Just make me feel like a sucker for choosing the "hip" GPL for my software. To think that I could have included a license that says something like:
"by using this software, you agree to give me your car and talk to a jar of pickels at work for the first five minutes of every day."
"by using this software, you agree to agree to the previous agreement, section D, which can be found in records department 41, level 9, building B. Yeah, see them to find out what you just agreed to, sucker."
or
"by using this software, you agree to tell me when you encounter bugs instead of emailing me I'll never use your software because it doesn't work good!"
They're not "protecting" their property; they've just found a covert, possibly-illegal way to squeeze more money out of their customers.
Regardless of the letter of the law on the speed limit, 99% of drivers consider it to be a guide and feel comfortable exceeding it by 5 mph. Sometimes the flow of traffic dictates that you exceed it it you don't want to get rear-ended. Yet when you return the truck, the company bills your credit card a surcharge they never told you about for exceeding the speed limit by 5 mph.
The same goes for the region you're allowed to drive in. The company could say you're not allowed to take their truck outside a 100-mile radius and surreptitiously install a GPS receiver to ensure you don't go outside that radius, but they don't give you any indication of exactly where the boundary is. And what if the GPS receiver isn't calibrated properly? If the time on the device isn't correct, the location it reports won't be correct. The average person working at a rental car company doesn't know anything about GPS, so it's likely to be off, but the average consumer won't think to question it. "You were tracking me with GPS? Oh my God, the military uses that. It must be right."
Your comparison to suing "the local theatre, for not letting you bring in your video camera" is way off. This is more like if you rent a video camera to tape your daughter's wedding and upon its return the rental company bills a surcharge to your credit card because you shot 4 hours of video (on your own tape, mind you) instead of the 3 hours specified by the fine print in their contract. Or if they installed a GPS receiver in the camera so they can bill you if you take the camera more than 10 miles from their store.
Sometimes I wonder if trolls like you really exist in nature or if you're artificially created by corporations.
Dude, Keanu Reeves figured this out years ago. The Matrix is everywhere: when you go to work, when you pay your taxes, when you post on Slashdot... As long as you are inside the Matrix, the universe seems like a big computer because your world is a big computer.
Or perhaps you saw Pleasantville: "Yeah, what's outside of Pleasantville?" "I don't understand..." "What's at the end of Main Street?" "Mary Sue, you should know the answer to that... the end of main street is just the beginning again!"
The real question is: "Is the universe outside the Matrix a big computer too?"
In an amazing turn of events, Verizon reveals that it is actually just a front for popular band Vertical Horizon.
"Dude!" said the band's lead singer. "I totally can't believe no one figured that out! I mean, Ver and izon? What kind of name is that?"
"I told you it would work," said another band member. "Anyway, we just did this to show the RIAA that we could build a big, evil corporation too if we wanted, and we don't need them. We're going to lead all the recording artists to freedom and allow them to collect their own royalties!"
"Rock on, man," said the lead singer.
When asked if he was aware of his status as the band's puppet, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg replied, "are you kidding? He's my son. I don't know where the little fucker comes up with these ideas. I'm gonna go home and watch the game; you kids play safe."
A closely watched bill in Washington, D.C., would ultimately require all consumer-electronics manufacturers and computer companies to include technology that blocks piracy.
It's only a matter of time before the gov't requires you to be licensed to operate a computer, just as you are licensed to drive. When one turns 13 or 14, he can take his computer social responsibility test. It will include questions like:
Your friend has the latest CD by a popular group and he offers to email it to you. Should you:
a) accept his gift
b) ask your parents
c) tell him you're not interested
d) report your friend to your local FBI field office
If you pass, you will periodically get "pulled over." This entails an official popup from the FBI complete with flashing lights, an image of a badge and a chat window. An FBI agent, who has apparently been monitoring your license ID and your activities asks where you're headed and if you've had anything to drink tonight. You tell him you're just looking at porn sites to learn some new positions that may help your wife get pregnant. He points out that your file says you're single, and you explain that you were referring to your fiancee. After several minutes of suspicious questioning, he lets you go. Or does he?
It sounds draconian, but I'm sure it's essential to promote public safety on the Internet. We can't have unlicensed rogues running amok ruining the online environment, can we?
the players fight to topple a massive corporation that is bent on world domination. Only they wouldn't fight with swords or ray guns; they'd write software and articles to re-educate the people and overthrow the dominant company.
On one end of the spectrum, you'd have the hard core players who have left their families to write software for the cause. On the other you'd have the people who don't really play much, but when they do they wander around asking, "a/s/l?"
Oh, wait. Never mind. That's Slashdot.
If that's the case, then would that make it hypocritical of us to make fun of those EverQuest freaks? (Disclaimer: I've never played EverQuest, I'm just thinking out loud here)
Mr. Rogers, a big believer in sharing, came into the court and said he didn't mind if people taped his shows. Again, this meant to the court that the VCR must be legal.
So basically we should take up a collection to buy Mr. Rogers an iPod, a Tivo and a computer with some variant of Napster and Gnutella installed.
Then he can go to court and take the stand with one of his puppets:
Mr. Rogers: "They're just sharing, your Honor. Isn't that what we taught them to do? Isn't that what people should do?"
Puppet: "Yeah, I never thought of it like that. They're like neighbors."
Mr. Rogers: "Gasp! Look what I found... a home-made cookie in my pocket. Mrs. Andrews down the street made it for me yesterday but I forgot all about it. Would you like some, your Honor?"
General Misuse of the term "Broadcasting"
on
Reason Magazine on DRM
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Movie and TV studios are worried not because of what you're doing now, but because of what you might do in the near future: grab digital content with your computer and rebroadcast it online.
I start twitching every time I see/hear someone mention the concept of "broadcasting" content on the Web -- because it implies that the Web works like high-tech radio. It doesn't work that way, and it never will.
With radio broadcasting, a station spends a fortune on:
Spectrum rights (FCC)
Broadcast equipment
Content Broadcasting rights
So there's a high barrier to entry, but once you've achieved all this, you saturate the "air" for miles around with your content. It doesn't matter whether one person tunes into your content or a million people tune in. You still spend the same amount of money (you may get more in advertising if a lot of people are listening, but that's another story).
With Internet "broadcasting" a site needs to buy:
A domain (equiv to spectrum rights)
A fast server/server farm (broadcast equip)
A fat pipe (because streaming music, video or trading files takes a lot of bandwidth)
Content Broadcasting rights (hopefully)
Unlike traditional broadcasting, the cost of operation jumps for each listener tuned in. Each listener requires an ongoing dialog with the server and a big chunk of bandwidth, plus the content owners/format owners want to bill you per user (QuickTime 6 has been delayed because of this nonsense) because they know you have the numbers.
The costs of truly "broadcasting" over the Internet are prohibitive even for large companies and will never be economical for the average Joe sitting in his den, no matter how fat consumer bandwidth gets. File swapping is not broadcasting -- anyone who thinks it is has obviously never waited two hours in the server que for a download slot or tried to download a 20MB file at 0.8kbps.
Also banned are corkscrews and toy transformer robots.
Are Gobots still OK?
Fight the power! Buy a Gobot!
Circulating laser beams...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
Circulating laser beams in the right way, by slowing them down and shooting them through anything from fiber-optic cable to special crystals, might create a similar distortion that could theoretically transport someone through different times, Mallett believes.
A year from now Mallett will build and test this machine. Upon his return he will report that it acts only as a bridge between the present and a 1980s disco.
He may effect the timeline, but he will create a branch at the same time.
The rest of us on the main trunk will never see that effect that professor A had on the past...
Yeah, we had this at my last company. We called it CVS. It was a good idea in theory, but creating new branches was just so slow it wasn't worth our time.
I'm glad you pointed that out. I've been unable to send email through my earthlink DSL account since I got it, and I always figured it was a firewall or router problem on my end. After I read your posting, I had the following conversation with an Earthlink CSR:
AnthonyM: Thank you for contacting Earthlink LiveChat. What can I help you with today?
Me: I don't use my earthlink.net email account; I use a third party's email service. However, when I try to connect to their SMTP server, I always get an error.
Me: Today I read that some ISPs block outgoing connections on port 25 to fight spammers. Does earthlink DSL do this? That would explain why I can't connect (I've tried several smtp servers... nothing goes through on port 25 to any server)
AnthonyM: The problem you are having is due to Port 25 blocking. This blocks any 3rd pary outgoing mail servers from being accessed while connected to the EarthLink network via Dialup, DSL or Cable. This has been done to elminate much of the spam originating from our customers. Most of this spam is being sent from 3rd party SMTP servers and not the EarthLink SMTP servers. All you need to do is go into your e-mail program's settings and change the outgoing mail server to either mail.mindspring.com or mail.earthlink.net. One of these will work for you and allow you to send mail while connected to your EarthLink connection without a problem.
To explain this in more "real world" terms, think of the US Mail system. All that's going in is that you're being required to use your current connection's post office (outgoing mail server) to post mark your email. Every ISP has post office server to do this for the customers connected. And just like the US Mail system, the postmark does not change the address the mail message is coming from.
This policy has been in effect for nearly 3 years on the MindSpring side of the company and is now being implemented on the EarthLink side of the company. You can find more information about this at the following site:
http://help.earthlink.net/port25/
Me: Just to clarify... does this mean that earthlink's mail servers will send my outgoing mail instead of my ISPs servers?
AnthonyM: exactly right.
Me: how does earthlink authenticate me as the owner of the third party account? In other words, what's to stop a malicious person from doing the same thing and sending mail that appears to be from my account?
AnthonyM: you must authenticate to connect to an earthlink access point. only someone who is connected through our access points can use our smtp servers.
Me: It authenticates me as an earthlink user, but it has no way of knowing that I own the third-party account, I could say I'm gbush@whitehouse.gov, for instance, and it sounds like the earthlink servers would send that.
AnthonyM: as long as you are connected to us, why would it matter? it's your account.
Me: Anyway, I'll give it a try, but I'd like to point out that I don't think this is a very effective way of doing this... it might be better to just investigate people who seem to be sending massive amounts of data over port 25. Thanks for your time.
First mistake: believing college professors know anything about the Web (some do, most don't). If you want to learn Web development, go intern at some company that's actually doing it.
Second mistake: believing large companies like AOL-Time Warner know anything about the Web (I've done outsourced work for them and other giants... they don't have a clue)
Anyway, if you don't feel like playing their stupid "find the right page and type our secret password" game, just go here.
Reports of water on Mars say that huge amounts of water gushed through the surface of the red planet fairly 'recently'. (Recently being as little as 10 million years ago)
So that must make human beings "really recent" and vacuum tube computing "the latest craze." If that's the case, then maybe Windows XP really does incorporate "the latest" advances in security.
From whose perspective is this stuff written? The Grand Canyon?
I used to just ignore banner ads, but then I installed OmniWeb (Mac OS X only).
OmniWeb incorporates one of the greatest features I've seen in a Web browser: it lets you specify images that you don't want to download. It doesn't download:
468x60 images (the standard size for banner ads), and I can specify other sizes to exclude
Images that are not on the same server as the html file that called them
Any URL matching certain reg expressions (like/.*\.doubleclick\.net/ and/graphics4\.nytimes\.com/ads/)
It replaces those images with grey boxes of the same size that contain a privacy icon. If it has excluded an image that I actually wanted to see, no problem... I just click on the approprate grey box and it loads the image.
You'll never see that feature in IE or Netscape because Microsoft and AOL own lots of content sites that depend on ads. If you do use OmniWeb, please buy it and show the Omni folks you appreciate their innovations.
LISTEN: It doesn't matter if you are anti-MS, a VB Developer or Linus himself - Microsoft is a monopoly. It "earned" it's position in the marketplace through illegal practices.
As a journalist who covered the MS antitrust trial for two years, I am tired of people professing that Microsoft's crime was "being a monopoly." There is nothing illegal about having a monopoly -- your cable company or electric company are legal monopolies. Microsoft was found guilty of illegally using its existing monopoly in one market to crush competition in other markets.
Come to think of it, there are probably plenty of unemployed techies in Mountain View who would do this if it brought in a paycheck. At this point, I'd consider it... but because of my hatred for Microsoft, I'd probably try to lessen the blow by taping a sign to my butt that reads:
How do you think this will affect DVD movies? Will we see:
More bonus video footage
More lame Flash games (see Shrek DVD-ROM extras) that are cross-platform compatible but claim they're not, or...
A full copy of Windows XP DVD Edition to run our DVD players, download the latest movie trailers and transmit our viewing habits back to MS (I watched Snatch 5 times on Monday... wonder how they'd interpret that).
...the post gave me the impression that this monolith was still down there, clawing at South Africa.
A monolith is a large rock, like the grey matter contained in a troll's skull. Incidentally, here's nothing scary about being stalked by a monolith, unless that monolith happens to represent God in a Kubrick film.
"you keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means"
Slashdot Mirror
- "by using this software, you agree to give me your car and talk to a jar of pickels at work for the first five minutes of every day."
- "by using this software, you agree to agree to the previous agreement, section D, which can be found in records department 41, level 9, building B. Yeah, see them to find out what you just agreed to, sucker."
- "by using this software, you agree to tell me when you encounter bugs instead of emailing me I'll never use your software because it doesn't work good!"
Sigh... the fun I could've had...or
here
Is there a significant number of contributors to Linux writing in Chinese?
Regardless of the letter of the law on the speed limit, 99% of drivers consider it to be a guide and feel comfortable exceeding it by 5 mph. Sometimes the flow of traffic dictates that you exceed it it you don't want to get rear-ended. Yet when you return the truck, the company bills your credit card a surcharge they never told you about for exceeding the speed limit by 5 mph.
The same goes for the region you're allowed to drive in. The company could say you're not allowed to take their truck outside a 100-mile radius and surreptitiously install a GPS receiver to ensure you don't go outside that radius, but they don't give you any indication of exactly where the boundary is. And what if the GPS receiver isn't calibrated properly? If the time on the device isn't correct, the location it reports won't be correct. The average person working at a rental car company doesn't know anything about GPS, so it's likely to be off, but the average consumer won't think to question it. "You were tracking me with GPS? Oh my God, the military uses that. It must be right."
Your comparison to suing "the local theatre, for not letting you bring in your video camera" is way off. This is more like if you rent a video camera to tape your daughter's wedding and upon its return the rental company bills a surcharge to your credit card because you shot 4 hours of video (on your own tape, mind you) instead of the 3 hours specified by the fine print in their contract. Or if they installed a GPS receiver in the camera so they can bill you if you take the camera more than 10 miles from their store.
Sometimes I wonder if trolls like you really exist in nature or if you're artificially created by corporations.
Or perhaps you saw Pleasantville:
"Yeah, what's outside of Pleasantville?"
"I don't understand..."
"What's at the end of Main Street?"
"Mary Sue, you should know the answer to that... the end of main street is just the beginning again!"
The real question is: "Is the universe outside the Matrix a big computer too?"
"Dude!" said the band's lead singer. "I totally can't believe no one figured that out! I mean, Ver and izon? What kind of name is that?"
"I told you it would work," said another band member. "Anyway, we just did this to show the RIAA that we could build a big, evil corporation too if we wanted, and we don't need them. We're going to lead all the recording artists to freedom and allow them to collect their own royalties!"
"Rock on, man," said the lead singer.
When asked if he was aware of his status as the band's puppet, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg replied, "are you kidding? He's my son. I don't know where the little fucker comes up with these ideas. I'm gonna go home and watch the game; you kids play safe."
Your friend has the latest CD by a popular group and he offers to email it to you. Should you:
- a) accept his gift
- b) ask your parents
- c) tell him you're not interested
- d) report your friend to your local FBI field office
If you pass, you will periodically get "pulled over." This entails an official popup from the FBI complete with flashing lights, an image of a badge and a chat window. An FBI agent, who has apparently been monitoring your license ID and your activities asks where you're headed and if you've had anything to drink tonight. You tell him you're just looking at porn sites to learn some new positions that may help your wife get pregnant. He points out that your file says you're single, and you explain that you were referring to your fiancee. After several minutes of suspicious questioning, he lets you go. Or does he?It sounds draconian, but I'm sure it's essential to promote public safety on the Internet. We can't have unlicensed rogues running amok ruining the online environment, can we?
On one end of the spectrum, you'd have the hard core players who have left their families to write software for the cause. On the other you'd have the people who don't really play much, but when they do they wander around asking, "a/s/l?"
Oh, wait. Never mind. That's Slashdot.
If that's the case, then would that make it hypocritical of us to make fun of those EverQuest freaks? (Disclaimer: I've never played EverQuest, I'm just thinking out loud here)
Then he can go to court and take the stand with one of his puppets:
Mr. Rogers: "They're just sharing, your Honor. Isn't that what we taught them to do? Isn't that what people should do?"
Puppet: "Yeah, I never thought of it like that. They're like neighbors."
Mr. Rogers: "Gasp! Look what I found... a home-made cookie in my pocket. Mrs. Andrews down the street made it for me yesterday but I forgot all about it. Would you like some, your Honor?"
With radio broadcasting, a station spends a fortune on:
- Spectrum rights (FCC)
- Broadcast equipment
- Content Broadcasting rights
So there's a high barrier to entry, but once you've achieved all this, you saturate the "air" for miles around with your content. It doesn't matter whether one person tunes into your content or a million people tune in. You still spend the same amount of money (you may get more in advertising if a lot of people are listening, but that's another story).With Internet "broadcasting" a site needs to buy:
- A domain (equiv to spectrum rights)
- A fast server/server farm (broadcast equip)
- A fat pipe (because streaming music, video or trading files takes a lot of bandwidth)
- Content Broadcasting rights (hopefully)
Unlike traditional broadcasting, the cost of operation jumps for each listener tuned in. Each listener requires an ongoing dialog with the server and a big chunk of bandwidth, plus the content owners/format owners want to bill you per user (QuickTime 6 has been delayed because of this nonsense) because they know you have the numbers.The costs of truly "broadcasting" over the Internet are prohibitive even for large companies and will never be economical for the average Joe sitting in his den, no matter how fat consumer bandwidth gets. File swapping is not broadcasting -- anyone who thinks it is has obviously never waited two hours in the server que for a download slot or tried to download a 20MB file at 0.8kbps.
Fight the power! Buy a Gobot!
AnthonyM: Thank you for contacting Earthlink LiveChat. What can I help you with today?
Me: I don't use my earthlink.net email account; I use a third party's email service. However, when I try to connect to their SMTP server, I always get an error.
Me: Today I read that some ISPs block outgoing connections on port 25 to fight spammers. Does earthlink DSL do this? That would explain why I can't connect (I've tried several smtp servers... nothing goes through on port 25 to any server)
AnthonyM: The problem you are having is due to Port 25 blocking. This blocks any 3rd pary outgoing mail servers from being accessed while connected to the EarthLink network via Dialup, DSL or Cable. This has been done to elminate much of the spam originating from our customers. Most of this spam is being sent from 3rd party SMTP servers and not the EarthLink SMTP servers. All you need to do is go into your e-mail program's settings and change the outgoing mail server to either mail.mindspring.com or mail.earthlink.net. One of these will work for you and allow you to send mail while connected to your EarthLink connection without a problem.
To explain this in more "real world" terms, think of the US Mail system. All that's going in is that you're being required to use your current connection's post office (outgoing mail server) to post mark your email. Every ISP has post office server to do this for the customers connected. And just like the US Mail system, the postmark does not change the address the mail message is coming from.
This policy has been in effect for nearly 3 years on the MindSpring side of the company and is now being implemented on the EarthLink side of the company. You can find more information about this at the following site: http://help.earthlink.net/port25/
Me: Just to clarify... does this mean that earthlink's mail servers will send my outgoing mail instead of my ISPs servers?
AnthonyM: exactly right.
Me: how does earthlink authenticate me as the owner of the third party account? In other words, what's to stop a malicious person from doing the same thing and sending mail that appears to be from my account?
AnthonyM: you must authenticate to connect to an earthlink access point. only someone who is connected through our access points can use our smtp servers.
Me: It authenticates me as an earthlink user, but it has no way of knowing that I own the third-party account, I could say I'm gbush@whitehouse.gov, for instance, and it sounds like the earthlink servers would send that.
AnthonyM: as long as you are connected to us, why would it matter? it's your account.
Me: Anyway, I'll give it a try, but I'd like to point out that I don't think this is a very effective way of doing this... it might be better to just investigate people who seem to be sending massive amounts of data over port 25. Thanks for your time.
Second mistake: believing large companies like AOL-Time Warner know anything about the Web (I've done outsourced work for them and other giants... they don't have a clue)
Anyway, if you don't feel like playing their stupid "find the right page and type our secret password" game, just go here.
From whose perspective is this stuff written? The Grand Canyon?
- 468x60 images (the standard size for banner ads), and I can specify other sizes to exclude
- Images that are not on the same server as the html file that called them
- Any URL matching certain reg expressions (like
/.*\.doubleclick\.net/ and /graphics4\.nytimes\.com/ads/)
It replaces those images with grey boxes of the same size that contain a privacy icon. If it has excluded an image that I actually wanted to see, no problem... I just click on the approprate grey box and it loads the image.You'll never see that feature in IE or Netscape because Microsoft and AOL own lots of content sites that depend on ads. If you do use OmniWeb, please buy it and show the Omni folks you appreciate their innovations.
"you keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means"