...taxes pay for things from which enable Amazon to have a business at all. Amazon can sell books to us because we're a reasonably literate population. They can get stuff distributed because we have a good road / rail network which is maintained. We have mechanisms in place to dispose of the masses of card packaging that Amazon use. We have employees who are kept reasonably healthy by the NHS (I'll understand if American readers are confused on this point - we have a decent health care system, America doesn't). All of these are the result, essentially, of taxpayer-funded state investment. So, by not paying taxes, Amazon are benefiting directly from such investment without contributing to it which, I would argue, is unfair and parasitical.
I saw a great suggestion recently which was that if all of these anti-tax companies really wanted to put their money where their mouths are, they would set up shop in some crummy backward little country that doesn't bother with taxes and consequently has very little in the way of infrastructure, health, literacy etc. That's what small (or no) government gets you. If they decide they'd rather do business somewhere more advanced, they can damn well pay their fair share for the upkeep of the place.
I don't think fighting lawlessness with lawlessness brings any great moral credit to anyone. The British courts are perfectly capable of delivering justice, but reckless twits on the Internet seem to be happy to jeopardise this prospect. I repeat - this isn't going to help.
This won't help things, and is quite likely to make taking any sort of legal action against NI through the proper channels difficult or impossible.
(in interests of transparency and honesty, I posted the "Noooo!" comment above while not logged in...)
I have friends who work for FreeStyleGames. They found out last night via the Internet that they were probably going to be made redundant today. In my humble opinion, that kind of treatment from Activision is pretty disgraceful.
No it doesn't. The Earth is rotating and this may be demonstrated by experiment, ergo it cannot be said to be at rest. You can argue that one inertial frame of reference is as good as any other, but the Earth is not an inertial frame.
After the first activation, SecuROM requires that it re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned). Just so that the 10 day thing doesn't become abrupt, SecuROM tries its first re-check with 5 days remaining in the 10 day window. If it can't contact the server before the 10 days are up, nothing bad happens and the game still runs. After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run.
I don't see a suggestion that it dials home every 10 days, just within 10 days of initial activation to check that the activation key isn't compromised. Am I missing something?
I'm not asking whether Sen. Biden's proposed solution to the problem is reasonable, merely whether his desire for a solution is reasonable. This isn't a profound question, it's just that in the melee of mocking comments that these gaffes throw up, I sometimes have the impression that the commentators see nothing wrong with the behaviours that politicians are trying (albeit ineptly) to prevent.
So I'm not suggesting that people should support impractical solutions for the sake of it, and I agree that this one seems particularly dozy. However, I would prefer it if there were constructive suggestions rather than a zillion 'it will never work - duh!' comments.
For the record, I'd be interested to know how the incidence of child abuse (as a fraction of the population) has changed in the world over the last 20 years. It may be that on the whole, the proportion of children abused has remained fairly static. However, I'd be prepared to wager that there has been a statistically significant rise, and that this is attributable (at least in part) to the ease with which material may be shared on the internet. Just a hunch, but I wonder if there's been any research into this? It would have a bearing on the question of whether we need to target the distribution of material as well as individual abusers.
When stories along these lines (politician identifies problem, proposes unworkable solution), the resulting comments invariably turn into a mixture of mockery and paranoia. This always leaves me wondering - is it just the proposed solution that is being objected to, or the identified problem?
So, to the mockers and paranoics, I ask the following simple questions:
Do you approve of child pornography? That is, do you consider having sexual relations with a child not old enough to give any kind of informed consent, and the distribution of images / videos of these acts a reasonable thing to do?
If you feel that on the whole this is a bad thing, the followup question is fairly obvious - do you think anything should be done about it? If so, do you believe that Sen. Biden's desire to prevent the exchange of such material on P2P networks is reasonable in principle (even if it's infeasible in practice)? If not, why?
For those who agree that this is indeed a problem, are there any constructive suggestions for tackling it? Or do we just give up, let child abusers swap pictures and videos with impunity and shrug our shoulders about the whole thing?
...and saw four bands for 2 pounds. Two of the bands were selling promotional EPs, which I bought. The total expenditure for the evening was 8 pounds - this strikes me as being good value for money.
However, since the money I spent clearly won't go anywhere near the pockets of any record industry executives, this presumably this makes me a bad music consumer. After all, if everybody chose to spend their money going to pubs to see local bands and buying their self-produced CDs, people like Madonna wouldn't make any money.
Therefore, I suggest that there should be some kind of licensing scheme whereby small bands must seek the record industry's approval before attempting to play shows in pubs. They would give the industry a cut of the takings to compensate for drawing potential audience members away from official gigs by big-name artists. In return, the industry would promise not to sue these small bands for loss of revenue.
I wonder if anyone is checking the logs on this?
If so, perhaps they'll have spotted my request for http://www.grokster.com/?riaa=a+bunch+of+twits
Part of me things it would by amusing to write a script to store song lyrics in their logs which I assume would be a violation of someone's copyright - The Smiths' "Paint a vulgar picture" springs to mind for some reason. Another part of me thinks I should get on with something more productive...
Set up a fund to which people can donate money (anonymously if they like) and nominate their (least) favourite spammer.
A system automatically works out weightings for the various spammers out there and puts an appropriate price on their heads. Anybody who then eliminates the spammer in the traditional way (shotgun, car bomb, small thermonuclear explosion) can then claim the bounty.
I am hopeful that the risk of being remorselessly killed in a particularly painful way might act as something of a deterrent to even the most determined spammer, enabling the rest of us to get on with our lives and reclaim e-mail as a useful conversational tool. Some people may have reservations but it's probably no worse morally than the futures market on terrorism that was proposed recently, and much more beneficial to Joe Public.
In the 'deluxe' version of this scheme there'd be a website on which pictures of wasted spammers can be posted together with downloadable MP3s / OGGs of their dying screams and pleas for mercy and / or demands for their first amendment rights to be respected.
Um... no, that doesn't do the same thing. The whole point of ftsh is that the 'try' block encloses a set of statements which must all be executed or it fails. If the 'cd/tmp' fails, bash will blindly run the 'rm -f data' anyway, whereas ftsh will stop and jump to the start of the try block to have another go.
It's a six week test - presumably the companies want to get some feedback. If the ads annoy you, just e-mail their customer service department or wherever with a polite request that they stop using the ads. See where that gets us.
According to the article, it will be possible to skip the ads by clicking on a button, and also they'll be designed to work with Windows Media Player. It would be interesting to see whether the pages in question function correctly in something lacking WMP (e.g. Konqueror) - if they don't because of sloppy JavaScript or whatever then that would be another trigger for a polite e-mail.
I think it was Henry Ford who observed 'Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half.' Our job must be to suggest that it's the half spent on ads which actively impede our enjoyment of the web.
1) If using MS' service without using the official client is 'freeloading', I still think that it's in MS' interest that we freeload off them, and not one of their competitors. I use GAIM pretty much exclusively, but most if not all of the people on my buddy list use Messenger under Windows. I add a small amount of value to their experience of the service:-), and this makes them marginally more likely to use it (and hence see the ads etc.) whenever they want to talk to me.
2) I suppose an alternative for those who just want to connect would be to try to run Messenger under Wine. I gave it a cursory try, it didn't work straight away and I moved on to something more pressing, but has anyone else tried this with more success?
Speaking as someone who's about to abandon the IT industry in favour of a job teaching physics in UK schools, I'm entirely in favour of this.
I don't know how the funding of computers in schools works, but I assume MS must get their cut somewhere, and as a taxpayer, I don't think that would represent a good use of my money.
As regards the 'well, the real world uses MS stuff', firstly I didn't realise that the purpose of schools was to churn out a bunch of MS-using automata and secondly, if the children are taught the principles of the various packages (i.e. what a word processor is for, the things that it ought to be able to do, how to look for help) they ought to be able to adapt their skills to proprietory alternatives over the course of a wet Wednesday afternoon.
If the UK government wants a competitive and innovative IT industry, it ought to recognise that getting kids into computers via stuff you can actually tinker with would probably be a good start:-)
I'm sure I'll be corrected by people who know about these things, but to my understanding, your lawyers are mistaken.
I think you're entitled to modify GPL'd stuff all you want for your own amusement, but you're not allowed to release compiled binaries of your work without also releasing the source code. So if all the work you did was internal, I think you're entitled to keep it that way, although if you have made useful changes you ought (as a moral principle) to give them back to the community.
I'm not sure of the status of GCC, but I'd very much doubt that everything you compile with it has to be released - how could you, since some things that you compile may be other people's proprietory code! And I certainly wouldn't want to be deluged by a sea of GPL'd "Hello, World!" programs...
Would anyone who is, actually, a lawyer like to comment? I'd like to be clear on these points myself:-)
Perhaps society needs to re-think the idea that all jobs should be full-time, single employee propositions. Which would be preferable - to have some people in full-time employment and others fruitlessly searching for jobs, or to have job-share schemes in which everyone can be employed some of the time?
It's evident from looking at society (I'm in the UK, by the way) that there are many social problems which need addressing, and a large pool of intelligent, educated people with free time who could be doing useful work addressing these problems (e.g. working with delinquent kids, helping the elderly and infirm), but are instead using that time trying to get a job.
Maybe in the future, we'll accept that not everyone can work five days a week, and instead it will be accepted that people share their jobs, working maybe three days a week, and spending the other two working for the public good. Or maybe they work conventionally for 6 months a year, and spend the other half applying their skills to improve conditions in less developed countries.
Obviously, people would require paying for these services, and this would be done by the government. This is good for them, as it brings their salary up to the level they'd expect if they were working full time, and it gives them a wider perspective on the world than they might get if they spent their lives in an office. It is also good for the government, since it would mean that social problems for which they're ultimately held responsible are being tackled in a systematic and serious way. And as a taxpayer, I like the idea - currently I'm paying out to have people deal with the consequences of society's ills (e.g. crime, pollution), and I'd think it a better use of my money to have these problems attacked at the root.
Whatever happens, a society which generates increasing numbers of highly skilled people chasing a dwindling number of jobs is clearly not going to work in the long-term. Will we find imaginative alternative ways of harnessing those skills or wait patiently for 'market forces' to deal with the issue in their habitually destructive way?
Gentoo encourages experimentation
on
Gentoo Reviewed
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· Score: 1
I've found that since installing Gentoo as an experiment on a spare machine at work, I've become much more acquainted with the way Linux works.
Since then, I've installed it on various machines in my bedroom (Sun Ultra 10, P2 laptop with a broken screen, old Pentium thing and an Athlon, with a Sparc IPX box as a work in progress) and I'm also installing it on an old beige G3 machine sitting under my desk at work. The install instructions for X86 are great, the PPC ones seem pretty good, and you can sort of muddle through with the Sparc ones.
I like the fact that I can keep my distribution current using 'emerge sync; emerge - u world'. With Mandrake (previous distribution on my Athlon box) I was a bit wary of recompiling the kernel, or updating anything crucial like KDE in case I missed something important. Since I replaced it with Gentoo, I've felt much more in control.
Obviously it's not for everyone, but I'd certainly recommend it. But only if you've got a fast net connection...
I'm in the UK, where press adverts offering extortionately priced mobile phone ring-tones are commonplace, but I can always enter my own melodies on my Nokie 3310, and send them to other people.
But, if I were to enter top 10 hits on my phone and send them to friends who wanted them, I presume I'm hurting the record companies' revenue stream a little bit, and therefore they'll probably try to put pressure on Nokia and the others to remove the composer, or at the very least prevent the user from sending their tones to their friends.
Or, if they were really cunning, they could have my phone silently send a copy of the ringtone to RIAA central, who could try to match it against a large library of tunes. Should I attempt to figure out a song for myself and program it in, I get billed anyway! Paranoid speculation, of course...
Surely this is an obvious replacement for Windows product activation? Just sell XP on a CD which will survive long enough for you to install it once...
Anybody interested in data compression and a whole lot else besides might want to download the book available from here
Please don't all do so at once though:-)
It's essentially a collection of lecture notes for a course on information theory and neural networks given by the author (David MacKay), but has been much expanded since I took the course in 1997. It will certainly show how any claim for a compression technique which works consistently on random data is bogus.
Slashdot Mirror
...taxes pay for things from which enable Amazon to have a business at all. Amazon can sell books to us because we're a reasonably literate population. They can get stuff distributed because we have a good road / rail network which is maintained. We have mechanisms in place to dispose of the masses of card packaging that Amazon use. We have employees who are kept reasonably healthy by the NHS (I'll understand if American readers are confused on this point - we have a decent health care system, America doesn't). All of these are the result, essentially, of taxpayer-funded state investment. So, by not paying taxes, Amazon are benefiting directly from such investment without contributing to it which, I would argue, is unfair and parasitical. I saw a great suggestion recently which was that if all of these anti-tax companies really wanted to put their money where their mouths are, they would set up shop in some crummy backward little country that doesn't bother with taxes and consequently has very little in the way of infrastructure, health, literacy etc. That's what small (or no) government gets you. If they decide they'd rather do business somewhere more advanced, they can damn well pay their fair share for the upkeep of the place.
I don't think fighting lawlessness with lawlessness brings any great moral credit to anyone. The British courts are perfectly capable of delivering justice, but reckless twits on the Internet seem to be happy to jeopardise this prospect. I repeat - this isn't going to help.
This won't help things, and is quite likely to make taking any sort of legal action against NI through the proper channels difficult or impossible. (in interests of transparency and honesty, I posted the "Noooo!" comment above while not logged in...)
I have friends who work for FreeStyleGames. They found out last night via the Internet that they were probably going to be made redundant today. In my humble opinion, that kind of treatment from Activision is pretty disgraceful.
No it doesn't. The Earth is rotating and this may be demonstrated by experiment, ergo it cannot be said to be at rest. You can argue that one inertial frame of reference is as good as any other, but the Earth is not an inertial frame.
From the article:
I don't see a suggestion that it dials home every 10 days, just within 10 days of initial activation to check that the activation key isn't compromised. Am I missing something?
Thanks for the response.
I'm not asking whether Sen. Biden's proposed solution to the problem is reasonable, merely whether his desire for a solution is reasonable. This isn't a profound question, it's just that in the melee of mocking comments that these gaffes throw up, I sometimes have the impression that the commentators see nothing wrong with the behaviours that politicians are trying (albeit ineptly) to prevent.
So I'm not suggesting that people should support impractical solutions for the sake of it, and I agree that this one seems particularly dozy. However, I would prefer it if there were constructive suggestions rather than a zillion 'it will never work - duh!' comments.
For the record, I'd be interested to know how the incidence of child abuse (as a fraction of the population) has changed in the world over the last 20 years. It may be that on the whole, the proportion of children abused has remained fairly static. However, I'd be prepared to wager that there has been a statistically significant rise, and that this is attributable (at least in part) to the ease with which material may be shared on the internet. Just a hunch, but I wonder if there's been any research into this? It would have a bearing on the question of whether we need to target the distribution of material as well as individual abusers.
When stories along these lines (politician identifies problem, proposes unworkable solution), the resulting comments invariably turn into a mixture of mockery and paranoia. This always leaves me wondering - is it just the proposed solution that is being objected to, or the identified problem?
So, to the mockers and paranoics, I ask the following simple questions:
Do you approve of child pornography? That is, do you consider having sexual relations with a child not old enough to give any kind of informed consent, and the distribution of images / videos of these acts a reasonable thing to do?
If you feel that on the whole this is a bad thing, the followup question is fairly obvious - do you think anything should be done about it? If so, do you believe that Sen. Biden's desire to prevent the exchange of such material on P2P networks is reasonable in principle (even if it's infeasible in practice)? If not, why?
For those who agree that this is indeed a problem, are there any constructive suggestions for tackling it? Or do we just give up, let child abusers swap pictures and videos with impunity and shrug our shoulders about the whole thing?
...and saw four bands for 2 pounds. Two of the bands were selling promotional EPs, which I bought. The total expenditure for the evening was 8 pounds - this strikes me as being good value for money.
However, since the money I spent clearly won't go anywhere near the pockets of any record industry executives, this presumably this makes me a bad music consumer. After all, if everybody chose to spend their money going to pubs to see local bands and buying their self-produced CDs, people like Madonna wouldn't make any money.
Therefore, I suggest that there should be some kind of licensing scheme whereby small bands must seek the record industry's approval before attempting to play shows in pubs. They would give the industry a cut of the takings to compensate for drawing potential audience members away from official gigs by big-name artists. In return, the industry would promise not to sue these small bands for loss of revenue.
I wonder if anyone is checking the logs on this? If so, perhaps they'll have spotted my request for http://www.grokster.com/?riaa=a+bunch+of+twits Part of me things it would by amusing to write a script to store song lyrics in their logs which I assume would be a violation of someone's copyright - The Smiths' "Paint a vulgar picture" springs to mind for some reason. Another part of me thinks I should get on with something more productive...
A humble suggestion:
Set up a fund to which people can donate money (anonymously if they like) and nominate their (least) favourite spammer.
A system automatically works out weightings for the various spammers out there and puts an appropriate price on their heads. Anybody who then eliminates the spammer in the traditional way (shotgun, car bomb, small thermonuclear explosion) can then claim the bounty.
I am hopeful that the risk of being remorselessly killed in a particularly painful way might act as something of a deterrent to even the most determined spammer, enabling the rest of us to get on with our lives and reclaim e-mail as a useful conversational tool. Some people may have reservations but it's probably no worse morally than the futures market on terrorism that was proposed recently, and much more beneficial to Joe Public.
In the 'deluxe' version of this scheme there'd be a website on which pictures of wasted spammers can be posted together with downloadable MP3s / OGGs of their dying screams and pleas for mercy and / or demands for their first amendment rights to be respected.
Sorry, I've been having a bad day...
Um... no, that doesn't do the same thing. The whole point of ftsh is that the 'try' block encloses a set of statements which must all be executed or it fails. If the 'cd /tmp' fails, bash will blindly run the 'rm -f data' anyway, whereas ftsh will stop and jump to the start of the try block to have another go.
It's a six week test - presumably the companies want to get some feedback. If the ads annoy you, just e-mail their customer service department or wherever with a polite request that they stop using the ads. See where that gets us.
According to the article, it will be possible to skip the ads by clicking on a button, and also they'll be designed to work with Windows Media Player. It would be interesting to see whether the pages in question function correctly in something lacking WMP (e.g. Konqueror) - if they don't because of sloppy JavaScript or whatever then that would be another trigger for a polite e-mail.
I think it was Henry Ford who observed 'Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half.' Our job must be to suggest that it's the half spent on ads which actively impede our enjoyment of the web.
1) If using MS' service without using the official client is 'freeloading', I still think that it's in MS' interest that we freeload off them, and not one of their competitors. I use GAIM pretty much exclusively, but most if not all of the people on my buddy list use Messenger under Windows. I add a small amount of value to their experience of the service :-), and this makes them marginally more likely to use it (and hence see the ads etc.) whenever they want to talk to me.
2) I suppose an alternative for those who just want to connect would be to try to run Messenger under Wine. I gave it a cursory try, it didn't work straight away and I moved on to something more pressing, but has anyone else tried this with more success?
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
Offtopic - #7 seems appropriate for the /. readership, but you'll have to look it up...
I don't know how the funding of computers in schools works, but I assume MS must get their cut somewhere, and as a taxpayer, I don't think that would represent a good use of my money.
As regards the 'well, the real world uses MS stuff', firstly I didn't realise that the purpose of schools was to churn out a bunch of MS-using automata and secondly, if the children are taught the principles of the various packages (i.e. what a word processor is for, the things that it ought to be able to do, how to look for help) they ought to be able to adapt their skills to proprietory alternatives over the course of a wet Wednesday afternoon.
If the UK government wants a competitive and innovative IT industry, it ought to recognise that getting kids into computers via stuff you can actually tinker with would probably be a good start :-)
I think you're entitled to modify GPL'd stuff all you want for your own amusement, but you're not allowed to release compiled binaries of your work without also releasing the source code. So if all the work you did was internal, I think you're entitled to keep it that way, although if you have made useful changes you ought (as a moral principle) to give them back to the community.
I'm not sure of the status of GCC, but I'd very much doubt that everything you compile with it has to be released - how could you, since some things that you compile may be other people's proprietory code! And I certainly wouldn't want to be deluged by a sea of GPL'd "Hello, World!" programs...
Would anyone who is, actually, a lawyer like to comment? I'd like to be clear on these points myself :-)
Perhaps society needs to re-think the idea that all jobs should be full-time, single employee propositions. Which would be preferable - to have some people in full-time employment and others fruitlessly searching for jobs, or to have job-share schemes in which everyone can be employed some of the time?
It's evident from looking at society (I'm in the UK, by the way) that there are many social problems which need addressing, and a large pool of intelligent, educated people with free time who could be doing useful work addressing these problems (e.g. working with delinquent kids, helping the elderly and infirm), but are instead using that time trying to get a job.
Maybe in the future, we'll accept that not everyone can work five days a week, and instead it will be accepted that people share their jobs, working maybe three days a week, and spending the other two working for the public good. Or maybe they work conventionally for 6 months a year, and spend the other half applying their skills to improve conditions in less developed countries.
Obviously, people would require paying for these services, and this would be done by the government. This is good for them, as it brings their salary up to the level they'd expect if they were working full time, and it gives them a wider perspective on the world than they might get if they spent their lives in an office. It is also good for the government, since it would mean that social problems for which they're ultimately held responsible are being tackled in a systematic and serious way. And as a taxpayer, I like the idea - currently I'm paying out to have people deal with the consequences of society's ills (e.g. crime, pollution), and I'd think it a better use of my money to have these problems attacked at the root.
Whatever happens, a society which generates increasing numbers of highly skilled people chasing a dwindling number of jobs is clearly not going to work in the long-term. Will we find imaginative alternative ways of harnessing those skills or wait patiently for 'market forces' to deal with the issue in their habitually destructive way?
I've found that since installing Gentoo as an experiment on a spare machine at work, I've become much more acquainted with the way Linux works. Since then, I've installed it on various machines in my bedroom (Sun Ultra 10, P2 laptop with a broken screen, old Pentium thing and an Athlon, with a Sparc IPX box as a work in progress) and I'm also installing it on an old beige G3 machine sitting under my desk at work. The install instructions for X86 are great, the PPC ones seem pretty good, and you can sort of muddle through with the Sparc ones. I like the fact that I can keep my distribution current using 'emerge sync; emerge - u world'. With Mandrake (previous distribution on my Athlon box) I was a bit wary of recompiling the kernel, or updating anything crucial like KDE in case I missed something important. Since I replaced it with Gentoo, I've felt much more in control. Obviously it's not for everyone, but I'd certainly recommend it. But only if you've got a fast net connection...
I'm in the UK, where press adverts offering extortionately priced mobile phone ring-tones are commonplace, but I can always enter my own melodies on my Nokie 3310, and send them to other people. But, if I were to enter top 10 hits on my phone and send them to friends who wanted them, I presume I'm hurting the record companies' revenue stream a little bit, and therefore they'll probably try to put pressure on Nokia and the others to remove the composer, or at the very least prevent the user from sending their tones to their friends. Or, if they were really cunning, they could have my phone silently send a copy of the ringtone to RIAA central, who could try to match it against a large library of tunes. Should I attempt to figure out a song for myself and program it in, I get billed anyway! Paranoid speculation, of course...
Surely this is an obvious replacement for Windows product activation? Just sell XP on a CD which will survive long enough for you to install it once...
Please don't all do so at once though :-)
It's essentially a collection of lecture notes for a course on information theory and neural networks given by the author (David MacKay), but has been much expanded since I took the course in 1997. It will certainly show how any claim for a compression technique which works consistently on random data is bogus.