They REALLY need to fix that Slashcode bug to fix the re-parenting of replies to comments modded -1. Right now, it looks like the parent of THIS post is the one someone is referring to as a "virus link" when it's actually some goatse post at -1.
Parent is NOT a virus, BTW. It's actually a map of which countries voted what on OOXML.
> You can't hide secrets from the future with math.
Sure you can! With one time pads no one knows because they're secret.
The problem BD+ and ALL other DRM schemes have is that you can't keep the movie a secret from your customers because they pay to watch it! On other words, the problem is that these movies are not secrets.
You're putting words in his mouth. He never recommended obfuscation as a "fix" for this issue, now did he? That was YOUR idea.
Personally, I would require the user to supply the password, or else I would create something where the document was signed cryptographically and presented itself to the database for authentication. I'm sure there are other, better ways of doing this than just "who cares? store it in plain text because we're lazy and don't care!"
> a) The US political system is heavily biased towards those who claim to be Christians.
True.
> b) There's a demonstrable negative correlation between intelligence and religious belief, for an intelligent person to be a successful politician in the USA they mostly have to lie about their religious beliefs (eg. Pres. Clinton).
Not true. Unless you have a rather different study than the one I've seen, the study that everyone cites correlated education, not intelligence, with atheism. Anyhow, I'd rather not get into because you have a point here that I'd like to add on to.
> Conclusion: The US political system is biased against intelligent, honest people.
Mostly just honest people. Intelligent people, unfortunately, make good liars. I'm sure you know how helpful that sort of skill is in politics. Part of the problem, ironically, is our high standards. No one is perfect, but those who are better at burying their skeletons might be able to look it.
The high standards problem, BTW, works anywhere you have some kind of metric that's set too high if you are any less than perfect in detecting cheating. What happens is that once you've set the bar high enough, people have to cheat to clear it, so only those who are able to cheat well pass. This happens a lot in business, where they end up getting rid of all the really good people who just can't keep up, but they unknowingly keep those who cheated their way to the top.
Thus, the stricter their standards, the worse people they get. It can even cause a feedback cycle when overall performance is terrible (though individuals look good), so they respond by raising the bar even higher...
In other words, it's very important to make sure that whatever standards are set are actually achievable by honest people.
> Are there any states where they are licensed to investigate?
They are not licensed in any state, according to what I remember from a past article. Your question then becomes: in how many states are licenses required? As well as, in how many states has MediaSentry conducted investigations?
Frankly, I'm going to be disappointed if there aren't any sanctions against them when this is all over. I know that they expunged a few things from their website, but I somehow doubt that they've actually stopped investigating.
Actually, Sun said that they are going to GPL ZFS. Of course, they're in the middle of a patent lawsuit over ZFS right now, so it's probably not the best time.
From what they have released, I'm rather hopeful that they will release ZFS, given time. And I think you can already use it with FUSE (although I'm not sure how stable that is just yet).
True, Sun can be funny at times about these things, but I really hope that ZFS catches on, because the ideas behind it are great.
I'm interested in reading it, but I fear that this discussion will leave the front page in not so very long. Do you plan to put your analysis here, then?
> Prof. Johan Pouwelse got 220 Euros per hour plus expenses for his "investigation" and report. Do you really think he was unbiased in his report? Could one of the reasons he agreed to do this was to toot his own horn as an "expert"?
Umm, that's what? $500 or something per hour? If he were like the RIAA "expert", he'd have only spent one hour on it... Okay, I'm sure he spent longer, but that's not that much in the legal world, really.
As you must have noticed, he put that in his declaration under the heading FULL DISCLOSURE, so it's not exactly a secret. The RIAA "expert" and his fee arrangements are the subject of a discovery motion. Does that make you think THEY are honest? They're hiding it unless they get a court order requiring its disclosure!
The fees they pay MediaSentry are also being withheld. And the RIAA "expert" is the one who peddled his anti-P2P software to Ohio State as mentioned in one of Mr. Beckerman's comments, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to suspect that he has some business arrangement there he's not eager to disclose.
I don't mean to claim that either one has an improper financial conflict of interest, mind you, because there isn't sufficient information to prove that yet to my knowledge. But if anyone did have one, well... let's just say that the RIAA and their witness are far more suspicious and far less forthcoming than the defendant and leave it at that.
> so when the judge calls his testimony "borderline incompetent," the judge is signalling that it may be likely to get thrown out.
I really hate to undermine you because you make a lot of good points, but unless I've badly misread this whole story, it was an expert witness hired by the defense who called the RIAA's 'expert' testimony "borderline incompetent"...
Now, don't misunderstand. I fully agree with that characterization. I was here on Slashdot (and Groklaw) helping to dissect every wrong statement in it I could find. I trawled through all those leaked MediaDefender emails to see if there were any juicy bits that could help at trial. This man is right!... but I don't think he's a judge.
Hopefully the judge WILL agree with this soon and we'll have a ruling making you retroactively correct, though!
Oh, I should mention one other thing. The RIAA *DOES* have an odd habit of citing random posts online and airing them in court. Mostly they focus on Mr. Beckerman's blog and try to use that against him in court, but I would _NOT_ put it past them to cite any other random comment online if they thought it would prove anything. I don't think it's bought them anything, and you're certainly correct that judges do not seem to pay much attention to them.
But it's still one of those things to be aware of, because I've seen plenty of evidence in legal filings that the RIAA is essentially cyber-stalking Mr. Beckerman, for all the good it will do them. Sort of like how SCO reads Groklaw all the time. Must be agonizing, that. Watching the public gawk at the train wreck you're making of your own business. I mean, even if the RIAA wins all these lawsuits, at best, they'll teach people to hate corporate music.
> The blocked software was blocked with vendor approval.
True.
> Microsoft's KB article includes links to download current, working versions of affected software.
False! Trend Micro's update just disables a buggy part of it. They'll actually fix it next month. Why don't YOU read what the updates do? It even mentions that the update just disables part of the AV engine in TFA. But you only read the KB article, huh?
Well, if you had read TFA, you might have seen this part:
With the 16.05 update, which is available now, Trend disabled a behavioral monitoring module in the software in order to avoid issues with blue screens, said Kim. The 16.1 update -- which restores the module and meets Microsoft's certification standards -- will be available in early March, said Kim. Both updates are being distributed through Trend's auto update service.
(emphasis added)
Yes, they all have updates. You should've bothered to read what the updates do, instead of assuming the updates all just fixed things. Now, had you quibbled that behavioral monitoring is worthless and that doesn't really make it "half an anti-virus program" you might have had a point, but you didn't do that.
> Not to mention that when you try and "limit the influence of money" you will run into First Amendment problems.
True, but somehow I still wouldn't mind forbidding corporations from donating money. Period. If the company founders want to do it, they can do it with their own money, not their shareholders' money.
Oh, wait, then the individual donation caps would limit them to exactly as much influence as a normal person. No wonder it'd never work...
Why'd they approve this submission, instead of the one with all the details I read in the Firehose yesterday?
Paleontologist David Krause and his team have discovered the remains of a 'Devil Toad' that was 4.5 kg (10 lbs) in weight and 41 cm (16 in) long. The bones of 'Beelzebufo' -- a combination of the Greek word for devil and the Latin word for toad -- were found in Madagascar and dated to the late Cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago. This is puzzling because Beelzebufo is actually a relative of South American horned frogs (Ceratophrys), rather than the Golaith frogs of West Africa which are almost as big as it. They take this as evidence that Madagascar was still linked to South America via a land bridge in the late Cretaceous, not fully separated as had been thought and speculate that the two might have been linked by a then-warmer Antarctica.
DNS poisoning and the like are more likely to be used to compromise the user than his computer. After all, they can just put up their fake Bank of America clone that, thanks to poisoned DNS, is identical to the real one and steal his password.
Not everything is about compromising someone's computer.
Shouldn't that be [No Carrier] at the end? Or was it transcribe over VoIP?:]
Anyhow, even if they call this 'reasonable network management' in order to mirror the language of the FCC policy, that doesn't actually make it 'reasonable'...
They've had tons of idle stories, but you can only see them by modifying your account to show the idle section or by looking in the firehose. I think this is just the first one to show up on the main page.
And yeah, like the other guy said, this theme is ONLY for the idle section. You can probably just change the idle.slashdot.org to www.slashdot.org to get rid of it, actually. I know I had to make a script to do that so games.slashdot.org doesn't get blocked at work (I think I changed games -> it).
Idle has been around for weeks now. Most of the stories aren't that great, and more than a few have been NSFW.
> The way I see it is: If the content is so terrible, don't download it.
I don't. Wouldn't be caught dead listening to their music. However, there are a couple of factors you've neglected:
1) They sue the wrong people often enough. Remember that guy who didn't have a computer? I wonder if MediaSentry gave one of their boilerplate expert reports in that lawsuit? Because it would be really interesting if they had.
2) Anything popular is crap, according to simple statistics. That's a contradiction in terms, right? But a really good song might be liked by 80-90% of the people who hear it (the actual percentages don't matter, just accept those numbers as an example). So now we have 10-20% of the people who hear it who don't like it to some degree, a few of whom will likely hate it. Now realize that every song has a different percentage and that percentage is made up of different people. So the more popular you are, the more people there are who hate your music. In fact, the more people who hear it, the more likely it is that there are people who hate every single bit of music you've produced.
It may be counter-intuitive, but it's pretty clear that the more popular your music is, the more it's heard, so there are more people who hear it and hate it. It's the "Curse of Popularity"
There's a counter-point to this, too, BTW. If enough people hear an awful song, there's likely to be at least *one* guy who really loves it (probably the guy who wrote it). Thus, you have niche music that's horrible to most people, but which attracts a tiny fan following which absolutely loves the music. This is how you explain the Indee crowd.
Oh, and nothing here is exclusive to music. You can get the same thing with wine snobs, art, sex or anything else based on personal taste.
Slashdot Mirror
They REALLY need to fix that Slashcode bug to fix the re-parenting of replies to comments modded -1. Right now, it looks like the parent of THIS post is the one someone is referring to as a "virus link" when it's actually some goatse post at -1.
Parent is NOT a virus, BTW. It's actually a map of which countries voted what on OOXML.
> You can't hide secrets from the future with math.
Sure you can! With one time pads no one knows because they're secret.
The problem BD+ and ALL other DRM schemes have is that you can't keep the movie a secret from your customers because they pay to watch it! On other words, the problem is that these movies are not secrets.
You're putting words in his mouth. He never recommended obfuscation as a "fix" for this issue, now did he? That was YOUR idea.
Personally, I would require the user to supply the password, or else I would create something where the document was signed cryptographically and presented itself to the database for authentication. I'm sure there are other, better ways of doing this than just "who cares? store it in plain text because we're lazy and don't care!"
> a) The US political system is heavily biased towards those who claim to be Christians.
True.
> b) There's a demonstrable negative correlation between intelligence and religious belief, for an intelligent person to be a successful politician in the USA they mostly have to lie about their religious beliefs (eg. Pres. Clinton).
Not true. Unless you have a rather different study than the one I've seen, the study that everyone cites correlated education, not intelligence, with atheism. Anyhow, I'd rather not get into because you have a point here that I'd like to add on to.
> Conclusion: The US political system is biased against intelligent, honest people.
Mostly just honest people. Intelligent people, unfortunately, make good liars. I'm sure you know how helpful that sort of skill is in politics. Part of the problem, ironically, is our high standards. No one is perfect, but those who are better at burying their skeletons might be able to look it.
The high standards problem, BTW, works anywhere you have some kind of metric that's set too high if you are any less than perfect in detecting cheating. What happens is that once you've set the bar high enough, people have to cheat to clear it, so only those who are able to cheat well pass. This happens a lot in business, where they end up getting rid of all the really good people who just can't keep up, but they unknowingly keep those who cheated their way to the top.
Thus, the stricter their standards, the worse people they get. It can even cause a feedback cycle when overall performance is terrible (though individuals look good), so they respond by raising the bar even higher...
In other words, it's very important to make sure that whatever standards are set are actually achievable by honest people.
> Are there any states where they are licensed to investigate?
They are not licensed in any state, according to what I remember from a past article. Your question then becomes: in how many states are licenses required? As well as, in how many states has MediaSentry conducted investigations?
Frankly, I'm going to be disappointed if there aren't any sanctions against them when this is all over. I know that they expunged a few things from their website, but I somehow doubt that they've actually stopped investigating.
Actually, Sun said that they are going to GPL ZFS. Of course, they're in the middle of a patent lawsuit over ZFS right now, so it's probably not the best time.
From what they have released, I'm rather hopeful that they will release ZFS, given time. And I think you can already use it with FUSE (although I'm not sure how stable that is just yet).
True, Sun can be funny at times about these things, but I really hope that ZFS catches on, because the ideas behind it are great.
Skip DST entirely. No clock changes at all. You want more daylight? Get up earlier. Need more time to work? Work summer hours.
It's MUCH easier than having to change your clocks all the time. And it seems that it's much less wasteful, too.
> Unfortunately, the uncertainly principle kicks in when you take a close look . . .
Somebody call PETA and let's see if we can get them on their case for killing kittens!
I'm interested in reading it, but I fear that this discussion will leave the front page in not so very long. Do you plan to put your analysis here, then?
I feel that it's akin to SCO reading Groklaw, personally. I wish them the same fortune, too :-]
> Prof. Johan Pouwelse got 220 Euros per hour plus expenses for his "investigation" and report. Do you really think he was unbiased in his report? Could one of the reasons he agreed to do this was to toot his own horn as an "expert"?
Umm, that's what? $500 or something per hour? If he were like the RIAA "expert", he'd have only spent one hour on it... Okay, I'm sure he spent longer, but that's not that much in the legal world, really.
As you must have noticed, he put that in his declaration under the heading FULL DISCLOSURE, so it's not exactly a secret. The RIAA "expert" and his fee arrangements are the subject of a discovery motion. Does that make you think THEY are honest? They're hiding it unless they get a court order requiring its disclosure!
The fees they pay MediaSentry are also being withheld. And the RIAA "expert" is the one who peddled his anti-P2P software to Ohio State as mentioned in one of Mr. Beckerman's comments, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to suspect that he has some business arrangement there he's not eager to disclose.
I don't mean to claim that either one has an improper financial conflict of interest, mind you, because there isn't sufficient information to prove that yet to my knowledge. But if anyone did have one, well... let's just say that the RIAA and their witness are far more suspicious and far less forthcoming than the defendant and leave it at that.
> so when the judge calls his testimony "borderline incompetent," the judge is signalling that it may be likely to get thrown out.
...
... but I don't think he's a judge.
I really hate to undermine you because you make a lot of good points, but unless I've badly misread this whole story, it was an expert witness hired by the defense who called the RIAA's 'expert' testimony "borderline incompetent"
Now, don't misunderstand. I fully agree with that characterization. I was here on Slashdot (and Groklaw) helping to dissect every wrong statement in it I could find. I trawled through all those leaked MediaDefender emails to see if there were any juicy bits that could help at trial. This man is right!
Hopefully the judge WILL agree with this soon and we'll have a ruling making you retroactively correct, though!
Oh, I should mention one other thing. The RIAA *DOES* have an odd habit of citing random posts online and airing them in court. Mostly they focus on Mr. Beckerman's blog and try to use that against him in court, but I would _NOT_ put it past them to cite any other random comment online if they thought it would prove anything. I don't think it's bought them anything, and you're certainly correct that judges do not seem to pay much attention to them.
But it's still one of those things to be aware of, because I've seen plenty of evidence in legal filings that the RIAA is essentially cyber-stalking Mr. Beckerman, for all the good it will do them. Sort of like how SCO reads Groklaw all the time. Must be agonizing, that. Watching the public gawk at the train wreck you're making of your own business. I mean, even if the RIAA wins all these lawsuits, at best, they'll teach people to hate corporate music.
> The blocked software was blocked with vendor approval.
True.
> Microsoft's KB article includes links to download current, working versions of affected software.
False! Trend Micro's update just disables a buggy part of it. They'll actually fix it next month. Why don't YOU read what the updates do? It even mentions that the update just disables part of the AV engine in TFA. But you only read the KB article, huh?
(emphasis added)
Yes, they all have updates. You should've bothered to read what the updates do, instead of assuming the updates all just fixed things. Now, had you quibbled that behavioral monitoring is worthless and that doesn't really make it "half an anti-virus program" you might have had a point, but you didn't do that.
> Not to mention that when you try and "limit the influence of money" you will run into First Amendment problems.
True, but somehow I still wouldn't mind forbidding corporations from donating money. Period. If the company founders want to do it, they can do it with their own money, not their shareholders' money.
Oh, wait, then the individual donation caps would limit them to exactly as much influence as a normal person. No wonder it'd never work...
Maybe they were hoping to gain attention by getting sued over their lame little LEGO-men?
My printer is an inkjet and it DOES print them!
Don't write it off as lasers only so quickly.
> Drop a book on the floor in a backpack and step on it. Do the same with a book. Which is likely to come out on top?
:]
Ummm... the book?
DNS poisoning and the like are more likely to be used to compromise the user than his computer. After all, they can just put up their fake Bank of America clone that, thanks to poisoned DNS, is identical to the real one and steal his password.
Not everything is about compromising someone's computer.
The Japanese divide numbers into four order of magnitude groups like that.
Of course, I think it's more likely that someone added an extra 0 to the end of that figure.
(4) Their bid is denied thanks to EU anti-trust regulators, but they manage to cause havoc for Yahoo anyhow by distorting their stock price.
Shouldn't that be [No Carrier] at the end? Or was it transcribe over VoIP? :]
...
Anyhow, even if they call this 'reasonable network management' in order to mirror the language of the FCC policy, that doesn't actually make it 'reasonable'
They've had tons of idle stories, but you can only see them by modifying your account to show the idle section or by looking in the firehose. I think this is just the first one to show up on the main page.
And yeah, like the other guy said, this theme is ONLY for the idle section. You can probably just change the idle.slashdot.org to www.slashdot.org to get rid of it, actually. I know I had to make a script to do that so games.slashdot.org doesn't get blocked at work (I think I changed games -> it).
Idle has been around for weeks now. Most of the stories aren't that great, and more than a few have been NSFW.
> The way I see it is: If the content is so terrible, don't download it.
I don't. Wouldn't be caught dead listening to their music. However, there are a couple of factors you've neglected:
1) They sue the wrong people often enough. Remember that guy who didn't have a computer? I wonder if MediaSentry gave one of their boilerplate expert reports in that lawsuit? Because it would be really interesting if they had.
2) Anything popular is crap, according to simple statistics. That's a contradiction in terms, right? But a really good song might be liked by 80-90% of the people who hear it (the actual percentages don't matter, just accept those numbers as an example). So now we have 10-20% of the people who hear it who don't like it to some degree, a few of whom will likely hate it. Now realize that every song has a different percentage and that percentage is made up of different people. So the more popular you are, the more people there are who hate your music. In fact, the more people who hear it, the more likely it is that there are people who hate every single bit of music you've produced.
It may be counter-intuitive, but it's pretty clear that the more popular your music is, the more it's heard, so there are more people who hear it and hate it. It's the "Curse of Popularity"
There's a counter-point to this, too, BTW. If enough people hear an awful song, there's likely to be at least *one* guy who really loves it (probably the guy who wrote it). Thus, you have niche music that's horrible to most people, but which attracts a tiny fan following which absolutely loves the music. This is how you explain the Indee crowd.
Oh, and nothing here is exclusive to music. You can get the same thing with wine snobs, art, sex or anything else based on personal taste.