Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment.
I've been waiting to see if the US courts would ever clue onto this. It's a very important idea that code is communication as much as instruction, and almost all computer code is intended for people to read (even if the same programmer six months later).
The courts have now tacitly acknowledged that rather than restricting technology, crypto source export laws were restricting discussion of crypto. This seems obvious looking at the title of the book this case is about - "Computers and the Law". I'm kind of disappointed that the academic community didn't kick up a stink, because Junger was an academic. But in the end the whole exercise seemed like trying to restrict nuke proliferation by banning any discussion involving nuclear physics equations.
Sorry, but arguing that napster/gnutella wasn't designed with the sole purpose of pirating music is bullshit.
The only "purpose" of Napster/Gnutella is to swap binary files. The intent of piracy is that of the users, not of the program. It's like saying the purpose of cookies is to violate peoples privacy. Many sites use them in this manner, but that is a problem with the site - not with cookies. There is nothing stopping people from using Napster/Gnutella in a lawful manner. If 99% of axe owners suddenly started using their axes as weapons, would you argue the problem was the axe, or the owner. There is nothing stopping people from using Napster/Gnutella in a legitimate way except their own criminal intent. The problem is the users and not the technology.
Please. Why do people feel the need to gloss over the purpose of programs like Napster and Gnutella. I'm an Open Source Programmer, and I know damn well that Napster is used to download illegal mp3s more than anything else. Same with Gnutella.
The only "purpose" of Napster/Gnutella is to swap binary files. The intent of piracy is that of the users, not of the program. It's like saying the purpose of cookies is to violate peoples privacy. Many sites use them in this manner, but that is a problem with the site - not with cookies. By this argument, if it was suddenly found almost everyone with cable sold videotapes of pay per view to their neighbours, videotapes should be banned. There is nothing stopping people from using Napster/Gnutella in a legitimate way except their own criminal intent. The problem is the users and not the technology.
It irratates me no end to see people writing these programs off as piracy tools. Piracy is only one use for them. Blank tapes are also a piracy tool, and probably used for piracy as much as Napster/Gnutella, but they are still sold because they have legitimate uses. So do these programs. Napster and Gnutella can easily be used to trade copyright-free files (I hope someone is trading my mp3s), and Freenet is "an information publication system similar to the World Wide Web". Look at the Freenet philosophy page for an alternative perspective.
This is perceived as a threat to traditional publishing and recording industries just as radio was, and the mimeograph, and television, and the photocopier, and magnetic tape, and the compact disc, and the videocassette recorder, and many other technologies that made sharing information easier. Freenet doesn't do anything different from what can already be done with those technologies, it just does it more efficiently.
What a great article. I'm impressed with just how crap they managed to make it.
Even people who are familiar with how computers work have trouble getting their minds around the terrible things that can be done.
Like blowing people up - gee, that was hard to wrap my head around:-)
Come within two digits of cracking an 87-digit Russian security code that would have sent deadly missiles hurtling toward five of America's major cities.
Of course, the WeeklyWorldNews's mole in the KGB got us this exclusive scoop
"That means anyone who has a quarrel with you, holds a grudge against you or just plain doesn't like your looks, can kill you and never be found out."
So be careful next time you're in an online chat forum, the next script kiddy you piss off isn't just going to Ping of Death your machine, they're going to blow you up !!
Their page 5 girl is into "wake-boarding and -- what else? -- shopping." - what a women. Nice to see that tabloid journalism is alive and strong in the internet age. In other news from the site, YOUR WIFE IS PROBABLY A BITCH, EXPERT SAYS!.
I myself am getting suspicious that something odd is going on. Witness all the comments in the current thread, and in this thread. I have found that each time I moderate or metamoderate, despite following the guidelines closely, in fact by standards that have gained me Karma in the past (I had 10+ Karma before my first post), I lose a couple of Karma points. It's actually quite an irritation, as I put the effort in to (meta)moderate, and then get punished for it. Mabye someone should have a look at what has caused the Karma changes in those who are unhappy and check that there is no bug and no one is abusing the system. Anyway I'm not (meta)moderating until I know what is going on - I'm still working hard on my +1 bonus !!
Sounds like you need your waves normalised, like this guy here says - normalising is where you boost the volume of a wave so the loudest point of the wave is at the maximum amplitude for a wave - normalising all your waves will leave you with the loudest points of all your waves as loud as each other. To do this you'll have to go from CD->WAV, normalise, and then convert WAV->MP3.
If you don't have any music software that can do batch processing, you'll want a command line util that can normalise waves. You can then batch normalise all of the waves using the batch processing abilities of your OS - assuming Dos/Win95 and a program called norm.exe you'll want
for %a in (*.wav) do norm.exe %a
which will run norm.exe with each wav in turn as a parameter. You'll then need to batch convert your wavs into mp3s.
Please find me one example of an artist on mp3.com that is being robbed(*). Please find me one example of a cracked and GPLed piece of software. When you have failed, you'll learn the value of checking your facts.
And you are trying to tell me that I'm letting people rob me by putting my music online. I have a cheque at home from mp3.com telling the lie of that one. And even if I sold no CDs, I don't need the money. I have a good job programming computers. I have my music freely distributable because I'm far more worried about people hearing my music than making money. It's my choice what I do with my content.
(*) I'm hoping this guy is smart enough to realise the difference between mp3 files and the mp3.com website
Please.... everyone who is on mp3.com is on there voluntarily.... have you actually been to the site. I put my music on there because I want everyone to freely distribute my music. Not everyone feels the need to control their music the way the commercial artists do.
If this stuff is supposedly in the spec, why are people complaining about it being undocumented and therefore not able to be rolled into, say, Samba?
Because while the unused field is in the specification as a field you can use, Microsoft have not released any details of how they use this field, hindering interoperability efforts.
Thing is, making a loss is not the same thing as doing badly. Rather than making a profit, Amazon is concentrating on building a customer base, and selling opportunities. I'd imagine that Amazon could make a profit right now if the copmpany changed priorities.
So while Amazon has no profits to hurt, every customer Amazon has makes it more attractive to investors, and gives it more potential income. This is why the boycott is effective. Amazon needs customers, and needs them more than sales.
if all you have to do is use a chip to qualify for being a linux distro maker, then we're up for a wild ride in the next months/years to come..
Thing is, anyone can be a linux distro maker.... there is nothing stopping me downloading Debian, search/replacing Debian with Tangent, and releasing the Tangent distribution, for example. The trick is being the maker of a distribution people use.
They don't need to be able to win a court case though, just convince a judge that someone may have used the source code, and stop them from shipping their product until they prove they haven't used Windows code. Look at the recent Playstation emulator bother, and the injuctions that Sony has got.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but Office is a great product. There is nothing even close to comparable.
Yes and no. The features are brilliant, I've never seen a product that compares to them I'll agree. But they're poorly designed. I made a document with some long string cells in Excel97, and saved it as a 95 sheet. It warned me I'd lose some formatting features, but I never worry about this message as I don't mind losing formatting, but when I reloaded the document, it had truncated the string cells to 256 chars. The fact that (a) Excel97 appears to be the first Excel that allowed you more than 256 chars in a text cell and (b) the warning I was given for data truncation referred to "loss of formatting" did not impress me.
but if you want to do a complex document beyond the "Hi mom" level, the power of Office really shines.
Try and write a book in it, using advanced kerning and the like. While you find Office has a lot of bells and whistles, and is great for the level of presentation you need to do in a work environment, for high quality desk top publishing stuff, you need a stronger class of tool.
Microsoft could quite possibly manage to get the court to open-source Windows with some sort of quasi-open license, that makes the government happy, without being really open. Almost certainly Microsoft would limit the right to produce derived works.
On the other hand, if the code can be seen, so can Windows' inner workings. So even a license where you can view the code, but not produce derived works, could be enough. For the purposes of WINE for instant, while being able to reuse actual Windows code might be useful, simply seeing it would be enough to make development much easier. And it does still stop Microsoft from using hidden APIs, and a raft of their nasty tricks.
Problem here would be proving your code was not derived from the Windows source. If fact, having the source code available may give Microsoft a bit of a club. Imagine suddenly, six months after the source was released, a company released Losedows2000, Windows but better. Microsoft get an injuction on them, claiming they've stolen Windows code. Nine months later, they're declared innocent, but Microsoft have Windows2001 out, and no one wants Losedows any more. Or, alternatively, imagine something like this happening to WINE, a project Microsoft previously couldn't touch.
Whatever happens, the chance of seeing Windows under the GPL have to be about nil.
This could perhaps be our strongest weapon against the censorware vendors. Imagine if the same groups sold censored versions of other vendors physical magazines, crossing out all the fucks and damns, and putting stickers over breasts. Libraries started using these magazines for the same reasons they use censorware. Then some one found out that they'd been putting stickers over articles criticising their censorship practices. There'd be an outrage.
The above story is a physical version of what is occuring with censorware. So why no outrage and fury from any except geeks? Mabye because no one else has made the effort to understand. It's a shame, because these blocks are clearly in place because of company rather than "community" standards, a concern people often don't get. So I guess we need to spread the word that censorware not only blocks some protected speech, but that it blocks protected speech about censorware.
Looking at the guys page, Fox are the only ones who have called this a hack. CNN, and this guy, are calling it a prank. CNN are calling it a prank for damage control as much as anything else presumably, but they still recognise it's a prank. And Fox calling it a hack to tie this event back to the DOS attacks on CNN, one guesses to make CNN look bad. From the Fox article: The incident Monday was the latest in a recent wave of cyber-vandalism that has already targeted CNN.com once before, as well as major commercial sites such as eBay, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!
You can not prevent someone from reverse engineering a product by copyright protection in the US.
I am not even an American, let alone a lawyer, but it was my understanding the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) does make it illegal to reverse engineer, if the reverse engineering defeats a copyright control mechanism. Thusly, AFAIK, DeCSS is actually illegal under the DMCA. I could be wrong (I bloody hope so), but this is what I've gleaned from what I've seen so far.
Well yes, this would be cool, except that Northwest is getting to search their computers - mabye through an agent, but still Northwest. I'd always thought that only law enforcement agents were allowed to seize and search property, but obviously not. It's much easier for Northwest to tamper with the evidence if it's in the hands of a private company than in the hands of law enforcement.
The judge limited the search to union activities relating to the sickout or e-mail to 43 individuals, well beyond the number of people named in the original lawsuit.
So Northwest gets to see private communications between it's employees and individuals, one would guess the individuals they'd be most likely to gripe to about Northwest. How terribly convenient for them.
...in addition to searching the office computers of union officials, Northwest got permission to search... several rank-and-file employees, including Kevin Griffin and Ted Reeve... they do operate online message boards where flight attendants have vented their frustration toward the company and the union leadership...The threat of a court-authorized search of home computers has already had one measurable impact: Postings to a rank-and-file Web site that was openly critical of both union management and the company have slowed to a trickle
This is possibly the bit that scares me most. Two non-union people got searched who just happened to run boards that had posts critical of management. And now people are afraid to exercise their right to free speech about employment conditions. This is much easier than actually taking away people's rights, making them scared to exercise them. What happens the next time the union wants to organise something - no one will want to stand out from the crowd at Northwest now. And if conditions get worse at Northwest - who'd dare to go public.
Business speech needs to be free speech - we need to know that we can criticise those we think need criticising without fear of reprisal.
Re:Good as far as it goes, but still useless
on
Itsy Specs Updated
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· Score: 1
Between the fact that, looking at the rest of your and killbill's discussion, this project is more a research prototype than a do it yourself pocket computer, and that Compaq owns this project, why not start a seperate open project of your one (you the reader as well as torpor). Design it from common components, open a CVS with the diagrams and specs in it in some open format, and you have your OpenPocketBook, or whatever jargonese you may wish to call it.
In fact, why not start OpenHardware.Org. That could be a cool project. Specs on how people can build their own boxes, from 386 to high-end Pentium, homebake peripherals, whatever people might be interested in. (The AX84 Guitar Amp Project is a non-computing project that could fit in this framework (downloadable homebrew tube amp schematics), with the goals of cooperative design and the promotion of learning and camaraderie). The goals would be similar to opensource - give control back to users and make better stuff by leveraging collective knowledge.
John: Yeah in a lot of ways...I looked back and I was an arrogant little jerk when I was a teenager. I matured over the years and when I look back now, I don't think THAT highly of myself as a teenager. I mean, I was really smart, I was already programming computers in a lot of ways. But I was amoral at many times.
This doesn't exactly HELP those of us who are in school and being prejudiced against because of our geeky ways...
Apart from the fact I don't think any antigeeks will come across this article, Carmack would to me make good proof that geeks are good people, and grow into interesting and nice adults. Although it depends on which group of antigeeks you're referring to. If you mean high school peers, nothing will change their opinions but time (from experience). If you mean adults, then this is a good article I would think - it shows that geeks, even ones with antisocial tendencies, grow into caring adults, and have relationships, if encouraged and not labelled as dangerous.
You seriously think that it is more likely that we'll see non-Windows Direct3D, than that people will stop using D3D and use another standard? Microsoft will never port DirectX to an OS they don't control, because DirectX is a large part of what keeps Windows the PC gaming OS of choice. And if anyone manages to reverse engineer it, I predict updates plained to create lots of work for the reverse engineers to keep up with official DirectX versions. Particularly seen I'd guess DirectX ties into other Windows specific APIs and features, non-Windows DirectX would probably be a nightmare.
No, I would hope to see people stop using DirectX for the same reason other proprietry standards have fallen from dominance - other standards with better features and interoperability look more attractive. In this particular case, as Linux and other OSes become more attractive markets for game companies, hopefully companies will realise that OpenGL makes for less development time for non-Windows versions of games, leaving DirectX to slowly die a natural death
One scare tatic I've heard (and suppsidly this is true. Lets assume for the sake of discussion that it is true) is a mother noticed some rowdy kids in the library, looking at a comptuer. She walked by with her kid and saw the kids looking at porn. The mother then talked to the head librarian, who said that they can't do anything - the moment they try to censor this stuff the first admendment advocates get on their case.
An analog in the paper world - patron sees her child reading Lady Chatterly's Lover or some similar explicit book, patron is annoyed the first amendment means the book can't be removed. The solution here is the same in both cases - the parent or caregiver should tell the child that viewing porn/reading explicit literature is inappropriate.
I still think this comes from the mentality that says "I used to be able to parent my children by leaving them in front of a television five hours a day - why can't I do the same thing with the internet".
How can you say that this is worthwhile and well-spent. Did you actually read the blocked sites and searches listed in the article. Do you really want searches on testicular cancer blocked in libraries? Or the Blue-Footed Booby? Many others have made far better cases than me as to why the size of the internet means that no blocking software can avoid using automation, and ending up with stupid blocks like these.
And even assuming a perfect blocking solution - what if I am researching pornography on the internet? I may want to do a study into, say how much adult content for women is on internet. Or sexism in net porn. Why should a public library block me from doing this variety of research? And if not research into pornography, how about plain human sexuality research. There isn't a single blocking product out there I could research human sexuality through. And human sexuality is covered in library books, and certainly a subject that should be in libraries.
You'll never get sexual content out of a library, nor should you. I remember reading some fairly literary books from the library partially for their titilating content as a horny adolescent - should these books be removed from the library? Human experience contains sexuality, libraries are an archive of human experience, therefore libraries contain sexuality.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been waiting to see if the US courts would ever clue onto this. It's a very important idea that code is communication as much as instruction, and almost all computer code is intended for people to read (even if the same programmer six months later).
The courts have now tacitly acknowledged that rather than restricting technology, crypto source export laws were restricting discussion of crypto. This seems obvious looking at the title of the book this case is about - "Computers and the Law". I'm kind of disappointed that the academic community didn't kick up a stink, because Junger was an academic. But in the end the whole exercise seemed like trying to restrict nuke proliferation by banning any discussion involving nuclear physics equations.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
The only "purpose" of Napster/Gnutella is to swap binary files. The intent of piracy is that of the users, not of the program. It's like saying the purpose of cookies is to violate peoples privacy. Many sites use them in this manner, but that is a problem with the site - not with cookies. There is nothing stopping people from using Napster/Gnutella in a lawful manner. If 99% of axe owners suddenly started using their axes as weapons, would you argue the problem was the axe, or the owner. There is nothing stopping people from using Napster/Gnutella in a legitimate way except their own criminal intent. The problem is the users and not the technology.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
The only "purpose" of Napster/Gnutella is to swap binary files. The intent of piracy is that of the users, not of the program. It's like saying the purpose of cookies is to violate peoples privacy. Many sites use them in this manner, but that is a problem with the site - not with cookies. By this argument, if it was suddenly found almost everyone with cable sold videotapes of pay per view to their neighbours, videotapes should be banned. There is nothing stopping people from using Napster/Gnutella in a legitimate way except their own criminal intent. The problem is the users and not the technology.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
This is perceived as a threat to traditional publishing and recording industries just as radio was, and the mimeograph, and television, and the photocopier, and magnetic tape, and the compact disc, and the videocassette recorder, and many other technologies that made sharing information easier. Freenet doesn't do anything different from what can already be done with those technologies, it just does it more efficiently.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
This stuff is really funny - I might have to stop myself before I can't get through my day without Weekly World News.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
Even people who are familiar with how computers work have trouble getting their minds around the terrible things that can be done.
Like blowing people up - gee, that was hard to wrap my head around :-)
Come within two digits of cracking an 87-digit Russian security code that would have sent deadly missiles hurtling toward five of America's major cities.
Of course, the WeeklyWorldNews's mole in the KGB got us this exclusive scoop
"That means anyone who has a quarrel with you, holds a grudge against you or just plain doesn't like your looks, can kill you and never be found out."
So be careful next time you're in an online chat forum, the next script kiddy you piss off isn't just going to Ping of Death your machine, they're going to blow you up !!
Their page 5 girl is into "wake-boarding and -- what else? -- shopping." - what a women. Nice to see that tabloid journalism is alive and strong in the internet age. In other news from the site, YOUR WIFE IS PROBABLY A BITCH, EXPERT SAYS!.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
If you don't have any music software that can do batch processing, you'll want a command line util that can normalise waves. You can then batch normalise all of the waves using the batch processing abilities of your OS - assuming Dos/Win95 and a program called norm.exe you'll want
which will run norm.exe with each wav in turn as a parameter. You'll then need to batch convert your wavs into mp3s.tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
And you are trying to tell me that I'm letting people rob me by putting my music online. I have a cheque at home from mp3.com telling the lie of that one. And even if I sold no CDs, I don't need the money. I have a good job programming computers. I have my music freely distributable because I'm far more worried about people hearing my music than making money. It's my choice what I do with my content.
(*) I'm hoping this guy is smart enough to realise the difference between mp3 files and the mp3.com website
Because while the unused field is in the specification as a field you can use, Microsoft have not released any details of how they use this field, hindering interoperability efforts.
So while Amazon has no profits to hurt, every customer Amazon has makes it more attractive to investors, and gives it more potential income. This is why the boycott is effective. Amazon needs customers, and needs them more than sales.
Thing is, anyone can be a linux distro maker .... there is nothing stopping me downloading Debian, search/replacing Debian with Tangent, and releasing the Tangent distribution, for example. The trick is being the maker of a distribution people use.
They don't need to be able to win a court case though, just convince a judge that someone may have used the source code, and stop them from shipping their product until they prove they haven't used Windows code. Look at the recent Playstation emulator bother, and the injuctions that Sony has got.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but Office is a great product. There is nothing even close to comparable.
Yes and no. The features are brilliant, I've never seen a product that compares to them I'll agree. But they're poorly designed. I made a document with some long string cells in Excel97, and saved it as a 95 sheet. It warned me I'd lose some formatting features, but I never worry about this message as I don't mind losing formatting, but when I reloaded the document, it had truncated the string cells to 256 chars. The fact that (a) Excel97 appears to be the first Excel that allowed you more than 256 chars in a text cell and (b) the warning I was given for data truncation referred to "loss of formatting" did not impress me.
but if you want to do a complex document beyond the "Hi mom" level, the power of Office really shines.
Try and write a book in it, using advanced kerning and the like. While you find Office has a lot of bells and whistles, and is great for the level of presentation you need to do in a work environment, for high quality desk top publishing stuff, you need a stronger class of tool.
Microsoft could quite possibly manage to get the court to open-source Windows with some sort of quasi-open license, that makes the government happy, without being really open. Almost certainly Microsoft would limit the right to produce derived works.
On the other hand, if the code can be seen, so can Windows' inner workings. So even a license where you can view the code, but not produce derived works, could be enough. For the purposes of WINE for instant, while being able to reuse actual Windows code might be useful, simply seeing it would be enough to make development much easier. And it does still stop Microsoft from using hidden APIs, and a raft of their nasty tricks.
Problem here would be proving your code was not derived from the Windows source. If fact, having the source code available may give Microsoft a bit of a club. Imagine suddenly, six months after the source was released, a company released Losedows2000, Windows but better. Microsoft get an injuction on them, claiming they've stolen Windows code. Nine months later, they're declared innocent, but Microsoft have Windows2001 out, and no one wants Losedows any more. Or, alternatively, imagine something like this happening to WINE, a project Microsoft previously couldn't touch.
Whatever happens, the chance of seeing Windows under the GPL have to be about nil.
This could perhaps be our strongest weapon against the censorware vendors. Imagine if the same groups sold censored versions of other vendors physical magazines, crossing out all the fucks and damns, and putting stickers over breasts. Libraries started using these magazines for the same reasons they use censorware. Then some one found out that they'd been putting stickers over articles criticising their censorship practices. There'd be an outrage.
The above story is a physical version of what is occuring with censorware. So why no outrage and fury from any except geeks? Mabye because no one else has made the effort to understand. It's a shame, because these blocks are clearly in place because of company rather than "community" standards, a concern people often don't get. So I guess we need to spread the word that censorware not only blocks some protected speech, but that it blocks protected speech about censorware.
Looking at the guys page, Fox are the only ones who have called this a hack. CNN, and this guy, are calling it a prank. CNN are calling it a prank for damage control as much as anything else presumably, but they still recognise it's a prank. And Fox calling it a hack to tie this event back to the DOS attacks on CNN, one guesses to make CNN look bad. From the Fox article: The incident Monday was the latest in a recent wave of cyber-vandalism that has already targeted CNN.com once before, as well as major commercial sites such as eBay, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!
You can not prevent someone from reverse engineering a product by copyright protection in the US.
I am not even an American, let alone a lawyer, but it was my understanding the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) does make it illegal to reverse engineer, if the reverse engineering defeats a copyright control mechanism. Thusly, AFAIK, DeCSS is actually illegal under the DMCA. I could be wrong (I bloody hope so), but this is what I've gleaned from what I've seen so far.
Well yes, this would be cool, except that Northwest is getting to search their computers - mabye through an agent, but still Northwest. I'd always thought that only law enforcement agents were allowed to seize and search property, but obviously not. It's much easier for Northwest to tamper with the evidence if it's in the hands of a private company than in the hands of law enforcement.
The judge limited the search to union activities relating to the sickout or e-mail to 43 individuals, well beyond the number of people named in the original lawsuit.
So Northwest gets to see private communications between it's employees and individuals, one would guess the individuals they'd be most likely to gripe to about Northwest. How terribly convenient for them.
This is possibly the bit that scares me most. Two non-union people got searched who just happened to run boards that had posts critical of management. And now people are afraid to exercise their right to free speech about employment conditions. This is much easier than actually taking away people's rights, making them scared to exercise them. What happens the next time the union wants to organise something - no one will want to stand out from the crowd at Northwest now. And if conditions get worse at Northwest - who'd dare to go public.
Business speech needs to be free speech - we need to know that we can criticise those we think need criticising without fear of reprisal.
Between the fact that, looking at the rest of your and killbill's discussion, this project is more a research prototype than a do it yourself pocket computer, and that Compaq owns this project, why not start a seperate open project of your one (you the reader as well as torpor). Design it from common components, open a CVS with the diagrams and specs in it in some open format, and you have your OpenPocketBook, or whatever jargonese you may wish to call it.
In fact, why not start OpenHardware.Org. That could be a cool project. Specs on how people can build their own boxes, from 386 to high-end Pentium, homebake peripherals, whatever people might be interested in. (The AX84 Guitar Amp Project is a non-computing project that could fit in this framework (downloadable homebrew tube amp schematics), with the goals of cooperative design and the promotion of learning and camaraderie). The goals would be similar to opensource - give control back to users and make better stuff by leveraging collective knowledge.
John: Yeah in a lot of ways...I looked back and I was an arrogant little jerk when I was a teenager. I matured over the years and when I look back now, I don't think THAT highly of myself as a teenager. I mean, I was really smart, I was already programming computers in a lot of ways. But I was amoral at many times.
This doesn't exactly HELP those of us who are in school and being prejudiced against because of our geeky ways...
Apart from the fact I don't think any antigeeks will come across this article, Carmack would to me make good proof that geeks are good people, and grow into interesting and nice adults. Although it depends on which group of antigeeks you're referring to. If you mean high school peers, nothing will change their opinions but time (from experience). If you mean adults, then this is a good article I would think - it shows that geeks, even ones with antisocial tendencies, grow into caring adults, and have relationships, if encouraged and not labelled as dangerous.
You seriously think that it is more likely that we'll see non-Windows Direct3D, than that people will stop using D3D and use another standard? Microsoft will never port DirectX to an OS they don't control, because DirectX is a large part of what keeps Windows the PC gaming OS of choice. And if anyone manages to reverse engineer it, I predict updates plained to create lots of work for the reverse engineers to keep up with official DirectX versions. Particularly seen I'd guess DirectX ties into other Windows specific APIs and features, non-Windows DirectX would probably be a nightmare.
No, I would hope to see people stop using DirectX for the same reason other proprietry standards have fallen from dominance - other standards with better features and interoperability look more attractive. In this particular case, as Linux and other OSes become more attractive markets for game companies, hopefully companies will realise that OpenGL makes for less development time for non-Windows versions of games, leaving DirectX to slowly die a natural death
One scare tatic I've heard (and suppsidly this is true. Lets assume for the sake of discussion that it is true) is a mother noticed some rowdy kids in the library, looking at a comptuer. She walked by with her kid and saw the kids looking at porn. The mother then talked to the head librarian, who said that they can't do anything - the moment they try to censor this stuff the first admendment advocates get on their case.
An analog in the paper world - patron sees her child reading Lady Chatterly's Lover or some similar explicit book, patron is annoyed the first amendment means the book can't be removed. The solution here is the same in both cases - the parent or caregiver should tell the child that viewing porn/reading explicit literature is inappropriate.
I still think this comes from the mentality that says "I used to be able to parent my children by leaving them in front of a television five hours a day - why can't I do the same thing with the internet".
How can you say that this is worthwhile and well-spent. Did you actually read the blocked sites and searches listed in the article. Do you really want searches on testicular cancer blocked in libraries? Or the Blue-Footed Booby? Many others have made far better cases than me as to why the size of the internet means that no blocking software can avoid using automation, and ending up with stupid blocks like these.
And even assuming a perfect blocking solution - what if I am researching pornography on the internet? I may want to do a study into, say how much adult content for women is on internet. Or sexism in net porn. Why should a public library block me from doing this variety of research? And if not research into pornography, how about plain human sexuality research. There isn't a single blocking product out there I could research human sexuality through. And human sexuality is covered in library books, and certainly a subject that should be in libraries.
You'll never get sexual content out of a library, nor should you. I remember reading some fairly literary books from the library partially for their titilating content as a horny adolescent - should these books be removed from the library? Human experience contains sexuality, libraries are an archive of human experience, therefore libraries contain sexuality.