Imagine what John Johansen (and the others) could have done if they weren't "wasting time" chatting all day long!
Yes. If not for IRC all three of them would have become good consu^H^H^H^Hitizens and contributed to society, rather than encouraging theft on a massive scale. Clearly these channels should be shut down to protect us from this kind of online terrorism.
-- Concerned Parents' League, not affiliated in any way to RIAA, honest.
Because more than zero people are willing to pay $17 for that link?
Welcome to capitalism. Incidentally, could the grandparent poster please send me a copy of his customer list? I've got some excellent opportunities for them in cross-river mass transit real estate...
Um. That's something that happens to Windows users. Reinstall Windows, you have to either fish out your driver disks that your computer's manufacturer supplied you (they DID supply them, right?) or get on the internet to hunt them down. Good luck with that.
Install Linux, chances are everything's already there. The only driver I had to locate on my last install was nVidia.
Damn. Extended phenotype. grr. Got me there.
In which case the actual evolution is not taking place on the internet at all, and the viruses themselves are not actually the interesting structures. We're looking at the egg and missing the chicken. The evolving entities are memes, evolving in the minds of hackers...
So, a memestructure known as 'Virus A' arrives on the computer of Hacker 0. He reverse-engineers it; now it is resident in the brain of Hacker 0. There it breeds furiously, producing countless offspring with random mutations. These are subject to natural selection in the environment of the hacker's brain, because the hacker knows what makes a virulent virus and what makes a feeble failure. In this phase the virus is benign, a bit like malaria not harming the mosquito; Hacker 0's brain does not crash.
Eventually a mutant form of the virus arises in the brain of Hacker 0; natural selection against the constraints of Hacker 0's security knowledge has produced a fitter version of the virus. At this point Virus B is released into the wild.
It's an interesting lifecycle. Like many infectious agents it behaves differently depending upon the host in which it finds itself. Once a population is isolated for a long while (in the brain of a hacker) it may diverge and eventually form a new species, possibly replacing the ancestral population once re-released... The analogy with biological evolution is certainly quite strong.
Unfortunately, I've implicitly reduced all human thought to the rapid reproduction and mutation of meme-structures, and originality to the production of an unusual mutation. Maybe this is true, but it's probably taking reductionism too far, like explaining the working of a car in terms of quark-gluon interactions. Treating a virus hacker as an malevolent intelligent mind intent on causing mayhem will probably get us a more reliable model of computer virus epidemiology.
I would say that computer viruses do evolve... better or more sophisticated ones get written over time and the best ones prevail. If you consider the human coders as an extension to the digital organism then the resulting aggregate entity is evolving. Semantics aside- the evolution is occuring. Haven't I read somewhere that even humans have distinct organisms embedded internally on a low level that cause effects, possibly even genetic effects?
You may be thinking of mitochondria. They have their own DNA quite separate from that of the cell nuclei, and live their lives embedded in our cells providing chemical processing services.
The thing is, though, they aren't intelligent.
It may be interesting, from an epidemiological viewpoint, to consider the various hackers of the world as mutagens, features of a virus's environment that will cause it to change in some way, in the same way that a radioactive source might induce mutation in a biological creature.
However, the crucial difference is that the hackers are intelligent. They have an aim in mind when they alter the virus; mutation in nature does not. A hacker can alter a virus drastically, making a huge change to it all at once in order to achieve some enhancement he has in mind. Evolution must proceed by small steps, each one an improvement or at least not significantly detrimental.
So, be careful not to push the analogy too far. Computer viruses have a good deal in common with biological viruses, but not that much. We're dealing here with intelligent design, not evolution; don't confuse the two.
In humans, a virus may be able to adapt to antibiotics or vaccines over time and continue to survive. Looks like it can happen with computer viruses too.
Not quite. Biological viruses evolve. Computer viruses, however, are products of intelligent design, for certain values of 'intelligent'.
Computer viruses aren't a force of nature. Behind every one of them is a malicious programmer.
Eventually, I imagine we'll see polymorphic and self-modifying code reach the point where it can evolve in the same way as biological viruses, but that's probably quite a way off. The nearest I've heard of to that is viruses programmed to alter their appearance to avoid detection.
Broadband providers have never, as far as I can recall, provided bandwidth free of charge to their customers; nor would I expect them to. What am I missing here?
Your man here runs a phone company. His customers pay him for voice service, and also he gets paid by broadband providers for the right to run internet connections over the same line (or possibly he sells broadband himself - I don't know exactly how it's done in this particular case).
He has now noticed that some people are using the broadband connection instead of the voice service. There go his profitable long-distance and international charges! He charges a nontrivial amount per minute for a call to Tokyo, but these people are rolling it all into their modest monthly broadband fee! Aargh!
The words 'buggy whip manufacturer' spring immediately to mind.
I never understood why there's even a debate. Not the 'completely dismissing the possibility of God' sort of not understanding, but more of this: if you absolutely can't stand the idea of God/Nixon/etc, and you want to explain life, you've got evolution. Evolution is good, and really seems to be on track.
Which is exactly the problem. Evolution allows people to be atheists. It undermines the power of the religious establishments and they hate that.
Worse yet, AFAIK most Western Christians also believe the theory of evolution is broadly correct - i.e. that anything it has wrong is detail, like having the sequence of ancestry a bit off here or there, or having some missing fossils, but the overall principle being sound. What does that do to 'Made In God's Image'? What becomes of the Fall, and hence of Original Sin, and hence of the need for Christ's salvation?
Certainly it's possible to overcome all these problems and accommodate modern biology and cosmology within a Christian worldview, but it requires a good deal of mental flexibility, a rather different mindset to the absolutist fundamentalist.
It's interesting to notice that the Vatican has already come pretty much to terms with evolution and modern cosmology - indeed, they were said to be quite delighted with the Big Bang model, since the alternative was Steady State and a universe with nothing for a creator to do at all!
Basically what it boils down to is: if evolution is taught, then some of those kids will realise that God is an unnecessary addition to their worldview and will drop him into the same bin where they already put Santa Claus. If it is not taught, then some of them will continue to believe in God. That's enough for the fundamentalist. That's a soul saved from hell. Perhaps introducing intelligent design will save a few kids from this insidious atheist menace. Perhaps then, bit by bit, it might be possible to expand on intelligent design and introduce creationism proper, and from there roll back the whole materialist worldview...
There was a very good investigation into the fundamentalist agenda here in the New Scientist a few weeks ago. It was the 8th October 2005 issue, if you want to track it down at your library. Interesting stuff.
I'm thinking it maybe wouldn't be too difficult to hack together a system to sit between your phone and the socket which would do nothing but play a really loud noise onto the phone line at the press of a button.
You might even have a menu to choose from. Let's see, how shall I interrupt the telemarketer's script this time? 'Airhorn, v loud' - good. 'White Noise' - nice, might make them think their system's broken. 'Beep, Sinusoidal, Annoyingly High Pitch' - a possibility. 'Baby Crying' - cruel! 'Barney Theme Song' - perhaps excessively sadistic. 'Fingernail On Blackboard Noise' - they don't deserve that yet. No, I think this telemarketer gets the 'Burst of Incomprehensible Dialogue From Puni Puni Poemy'. * click *
And having built it, post a webpage and submit to/. so we can all applaud.
I believe in evolution... No one has ever conducted an "evolution experiment" whereby the input was some lower life form and the output was a higher life form... I could always propose some exotic other mechanism (such as perhaps monkeys evolved from humans)
You say you believe in evolution, yet... you think the idea is to go from 'lower' to 'higher' lifeforms - presumably with humans as the highest? - and you think that humans evolved from monkeys.
That's not what happens. There's no meaningful sense in which a human is 'higher' than a monkey, or a snake, or a squid. We're certainly a great deal more complex than some animals - for instance, than the amoeba - but that's mostly because we're larger than them. Is an elephant a 'higher' life form than you are? And a whale 'higher' still?
Furthermore, humans didn't evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys both evolved from a common ancestor, which was neither human nor monkey. Monkeys aren't our ancestors; think of them as our distant cousins.
A recommendation for you: get along to your local library and check out anything you can find by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Reading the works of those two, you'll get informed coverage of both sides of the debate over the great controversy in modern evolution.
(what, intelligent design? No, that's obvious nonsense. The controversy I'm talking about is punctuated equilibrium!)
"That's like being a Catholic. Catholics are as close to pagans as you can get and still call yourself a Christian." Apparently he was unaware that the Catholic Church is one the two original Christian denominations, and traces its founding to Peter.
But that's exactly why Catholicism is so close to paganism. Catholicism is, as you say, the original Christian religion that spread across Europe during the declining years of the Empire. In doing so, it co-opted a lot of pagan belief structures into itself. For instance, AFAIK there's no reason to think Jesus was born in December at all - Christmas is a rebranded pagan solstice festival. Easter? Take pagan springtime rituals focussed on the rebirth of the dead world, add the resurrection of Christ, cook at gas mark 8 for forty minutes or until well done. And as for the elevated importance of Mary in Catholicism: well, she combines the traditionally separate roles of nurturing mother goddess and chaste virgin goddess into a single icon.
Not to mention that a lot of Catholics in the English-speaking world are descendants of the Irish. The Church in Ireland went its own way for a long time before Rome finally managed to assert its authority there, and a lot of relics of the old Celtic Christian church still survive.
So your roommate was partly right. Catholicism is very close to paganism, and ironically, the fossils of ancient paganism that survive in Christianised form in Catholicism are probably still more authentic than what passes for paganism among the teenage-witch crowd.
And if one wishes to make a nasty retort to people who point out the Church's pagan heritage and think they've somehow scored points by doing so, it's quite easy to draw up an argument comparing fundamentalists to Pharisees, and literalists (who seem to worship the text more than the deity) to idolaters...
The DMCA is some crazy piece of sh*t sprung from the mind of people unable to think the thing all the way through.
No, it sprang from the minds of people who could and did think it all the way through. These were evil people. People at the *AAs. People who hate the public domain, except insofar as it provides stories for Disney to remake and earn a fortune from, and despise fair use.
It was then passed into law by people unable or unwilling to think the thing all the way through. These were lazy or greedy people. Your elected representatives. People who care little for the public domain, and are really more interested in campaign contributions, and don't like fair use because of that bit about parody, because parody is usually aimed against politicians...
... and no, 'I can't watch DVDs on Linux' isn't one of them. These people probably neither know nor care what Linux is, nor are they particularly bothered that we can't watch our imported-from-Japan DVDs of Naruto, so don't bother.
1: it kills 'fair use'. Traditionally, we've been allowed by copyright law to use small amounts of a given work for quotation, for review, for parody... However, the DMCA kills that off. Even if I'm allowed to use that small segment of the copyrighted work for my own purposes, I can't do so if it's technologically protected, even in the feeblest manner: the DMCA forbids that.
2: it encourages monopolies. Other than by means of Hymn, or burning to CD and then re-ripping, I can't play music downloaded from Apple on anything other than an iPod. Or, conversely, if I own an iPod I can't play music downloaded from anyone other than Apple on it. This has a chilling effect on the free market.
3: it threatens free speech itself. Even scholarly, academic discussion of cryptography has been curtailed by the DMCA, in cases where it touched on techniques that have been used to protect copyrighted works. Is it really more important to protect Hollywood's latest blockbuster than to have a free research base driving technology forward?
They supposedly knew about public key crypto a couple of years before anyone else (although we have only their word on that)
More than a couple of years. GCHQ had public key crypto long before R, S and A invented it. Someone upthread noted that secrecy led the British to throw away a massive lead in computer technology at the end of WW2; well, we did it again there. We had RSA for years and did sod all with it.
Not that I'm bitter, angry or resentful about the British government's policies on science and technology, no no no. I trust all those Sir Humphreys with their educations in the arts and classics to make the right choices...
However, the NSA (as far as I know) is mostly a bunch of idealistic scientists that really believe in concepts like freedom beyond just uttering the word as a mindless propaganda tool. Their mission is mostly to gather intelligence--not be assassins and set up puppet governments.
* dispatches Sam Fisher to go correct that misapprehension *
That said... you may well be right. I don't know about NSA, but GCHQ (the UK equivalent) is derived from the wartime codebreakers of Bletchley, Turing's mob, who were undoubtedly hackers and geeks to a man.
If that culture has survived (which is hard to know, but one can guess from the recruitment material that GCHQ keep advertising everywhere) then they're probably quite a good bunch. So, if they're reading this... like they do everything else... hi, guys!
(Note: I'm looking for replies based on experience with Japanese reality, not on anime. TIA...)
It's kind of sad that you had to specify that.
Can we cite live-action horror movies, though? There was one of those that had a lot of TVs in it, but they were still using VHS! I mean, come on... Sadako really should have cursed someone's TiVo:-)
everything from "Doctor, doctor, gimme the news" to "I can see clearly now, the pain is gone"...
Well, well, well, you're feeling fine...
aside: I was tremendously amused, cracking into the medical computer systems in VtM: Bloodlines, to find a staff appraisal for a terrific doctor who 'has never lost a patient. No-one can succeed like Doctor Robert.'
Anyway. I've got this coconut here, but I think it needs something to add to the flavour. Any ideas? Doctor?
Believe me that was not my intent, nor do I want it to appear as such. I don't honestly care if blizzard reads this article or not. And I certainly don't expect to get my nickname back.
Nonetheless, was this the place to post about it? You know what Slashdot's capable of. Hundreds of thousands of posters, countless lurkers, and even a small percentage taking it upon themselves to avenge a perceived wrong can cause havoc. Remember what happened to Alan Ralsky?
I strongly suspect Blizzard might be about to get some undeserved grief from the Slashdot Horde now. Not your intent, perhaps, to use Slashdot as a lever against them, but this is a very probable and predictable consequence. So: was this the place? Shouldn't this have gone on a personal blog, rather than the Slashdot front page?
This thing's a monster and you're Frankenstein. Careful whose village you point it at.
OK, I love the Ericsson phones. Great interface, great technology, versatile, it's all good. I've downloaded so many anime theme tunes from fan sites over GPRS to use as ringtones and alarm signals that it's just getting silly. Brilliant fun.
But... the joystick.
The goddamn Sony Ericsson joystick.
Everyone I know with any variant on the general theme of Standard Ericsson Phone has run into the same problem. That joystick starts sticking something rotten, as dust and pocket fluff and other grode start to gum it up. First the 'down' direction, for me, and now its response in other directions is getting dodgy too. Worse yet, pressing inward on the joystick counts as a 'click' sort of command - so a lot of the time when I'm trying to navigate down a menu it'll actually select the top item. That's bad on the net. It's infuriating playing games. It's a diabolic nightmare when you're in your phone book. You end up making half-second calls to about five people before you find the one you want.
Ericsson, for the love of God fix this. Your phones are fantastic except for this one horrific flaw...
If I and the rest of my cowrkers do such a good job that the company makes a few billion dollars in profit each year and the company raise the price of our prodcts each year, but have problem giving the employees the slightest wage increase. THAT is the real problem, the company I work for and many, many others are having record years, the owners fortunes increases drastically each year because we do such a good job, WE, not THEY, because without us, they would not be rich, but without them, we couls still produce and sell the same product.
Hmm. You're onto something here. These bosses are parasites on the produce of the workers; ideally, we could eliminate that entire class, then once the workers take control of the means of production we'll all be better off.
Trouble is, there's nothing you as an individual can do about it; you're replaceable, fireable, and if you try changing jobs you'll just get another boss same as the old boss. No improvement.
However: if the workers are united... Suppose all the disaffected workers walked out. Stopped work entirely. They can't replace all of you. You could force the bosses to negotiate, to improve your pay. Call it a 'strike', for you're striking a blow for the people against the oppressors. But without pay, how will you live? Perhaps you could put aside money in good times against the possibility of having to strike; form a 'union' to manage this.
Then you could build on this base of organised labour to develop a political force campaigning for the benefit of the workers, the ordinary people, rather than being a puppet of the rich capitalists like the current parties. Call it a Socialist Party.
And once the workers are politically aware and organised? Why, that's the glorious day of Revolution, comrade!
Maybe somebody should write a Manifesto for all this. It's an idea whose time has come...
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly as it should be. What do you expect, a 3D environment like some sort of MMORPG?
used this bizarre "so-and-so wants to chat with you" popup if they were sending you a file
That sort of thing would depend on what client you were using, I imagine.
had a built-in server list that kept getting out of date
Well, people do move their servers. The main services will stay put, though.
and was very hostile to newbies.
OMG j00 L4M3R!!!!!!1! w0t u u51n ther, win3.1? rofl lol lol lol. asl plz? Which is to say, yeah, I'll give you that one :-)
Yes. If not for IRC all three of them would have become good consu^H^H^H^Hitizens and contributed to society, rather than encouraging theft on a massive scale. Clearly these channels should be shut down to protect us from this kind of online terrorism.
-- Concerned Parents' League, not affiliated in any way to RIAA, honest.
Because more than zero people are willing to pay $17 for that link?
Welcome to capitalism. Incidentally, could the grandparent poster please send me a copy of his customer list? I've got some excellent opportunities for them in cross-river mass transit real estate...
Um. That's something that happens to Windows users. Reinstall Windows, you have to either fish out your driver disks that your computer's manufacturer supplied you (they DID supply them, right?) or get on the internet to hunt them down. Good luck with that.
Install Linux, chances are everything's already there. The only driver I had to locate on my last install was nVidia.
So, a memestructure known as 'Virus A' arrives on the computer of Hacker 0. He reverse-engineers it; now it is resident in the brain of Hacker 0. There it breeds furiously, producing countless offspring with random mutations. These are subject to natural selection in the environment of the hacker's brain, because the hacker knows what makes a virulent virus and what makes a feeble failure. In this phase the virus is benign, a bit like malaria not harming the mosquito; Hacker 0's brain does not crash.
Eventually a mutant form of the virus arises in the brain of Hacker 0; natural selection against the constraints of Hacker 0's security knowledge has produced a fitter version of the virus. At this point Virus B is released into the wild.
It's an interesting lifecycle. Like many infectious agents it behaves differently depending upon the host in which it finds itself. Once a population is isolated for a long while (in the brain of a hacker) it may diverge and eventually form a new species, possibly replacing the ancestral population once re-released... The analogy with biological evolution is certainly quite strong.
Unfortunately, I've implicitly reduced all human thought to the rapid reproduction and mutation of meme-structures, and originality to the production of an unusual mutation. Maybe this is true, but it's probably taking reductionism too far, like explaining the working of a car in terms of quark-gluon interactions. Treating a virus hacker as an malevolent intelligent mind intent on causing mayhem will probably get us a more reliable model of computer virus epidemiology.
You may be thinking of mitochondria. They have their own DNA quite separate from that of the cell nuclei, and live their lives embedded in our cells providing chemical processing services.
The thing is, though, they aren't intelligent.
It may be interesting, from an epidemiological viewpoint, to consider the various hackers of the world as mutagens, features of a virus's environment that will cause it to change in some way, in the same way that a radioactive source might induce mutation in a biological creature.
However, the crucial difference is that the hackers are intelligent. They have an aim in mind when they alter the virus; mutation in nature does not. A hacker can alter a virus drastically, making a huge change to it all at once in order to achieve some enhancement he has in mind. Evolution must proceed by small steps, each one an improvement or at least not significantly detrimental.
So, be careful not to push the analogy too far. Computer viruses have a good deal in common with biological viruses, but not that much. We're dealing here with intelligent design, not evolution; don't confuse the two.
Not quite. Biological viruses evolve. Computer viruses, however, are products of intelligent design, for certain values of 'intelligent'.
Computer viruses aren't a force of nature. Behind every one of them is a malicious programmer.
Eventually, I imagine we'll see polymorphic and self-modifying code reach the point where it can evolve in the same way as biological viruses, but that's probably quite a way off. The nearest I've heard of to that is viruses programmed to alter their appearance to avoid detection.
Your man here runs a phone company. His customers pay him for voice service, and also he gets paid by broadband providers for the right to run internet connections over the same line (or possibly he sells broadband himself - I don't know exactly how it's done in this particular case).
He has now noticed that some people are using the broadband connection instead of the voice service. There go his profitable long-distance and international charges! He charges a nontrivial amount per minute for a call to Tokyo, but these people are rolling it all into their modest monthly broadband fee! Aargh!
The words 'buggy whip manufacturer' spring immediately to mind.
Problem is that they're already paying for the use of the lines. What do you think your monthly ISP fee is doing?
Seems he now wants to be paid twice.
Which is exactly the problem. Evolution allows people to be atheists. It undermines the power of the religious establishments and they hate that.
Worse yet, AFAIK most Western Christians also believe the theory of evolution is broadly correct - i.e. that anything it has wrong is detail, like having the sequence of ancestry a bit off here or there, or having some missing fossils, but the overall principle being sound. What does that do to 'Made In God's Image'? What becomes of the Fall, and hence of Original Sin, and hence of the need for Christ's salvation?
Certainly it's possible to overcome all these problems and accommodate modern biology and cosmology within a Christian worldview, but it requires a good deal of mental flexibility, a rather different mindset to the absolutist fundamentalist.
It's interesting to notice that the Vatican has already come pretty much to terms with evolution and modern cosmology - indeed, they were said to be quite delighted with the Big Bang model, since the alternative was Steady State and a universe with nothing for a creator to do at all!
Basically what it boils down to is: if evolution is taught, then some of those kids will realise that God is an unnecessary addition to their worldview and will drop him into the same bin where they already put Santa Claus. If it is not taught, then some of them will continue to believe in God. That's enough for the fundamentalist. That's a soul saved from hell. Perhaps introducing intelligent design will save a few kids from this insidious atheist menace. Perhaps then, bit by bit, it might be possible to expand on intelligent design and introduce creationism proper, and from there roll back the whole materialist worldview...
There was a very good investigation into the fundamentalist agenda here in the New Scientist a few weeks ago. It was the 8th October 2005 issue, if you want to track it down at your library. Interesting stuff.
That I like, but we could do better.
I'm thinking it maybe wouldn't be too difficult to hack together a system to sit between your phone and the socket which would do nothing but play a really loud noise onto the phone line at the press of a button.
You might even have a menu to choose from. Let's see, how shall I interrupt the telemarketer's script this time? 'Airhorn, v loud' - good. 'White Noise' - nice, might make them think their system's broken. 'Beep, Sinusoidal, Annoyingly High Pitch' - a possibility. 'Baby Crying' - cruel! 'Barney Theme Song' - perhaps excessively sadistic. 'Fingernail On Blackboard Noise' - they don't deserve that yet. No, I think this telemarketer gets the 'Burst of Incomprehensible Dialogue From Puni Puni Poemy'. * click *
And having built it, post a webpage and submit to /. so we can all applaud.
You say you believe in evolution, yet... you think the idea is to go from 'lower' to 'higher' lifeforms - presumably with humans as the highest? - and you think that humans evolved from monkeys.
That's not what happens. There's no meaningful sense in which a human is 'higher' than a monkey, or a snake, or a squid. We're certainly a great deal more complex than some animals - for instance, than the amoeba - but that's mostly because we're larger than them. Is an elephant a 'higher' life form than you are? And a whale 'higher' still?
Furthermore, humans didn't evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys both evolved from a common ancestor, which was neither human nor monkey. Monkeys aren't our ancestors; think of them as our distant cousins.
A recommendation for you: get along to your local library and check out anything you can find by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Reading the works of those two, you'll get informed coverage of both sides of the debate over the great controversy in modern evolution.
(what, intelligent design? No, that's obvious nonsense. The controversy I'm talking about is punctuated equilibrium!)
But that's exactly why Catholicism is so close to paganism. Catholicism is, as you say, the original Christian religion that spread across Europe during the declining years of the Empire. In doing so, it co-opted a lot of pagan belief structures into itself. For instance, AFAIK there's no reason to think Jesus was born in December at all - Christmas is a rebranded pagan solstice festival. Easter? Take pagan springtime rituals focussed on the rebirth of the dead world, add the resurrection of Christ, cook at gas mark 8 for forty minutes or until well done. And as for the elevated importance of Mary in Catholicism: well, she combines the traditionally separate roles of nurturing mother goddess and chaste virgin goddess into a single icon.
Not to mention that a lot of Catholics in the English-speaking world are descendants of the Irish. The Church in Ireland went its own way for a long time before Rome finally managed to assert its authority there, and a lot of relics of the old Celtic Christian church still survive.
So your roommate was partly right. Catholicism is very close to paganism, and ironically, the fossils of ancient paganism that survive in Christianised form in Catholicism are probably still more authentic than what passes for paganism among the teenage-witch crowd.
And if one wishes to make a nasty retort to people who point out the Church's pagan heritage and think they've somehow scored points by doing so, it's quite easy to draw up an argument comparing fundamentalists to Pharisees, and literalists (who seem to worship the text more than the deity) to idolaters...
No, it sprang from the minds of people who could and did think it all the way through. These were evil people. People at the *AAs. People who hate the public domain, except insofar as it provides stories for Disney to remake and earn a fortune from, and despise fair use.
It was then passed into law by people unable or unwilling to think the thing all the way through. These were lazy or greedy people. Your elected representatives. People who care little for the public domain, and are really more interested in campaign contributions, and don't like fair use because of that bit about parody, because parody is usually aimed against politicians...
1: it kills 'fair use'. Traditionally, we've been allowed by copyright law to use small amounts of a given work for quotation, for review, for parody... However, the DMCA kills that off. Even if I'm allowed to use that small segment of the copyrighted work for my own purposes, I can't do so if it's technologically protected, even in the feeblest manner: the DMCA forbids that.
2: it encourages monopolies. Other than by means of Hymn, or burning to CD and then re-ripping, I can't play music downloaded from Apple on anything other than an iPod. Or, conversely, if I own an iPod I can't play music downloaded from anyone other than Apple on it. This has a chilling effect on the free market.
3: it threatens free speech itself. Even scholarly, academic discussion of cryptography has been curtailed by the DMCA, in cases where it touched on techniques that have been used to protect copyrighted works. Is it really more important to protect Hollywood's latest blockbuster than to have a free research base driving technology forward?
More than a couple of years. GCHQ had public key crypto long before R, S and A invented it. Someone upthread noted that secrecy led the British to throw away a massive lead in computer technology at the end of WW2; well, we did it again there. We had RSA for years and did sod all with it.
Not that I'm bitter, angry or resentful about the British government's policies on science and technology, no no no. I trust all those Sir Humphreys with their educations in the arts and classics to make the right choices...
* dispatches Sam Fisher to go correct that misapprehension *
That said... you may well be right. I don't know about NSA, but GCHQ (the UK equivalent) is derived from the wartime codebreakers of Bletchley, Turing's mob, who were undoubtedly hackers and geeks to a man.
If that culture has survived (which is hard to know, but one can guess from the recruitment material that GCHQ keep advertising everywhere) then they're probably quite a good bunch. So, if they're reading this... like they do everything else... hi, guys!
It's kind of sad that you had to specify that.
Can we cite live-action horror movies, though? There was one of those that had a lot of TVs in it, but they were still using VHS! I mean, come on... Sadako really should have cursed someone's TiVo :-)
Well, well, well, you're feeling fine...
aside: I was tremendously amused, cracking into the medical computer systems in VtM: Bloodlines, to find a staff appraisal for a terrific doctor who 'has never lost a patient. No-one can succeed like Doctor Robert.'
Anyway. I've got this coconut here, but I think it needs something to add to the flavour. Any ideas? Doctor?
Subtlety? You must be new here...
Nonetheless, was this the place to post about it? You know what Slashdot's capable of. Hundreds of thousands of posters, countless lurkers, and even a small percentage taking it upon themselves to avenge a perceived wrong can cause havoc. Remember what happened to Alan Ralsky?
I strongly suspect Blizzard might be about to get some undeserved grief from the Slashdot Horde now. Not your intent, perhaps, to use Slashdot as a lever against them, but this is a very probable and predictable consequence. So: was this the place? Shouldn't this have gone on a personal blog, rather than the Slashdot front page?
This thing's a monster and you're Frankenstein. Careful whose village you point it at.
But... the joystick.
The goddamn Sony Ericsson joystick.
Everyone I know with any variant on the general theme of Standard Ericsson Phone has run into the same problem. That joystick starts sticking something rotten, as dust and pocket fluff and other grode start to gum it up. First the 'down' direction, for me, and now its response in other directions is getting dodgy too. Worse yet, pressing inward on the joystick counts as a 'click' sort of command - so a lot of the time when I'm trying to navigate down a menu it'll actually select the top item. That's bad on the net. It's infuriating playing games. It's a diabolic nightmare when you're in your phone book. You end up making half-second calls to about five people before you find the one you want.
Ericsson, for the love of God fix this. Your phones are fantastic except for this one horrific flaw...
Hey, me too. New Age girls are easy.
Do your bit for Windows compatibility!
"Right now, Wine apps look like something the type dragged in".
Hmm. You're onto something here. These bosses are parasites on the produce of the workers; ideally, we could eliminate that entire class, then once the workers take control of the means of production we'll all be better off.
Trouble is, there's nothing you as an individual can do about it; you're replaceable, fireable, and if you try changing jobs you'll just get another boss same as the old boss. No improvement.
However: if the workers are united... Suppose all the disaffected workers walked out. Stopped work entirely. They can't replace all of you. You could force the bosses to negotiate, to improve your pay. Call it a 'strike', for you're striking a blow for the people against the oppressors. But without pay, how will you live? Perhaps you could put aside money in good times against the possibility of having to strike; form a 'union' to manage this.
Then you could build on this base of organised labour to develop a political force campaigning for the benefit of the workers, the ordinary people, rather than being a puppet of the rich capitalists like the current parties. Call it a Socialist Party.
And once the workers are politically aware and organised? Why, that's the glorious day of Revolution, comrade!
Maybe somebody should write a Manifesto for all this. It's an idea whose time has come...