill-will if it occurs. This makes it so even though there is a copyright transfer, the primary copyright owner will be unwilling to wield this power to relicense the product.
I recommend using Google Browser Sync to save your bookmarks remotely automatically. I too am very wary about potentially losing my bookmarks, but this extension alleviates my concerns greatly.
Consumer Reports recently had an article on backup solutions, and they are recommending easy-to-use external drive systems.
Re:Info on what exactly SHA-1 is ...
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
SHA-1 is not used for encryption, it is used for message authentication. Part of the NSA's mandate is to secure government traffic; it would gain little from promoting a broken digest algorithm. It arguably might have an interest in promoting a broken encryption algorithm, but SHA-1 is used for digital signatures.
Torrent link for linux installer
on
Mozilla 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've actually thought about the problem of having user-supplied comments in a site that is trying to shoot for valid XHTML. I think the best solution is for the site to allow a simplified language for posting comments. Web BB's and wikis got this right, I feel.
The reason why a simplified language is better is:
a good one can be taught in 20 seconds
it wouldn't have 'nested structures' problems; they would simply be forbidden
it would be more typing-friendly
HTML is good for generated content and expert users. However, it is extremely poor for most handwritten content. There is a similar contrast between knowing TeX and simply using a frontend or a word processor.
You said you RH was shafting its customers. In describing your workplace scenario, you complained how you couldn't now get RH used because of your PHB. As you say, your company isn't a customer of RedHat. Therefore, your entire comment complaining about you now can't get RedHat used in your workplace is impotent; you can't summarize by shifting something about you being a loyal customer, since your entire comment was about your workplace, which is not a customer.
If you could install Kimberlite and maintain your clustered advanced server yourself, why don't do you do that already? Furthermore, given what you say about your desktops, why do you need RedHat on them, if support is as minimal as you say.
There does not need to a central repository remembering your system profile. Systems like apt simply query what is available, and compare it to what you have locally.
The mails RedHat has sent out have made it explicitly clear that up2date will have erratas posted to it until April 30, 2004. up2date will continue to work for the next 8 months, but no new erratas will be posted.
Default settings, when presented to the general public, become the status quo. Therefore, if the NRA is blocked in the default settings, blocking the NRA will become the status quo. Default settings make a political statement, and affect the worldview of the users of the product.
It does not matter one iota that users can change from the default settings, because 99.99% won't or don't know how.
I'm afraid you completely misunderstand me. I want accountability not for goofing up the censoring, but for the creation of the censoring in the first place. I am very glad that the DOJ was technically incompetent in this situation, or else the public would not have realized the cover-up.
You have a valid point, so but I still feel there is truth to my statement, so let's try to resolve the differences by highlighting some distinctions. In one case, that in the story, the DOJ is protecting itself, an entity without inherent rights. In witness scenarios, the DOJ is protecting others, humans, which do have inherent rights. In general, the latter is also an example of focused attempts at secrecy (that of the witness's identiy), not a generalized notion of "keep the practices of the DOJ classified". It is in our interest of the 'general notion' of secrecy flawed, with the focused measures, which are finite, approached with more diligence.
I am distraught that the editors and many posters find it simply amusing that the DOJ was technologically incompetent in this situation, and that that is all there is too it. What frightens me is when they do become competent, and these breakdowns cannot or do not happen, whether it be via more 'perfect' DRM systems, or simply more competent DOJ employees/contractors.
It is in our interest to have the government flawed when it comes to secrecy.
Am I the only person who feels such actions are an atrocity, as they are willful censorships of documents critial of the department? Unless the department can be held accountable for such deeds, these scenarios are going to play out repeatedly.
I didn't require only two edge lengths for patent worthiness; that was the minimum, an "only if". Hence, there would not necessarily be a patent every two steps. Furthermore, I confess "two" was somewhat arbitrarily picked; to be more precise, I would have said any integer N where N > 1. Certainly 1 is too small (the whole basis for the analogy), but too large of an N would make patents too difficult to obtain.
I do agree with your take on the length of patents. 20 years is too long, period. There are really so few branches in the young tree of information technology.
There are several means by which we should look into fixing patents. I am not convinced that their absence would be a good thing, but I feel we should at least perform something akin to a binary search (with a bias towards status quo, to lower the cost of transition) to find a more optimal point in patent law.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops, I had a reference to something called 7music above, but I meant 7digital.
I'm going to throw this out there, but what are people's opinions about different DRM-free retailers?
I have liked Amazon for their ease of use, but their encodings are usually only 128-bit MP3s. I just found 7music, but haven't tried them yet. AudioLunchBox has nice encoding choices, but their music selection has been greatly limited in my experience. I used to have a subscription at Emusic, but the subscription model does not feed my desires.
The most important change with Wal-Mart offering DRM-free music is that it is clear customers will see music as having one of two different types of labels, WMA vs MP3. Customers tend to know that MP3's can be used technologically unrestricted, but WMA can be restricted; having this choice makes them aware that music can be sold legitimately under MP3's.
Given no direct benefit but only impediments for customers with WMA or DRM, they will attach negative connotations to DRM systems. As long as this negative connotation is implanted long enough, they will come to expect that things should only get better over time, and that WMA and DRM will eventually go away.
In this manner, the societally expected norm will change, and the anti-DRM side will win the war of minds.
Using a credit card wisely helps build your credit history; without a good history, one can have a difficult time getting a good mortgage or car loan. Yes, geeks and non-geeks alike can use credit unwisely, but wielding it wisely hints to society you can be entrusted with larger financial responsibilities.
MySQL is not bound by section 3a. The lead of section three states:
The "you" referred to is the licensee, in this case MySQL's customers, not MySQL. Therefore, MySQL does not have any obligation to release anything with regards to section three.
As far as I can tell, there are no terms in the GPL that bind the licenser in any way.
You have a good point, but you're assuming that the risk is increasing as the filtering techniques get better. The risk only exists if your spam gets through, as I find it improbable that authorities will go after spam that gets blocked. So, similar numbers of pieces of spam have to still get through for the risk to remain level or increasing. It also might be true that if there is a correlation between spam getting through and prosecution, filtering among the less-likely-to-buy victims might induce less prosecution overall, if their voices are heard more by authorities than the more-likely-to-buy victims. If spam only successfully gets through to more susceptible victims, and they have less sway with prosecutors, the risk/reward ratio actually gets better from the spammer's perspective.
I tend to believe there is value in both sides' arguments. Completely restricting the data on informants could have side effects of allowing people to act unchecked. Public accountability for actions has a positive tempering effect on society. However, the safety of informants and agents is tantamount. The question is how to strike a balance that can be made flexible for different circumstances. I would suspect that the timeliness of data has value for people who would wish to do harm to informants and agents. If the data was publicly restricted for some time, possibly years, this could provide an effective control mechanism to provide safety. Of course, some information might need to be permanently sealed, and provisions would remain in-tact for that. I wish Slashdot had an easy-to-use search function to check to see if someone had suggested this already throughout this story's comments.
Your argument, in general, is correct. Closed source licenses are overall more strict in their allowances than open source. However, another important advantage that closed source licenses have is that they usually have one entity that is in control of the copyright. This allows one point of contact for re-negotiating the license, and possibly paying the owner for personal or business license. If there are many copyright owners for a software project, this is unfeasible.
Some open source software tries to follow the same route, mandating that all copyright be turned over, but even if this does happen, there is an assumption on the part of contributors that their software will remain open source, and not be taken closed; this can generate ill-will if it occurs. This makes it so even though there is a copyright transfer, the primary copyright owner will be unwilling to wield this power to relicense the product.
I recommend using Google Browser Sync to save your bookmarks remotely automatically. I too am very wary about potentially losing my bookmarks, but this extension alleviates my concerns greatly.
Consumer Reports recently had an article on backup solutions, and they are recommending easy-to-use external drive systems.
SHA-1 is not used for encryption, it is used for message authentication. Part of the NSA's mandate is to secure government traffic; it would gain little from promoting a broken digest algorithm. It arguably might have an interest in promoting a broken encryption algorithm, but SHA-1 is used for digital signatures.
http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/tmp/mozilla-i68 6-pc-linux-gnu-1.6-installer.tar.gz.torrent
I've actually thought about the problem of having user-supplied comments in a site that is trying to shoot for valid XHTML. I think the best solution is for the site to allow a simplified language for posting comments. Web BB's and wikis got this right, I feel.
The reason why a simplified language is better is:
HTML is good for generated content and expert users. However, it is extremely poor for most handwritten content. There is a similar contrast between knowing TeX and simply using a frontend or a word processor.
You said you RH was shafting its customers. In describing your workplace scenario, you complained how you couldn't now get RH used because of your PHB. As you say, your company isn't a customer of RedHat. Therefore, your entire comment complaining about you now can't get RedHat used in your workplace is impotent; you can't summarize by shifting something about you being a loyal customer, since your entire comment was about your workplace, which is not a customer.
The OP implied that they did not have support contracts for the desktops.
You imply you weren't a customer by saying your PH would ask "Who can I buy spport from if you die?".
If you could install Kimberlite and maintain your clustered advanced server yourself, why don't do you do that already? Furthermore, given what you say about your desktops, why do you need RedHat on them, if support is as minimal as you say.
There does not need to a central repository remembering your system profile. Systems like apt simply query what is available, and compare it to what you have locally.
The mails RedHat has sent out have made it explicitly clear that up2date will have erratas posted to it until April 30, 2004. up2date will continue to work for the next 8 months, but no new erratas will be posted.
Default settings, when presented to the general public, become the status quo. Therefore, if the NRA is blocked in the default settings, blocking the NRA will become the status quo. Default settings make a political statement, and affect the worldview of the users of the product.
It does not matter one iota that users can change from the default settings, because 99.99% won't or don't know how.
I'm afraid you completely misunderstand me. I want accountability not for goofing up the censoring, but for the creation of the censoring in the first place. I am very glad that the DOJ was technically incompetent in this situation, or else the public would not have realized the cover-up.
You have a valid point, so but I still feel there is truth to my statement, so let's try to resolve the differences by highlighting some distinctions. In one case, that in the story, the DOJ is protecting itself, an entity without inherent rights. In witness scenarios, the DOJ is protecting others, humans, which do have inherent rights. In general, the latter is also an example of focused attempts at secrecy (that of the witness's identiy), not a generalized notion of "keep the practices of the DOJ classified". It is in our interest of the 'general notion' of secrecy flawed, with the focused measures, which are finite, approached with more diligence.
I am distraught that the editors and many posters find it simply amusing that the DOJ was technologically incompetent in this situation, and that that is all there is too it. What frightens me is when they do become competent, and these breakdowns cannot or do not happen, whether it be via more 'perfect' DRM systems, or simply more competent DOJ employees/contractors.
It is in our interest to have the government flawed when it comes to secrecy.
Am I the only person who feels such actions are an atrocity, as they are willful censorships of documents critial of the department? Unless the department can be held accountable for such deeds, these scenarios are going to play out repeatedly.
I do agree with your take on the length of patents. 20 years is too long, period. There are really so few branches in the young tree of information technology.
There are several means by which we should look into fixing patents. I am not convinced that their absence would be a good thing, but I feel we should at least perform something akin to a binary search (with a bias towards status quo, to lower the cost of transition) to find a more optimal point in patent law.