Let's say you like Phish's "Billy Breathes" CD. Now, you can go search for that on Amazon.com, and if you scroll down a little bit, you can see:
Customers who bought this title also bought:
* A Picture of Nectar ~ Phish
* Lawn Boy ~ Phish
* Rift ~ Phish
* Junta ~ Phish
* The Story of the Ghost ~ Phish
Granted, this is only going to work for commercial releases, and may only give you results for the same artist, but it's a good way to expand your web of music. It's also a good way to abuse Amazon.com by not paying for anything from them and still gaining benefit from their site.
Why can't we have source tarballs that resolve dependencies?
I want to be able to do "./configure && make && make install" and have the configure script look at a DEPENDENCIES file with URLs to resolve missing dependencies automatically. Such a system would be distro-independent and would not require packages to ever be created. If the process was this consistent, GUIs could even be created so the user doesn't even have to know what's going on.
Just a thought from a guy that really hates package managers.
I'm sure a lot of you are surprised to find out that freedom of information is not a left-wing specific issue. For that matter, it's not a right-wing specific issue, either.
Now that we have that out in the open, we're going to stop bashing the right-wing extremists that want to control what we can and and cannot see? Oh, and the right-wing shouldn't be too hard on Senator Fritz Hollings, the Democratic "Senator from Disney".
FLAMEBAIT
Seriously, though, I hope most of you are open-minded enough to realize that freedom of information and fair use rights are of importance to a lot of people all across the political spectrum -- regardless of their opinions on other issues.
I don't want any "mass unification" in Linux or any such garbage. I'm just saying that the Microsoft community having two opposing viewpoints within it doesn't mean anything more than Linux having several fragments. Variety is a Good Thing(TM).
People are jumping and down excited that Microsoft is going to somehow fall apart because of opposition within the camp, but Linux has been strengthened by that very characteristic. Will Microsoft be weakened by the very thing that makes software better? Of course not. Microsoft is not their own worst enemy anymore than the Linux/FS/OSS community is theirs. Come on people -- use a little consistency in your logic.
What is #2 for you, or more generally, how do you support your project financially? What do you see as the most sustainable model for supporting Free Software?
Hurray, they rejected the DCMA!
on
Euro DMCA Fails
·
· Score: 2
Seems to me, that there is less Flash being used for content and more being used for banner ads. It could also be the selection of sites that I visit, though.
I'm not an idiot, as you'd like to think, and I'm well aware of the first amendment, however, I was referring to specific rights such as mentioned in the parent post -- "it would mean they have a right to protect their sources". I'd like to know where that right is listed and if there are others, but don't bother replying. It's apparent that you don't know the answer to this question.
Would you have preferred that I typed out each point myself and claimed credit for them? Instead I took a piece that portrayed my thoughts accurately and pasted them to convey what I wanted to bring to the discussion.
This is the same as me saying, "This is what Ben Stein says, and I agree. What do you think?", but then you and others reply with, "Uh...that's off-topic, overrated flamebait." Which of these two parties is contributing again?
As for the herd mentality, I'm in complete agreement with you, however, I have my doubts as to whether I fit into that herd at all. Then again, so do you.
Stein's success in various fields tends to make him somewhat of an authority on the subject of what it takes to be successful -- the fruit of innovation.
Are you expecting a single, reasonably concise rebuttal for all of the hundreds of disparate potshots he takes in his 1,000-word diatribe? It would take too long to enumerate every instance in which I disagree with Mr. Stein.
I'm not an unreasonable man, but you didn't even attempt one point.
In general, the points toe a very predictable conservative line, and do not offer any new insight that I can see.
Not new, but still correct.
I should mention that it's really amusing to see all these down-moderations, yet not one person has managed to list a single valid rebuttal to any of the points. "I disagree, but I don't know why!"
The way I read it was that trial lawyers and judges were preventing scientists, AND other people that understand the issues from solving the problems. There are a lot of people that have a lot to gain from problems not being resolved once and for all. Those people employee attorneys and sometimes judges to throw legal roadblocks in the way of those (scientists and everybody else) who may be able to put an end to the problems.
One thing that's interesting about this statement is that Stein himself is a lawyer.
There is not a single original thought in your post. Instead of flaming me for copying and pasting, how about you respond to some of the points that you disagree with?
Are you aware of the term "Ad Hominem"? If you are, then you will know that attempting to discredit this argument based on irrelevant facts about Ben Stein doesn't hold much water.
I'm not trying to pick on this single post, because there hasn't been a single valid rebuttal on this thread, actually. It doesn't matter that I copied and pasted the post and it doesn't matter that Ben Stein hosts a game show. The points are still strong, and nobody seems to want to actually deal with the issues head on. That's exactly what prevents innovation -- lack of desire or ability to solve problems.
I think the lack of recent good ideas has been explained best by Ben Stein.
QUOTE 1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit. Do not expect students to know the basics of mathematics, chemistry and physics. Working closely with the teachers' unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors. Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its scientific and competitive edge to other nations that make a comprehensive knowledge base a rule of the society.
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services. Make sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.
3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in self-medication. Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.
4) Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that all true wealth comes from skillful manipulation and cunning, or from sudden, brilliant and lucky strokes that leave the plodding, ordinary worker and saver in the dust. Make sure that society's idols are men and women who got rich from being sexy in public or through gambling or playing tricks, not from hard work or patience. Make the citizenry permanently envious and bewildered about where real success comes from.
5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.
6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way. This will dissolve the glue that holds the nation together, and dissuade any long-term thinking. Societies in which the law can be clearly seen to apply to some and not to others are doomed to decay, in terms of innovation and everything else.
7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school. As children learn to be stupid instead of smart, the national intelligence base needed for innovation will simply vanish into MTV-land.
8) Mock and belittle the family. Provide financial incentives to people willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened. This guarantees that men and women of sufficient character to bring about innovation will be psychologically stifled from an early age.
9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us. This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual disappearance of social cohesion.
10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:
First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in the developed world. This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.
11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.
12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind. Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable. ENDQUOTE
If I were genuinely concerned about being watched, this is what I'd do:
The best way to prevent surveillance from interfering with your life is to make it useless information. One way to do this is by creating more noise data, which makes the signal data harder to retrieve.
There is one really easy way to do this with the Internet particularly, and that is to create an application, which can be run voluntarily or propogated the same way Nimda and Melissa were. That running application would then spread random false alarms at such a high rate that nobody can keep up with them, thereby throwing the profile of a terrorist way off. This junk data can be trigger phrases from a dictionary, or it can just be faked PGP encrypted data from/dev/random, all of which would be sent to random IPs and ports, especially to nations that are considered hostile to the US.
If you wanted to take that a step further and screw with Echelon, you could create a virus that gained control of various corporations' PBX servers, then randomly dial numbers in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Everytime a connection is made, you could have an audio file play various trigger phrases, thereby adding noise to that medium.
In the real world, the solution is to make yourself appear as a terrorist even if you're not. Check out "How to Build a Nuclear Weapon" and the Koran from your local library. Use your credit card to buy dual-use products that you need. If everyone is suspicious, then the data is useless.
Now, the problem is, that I, as Joe American, can think of this, which means that the real terrorists can certainly think of even more effective ways to cripple surveillance tools. The sad part is that the government agencies still think that they are able to find a signal in complete white noise. The only people that are going to be effectively watched are the ones that don't need to be.
If I were genuinely concerned about being watched, this is what I'd do:
The best way to prevent surveillance from interfering with your life is to make it useless information. One way to do this is by creating more noise data, which makes the signal data harder to retrieve.
There is one really easy way to do this with the Internet particularly, and that is to create an application, which can be run voluntarily or propogated the same way Nimda and Melissa were. That running application would then spread random false alarms at such a high rate that nobody can keep up with them, thereby throwing the profile of a terrorist way off. This junk data can be trigger phrases from a dictionary, or it can just be faked PGP encrypted data from/dev/random, all of which would be sent to random IPs and ports, especially to nations that are considered hostile to the US.
If you wanted to take that a step further and screw with Echelon, you could create a virus that gained control of various corporations' PBX servers, then randomly dial numbers in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Everytime a connection is made, you could have an audio file play various trigger phrases, thereby adding noise to that medium.
In the real world, the solution is to make yourself appear as a terrorist even if you're not. Check out "How to Build a Nuclear Weapon" and the Koran from your local library. Use your credit card to buy dual-use products that you need. If everyone is suspicious, then the data is useless.
Now, the problem is, that I, as Joe American, can think of this, which means that the real terrorists can certainly think of even more effective ways to cripple surveillance tools. The sad part is that the government agencies still think that they are able to find a signal in complete white noise. The only people that are going to be effectively watched are the ones that don't need to be.
None of these companies have the best track record for contributing to the community -- unlike Redhat. No, I'm not a Redhat fan, but they're much better than the those slimeballs.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you like Phish's "Billy Breathes" CD. Now, you can go search for that on Amazon.com, and if you scroll down a little bit, you can see:
Customers who bought this title also bought:
* A Picture of Nectar ~ Phish
* Lawn Boy ~ Phish
* Rift ~ Phish
* Junta ~ Phish
* The Story of the Ghost ~ Phish
Granted, this is only going to work for commercial releases, and may only give you results for the same artist, but it's a good way to expand your web of music. It's also a good way to abuse Amazon.com by not paying for anything from them and still gaining benefit from their site.
Why can't we have source tarballs that resolve dependencies?
I want to be able to do "./configure && make && make install" and have the configure script look at a DEPENDENCIES file with URLs to resolve missing dependencies automatically. Such a system would be distro-independent and would not require packages to ever be created. If the process was this consistent, GUIs could even be created so the user doesn't even have to know what's going on.
Just a thought from a guy that really hates package managers.
FLAMEBAIT
I'm sure a lot of you are surprised to find out that freedom of information is not a left-wing specific issue. For that matter, it's not a right-wing specific issue, either.
Now that we have that out in the open, we're going to stop bashing the right-wing extremists that want to control what we can and and cannot see? Oh, and the right-wing shouldn't be too hard on Senator Fritz Hollings, the Democratic "Senator from Disney".
FLAMEBAIT
Seriously, though, I hope most of you are open-minded enough to realize that freedom of information and fair use rights are of importance to a lot of people all across the political spectrum -- regardless of their opinions on other issues.
How will we make anonymous calls without a payphone?
I don't want any "mass unification" in Linux or any such garbage. I'm just saying that the Microsoft community having two opposing viewpoints within it doesn't mean anything more than Linux having several fragments. Variety is a Good Thing(TM).
People are jumping and down excited that Microsoft is going to somehow fall apart because of opposition within the camp, but Linux has been strengthened by that very characteristic. Will Microsoft be weakened by the very thing that makes software better? Of course not. Microsoft is not their own worst enemy anymore than the Linux/FS/OSS community is theirs. Come on people -- use a little consistency in your logic.
Wow, did everybody miss the point of that one?
This reminds me of another heavily fragmented software community.
Who is Linux's worst enemy?
We often see jokes posted on here such as:
1) License product under GPL
2) ???
3) Profit!
What is #2 for you, or more generally, how do you support your project financially? What do you see as the most sustainable model for supporting Free Software?
The Europeans are rejecting the United States' Defense Contract Management Agency!
Errrr....wait a sec.
Seems to me, that there is less Flash being used for content and more being used for banner ads. It could also be the selection of sites that I visit, though.
Lots of guys are still waiting for this.
I'm not an idiot, as you'd like to think, and I'm well aware of the first amendment, however, I was referring to specific rights such as mentioned in the parent post -- "it would mean they have a right to protect their sources". I'd like to know where that right is listed and if there are others, but don't bother replying. It's apparent that you don't know the answer to this question.
Would you have preferred that I typed out each point myself and claimed credit for them? Instead I took a piece that portrayed my thoughts accurately and pasted them to convey what I wanted to bring to the discussion.
This is the same as me saying, "This is what Ben Stein says, and I agree. What do you think?", but then you and others reply with, "Uh...that's off-topic, overrated flamebait." Which of these two parties is contributing again?
As for the herd mentality, I'm in complete agreement with you, however, I have my doubts as to whether I fit into that herd at all. Then again, so do you.
Stein's success in various fields tends to make him somewhat of an authority on the subject of what it takes to be successful -- the fruit of innovation.
Are you expecting a single, reasonably concise rebuttal for all of the hundreds of disparate potshots he takes in his 1,000-word diatribe? It would take too long to enumerate every instance in which I disagree with Mr. Stein.
I'm not an unreasonable man, but you didn't even attempt one point.
In general, the points toe a very predictable conservative line, and do not offer any new insight that I can see.
Not new, but still correct.
I should mention that it's really amusing to see all these down-moderations, yet not one person has managed to list a single valid rebuttal to any of the points. "I disagree, but I don't know why!"
Is there anything in writing enumerating the rights of the press? I've done some googling, but I'm not finding anything like what I'm looking for.
The way I read it was that trial lawyers and judges were preventing scientists, AND other people that understand the issues from solving the problems. There are a lot of people that have a lot to gain from problems not being resolved once and for all. Those people employee attorneys and sometimes judges to throw legal roadblocks in the way of those (scientists and everybody else) who may be able to put an end to the problems.
One thing that's interesting about this statement is that Stein himself is a lawyer.
There is not a single original thought in your post. Instead of flaming me for copying and pasting, how about you respond to some of the points that you disagree with?
Are you aware of the term "Ad Hominem"? If you are, then you will know that attempting to discredit this argument based on irrelevant facts about Ben Stein doesn't hold much water.
I'm not trying to pick on this single post, because there hasn't been a single valid rebuttal on this thread, actually. It doesn't matter that I copied and pasted the post and it doesn't matter that Ben Stein hosts a game show. The points are still strong, and nobody seems to want to actually deal with the issues head on. That's exactly what prevents innovation -- lack of desire or ability to solve problems.
I think the lack of recent good ideas has been explained best by Ben Stein.
QUOTE
1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit. Do not expect students to know the basics of mathematics, chemistry and physics. Working closely with the teachers' unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors. Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its scientific and competitive edge to other nations that make a comprehensive knowledge base a rule of the society.
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services. Make sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.
3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in self-medication. Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.
4) Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that all true wealth comes from skillful manipulation and cunning, or from sudden, brilliant and lucky strokes that leave the plodding, ordinary worker and saver in the dust. Make sure that society's idols are men and women who got rich from being sexy in public or through gambling or playing tricks, not from hard work or patience. Make the citizenry permanently envious and bewildered about where real success comes from.
5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.
6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way. This will dissolve the glue that holds the nation together, and dissuade any long-term thinking. Societies in which the law can be clearly seen to apply to some and not to others are doomed to decay, in terms of innovation and everything else.
7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school. As children learn to be stupid instead of smart, the national intelligence base needed for innovation will simply vanish into MTV-land.
8) Mock and belittle the family. Provide financial incentives to people willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened. This guarantees that men and women of sufficient character to bring about innovation will be psychologically stifled from an early age.
9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us. This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual disappearance of social cohesion.
10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:
First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in the developed world. This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.
11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.
12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind. Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable.
ENDQUOTE
The new spines are reserved for politicians that are unable to do the right thing when faced with large sums of cash.
Is it the wicked extraterrestrial tyrant Xenu?
I'd apologize for the dupe, but I'm applying for a Slashdot editor position.
If I were genuinely concerned about being watched, this is what I'd do:
/dev/random, all of which would be sent to random IPs and ports, especially to nations that are considered hostile to the US.
The best way to prevent surveillance from interfering with your life is to make it useless information. One way to do this is by creating more noise data, which makes the signal data harder to retrieve.
There is one really easy way to do this with the Internet particularly, and that is to create an application, which can be run voluntarily or
propogated the same way Nimda and Melissa were. That running application would then spread random false alarms at such a high rate that nobody can
keep up with them, thereby throwing the profile of a terrorist way off. This junk data can be trigger phrases from a dictionary, or it can just be faked PGP encrypted data from
If you wanted to take that a step further and screw with Echelon, you could create a virus that gained control of various corporations' PBX
servers, then randomly dial numbers in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Everytime a connection is made, you could have an audio file play various
trigger phrases, thereby adding noise to that medium.
In the real world, the solution is to make yourself appear as a terrorist even if you're not. Check out "How to Build a Nuclear Weapon" and the
Koran from your local library. Use your credit card to buy dual-use products that you need. If everyone is suspicious, then the data
is useless.
Now, the problem is, that I, as Joe American, can think of this, which means that the real terrorists can certainly think of even more effective ways to cripple surveillance tools. The sad part is that the government agencies still think that they are able to find a signal in complete white noise. The only people that are going to be effectively watched are the ones that don't need to be.
If I were genuinely concerned about being watched, this is what I'd do:
/dev/random, all of which would be sent to random IPs and ports, especially to nations that are considered hostile to the US.
The best way to prevent surveillance from interfering with your life is to make it useless information. One way to do this is by creating more noise data, which makes the signal data harder to retrieve.
There is one really easy way to do this with the Internet particularly, and that is to create an application, which can be run voluntarily or propogated the same way Nimda and Melissa were. That running application would then spread random false alarms at such a high rate that nobody can keep up with them, thereby throwing the profile of a terrorist way off. This junk data can be trigger phrases from a dictionary, or it can just be faked PGP encrypted data from
If you wanted to take that a step further and screw with Echelon, you could create a virus that gained control of various corporations' PBX servers, then randomly dial numbers in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Everytime a connection is made, you could have an audio file play various trigger phrases, thereby adding noise to that medium.
In the real world, the solution is to make yourself appear as a terrorist even if you're not. Check out "How to Build a Nuclear Weapon" and the Koran from your local library. Use your credit card to buy dual-use products that you need. If everyone is suspicious, then the data is useless.
Now, the problem is, that I, as Joe American, can think of this, which means that the real terrorists can certainly think of even more effective ways to cripple surveillance tools. The sad part is that the government agencies still think that they are able to find a signal in complete white noise. The only people that are going to be effectively watched are the ones that don't need to be.
We can just give'em a good slashdottin'.
None of these companies have the best track record for contributing to the community -- unlike Redhat. No, I'm not a Redhat fan, but they're much better than the those slimeballs.