Did you phrase it that way because you're a professional reporter and are used to getting paid to scare people into buying the crap you write, or are you just being a troll?
I agree, and am similarly irritated.
Posting deliberately misleading stories is enough to get a Foe rating from me, at least.
I have had a hell of a time with memory on a dual Xeon server I built recently; I know I wouldn't want to be mixing modules from different manufacturers on it!
I just buy a bin above what I need, and don't worry about compatibility issues.
I use GPG. Nobody else that I know does, and so I cannot encrypt email to them.
How many people really use WASTE?
As for AIM encryption, how many people are using gaim, have the encryption plugin compiled in (which frequently doesn't work with the latest version of gaim), and don't mind the occasional compatibility problems the encryption plugin causes with other AIM clients? I've come to the conclusion that the *only* instant-messaging protocol that I know of with effective and widespread encryption is Jabber, but few people use Jabber -- sure, it's great for talking to your techie friends, but not everyone in the world is a techie.
When did trading copyrighted music online become one of my "rights"?
It isn't (usually) legally a right.
However, I think some are speaking of ethical rights. Clearly, a lot of people do take issue with many current laws, be it drug law, the extremely-extended copyright law, or whatnot. They may not feel that the law is just.
Actually, I suspect that few people's ethics actually match up perfectly with US law. Do you believe that you cannot safely drink alcohol until 21 (a law that contrasts with most of the rest of the world)? Do you find yourself attracted to nude 18-year-olds, but repelled by nude 17-year-olds? Despite the fact that it's legal for an Olympic swimmer to stand by and point and laugh at a drowning person, would you consider it ethical? Is it ethical to continue to enforce a monopoly on reproduction of someone's writings sixty years after the producer of those writings has passed away? Is what SCO is doing ethical, even though US law shields executives of a corporation from criminal charges under almost all circumstances, leaving them free to continue doing what they're doing? Does your sense of ethics agree with the imprisonments that result from people using marijuana?
I'm sure that there are a few people out there that have an ethical system that fits *exactly* with all of the points above. However, I suspect that they are in the minority.
If you really want to end piracy, it's a matter of creating a climate where users don't want to pirate - they'd prefer to buy, because they feel like they're getting something for their money.
Antipiracy work is not, fundamentally, an invalid method of doing this -- it devalues pirating, rather than increasing the value of the product, but it still produces a difference between the two.
The problem that content producers have is that, aside from tying a product to a service (a la MMORPGs), it's awfully hard to improve the value of your product without the value of the pirated product increasing an equal amount. How would you suggest that they convince people to purchase their product rather than pirate it?
Currently, the main benefits that a non-pirated version of software provides are (we'll leave out music and movies, which are even more difficult to differentiate from pirated versions):
* Support. Pretty much theoretical. A publisher can't profitably provide much support with the amount they make on a game.
My take: I don't think that support is a very useful factor. You can have "help forums" and require a login obtained through registration, but this is a severe impediment to all users, and it's easy to just use another non-publisher-affiliated forum.
* Ease of use, especially relating to updates. Generally, pirated copies of software are more difficult to install/use than non-pirated copies (though the fact that the user doesn't have to screw with putting his CD in the drive each time seriously impacts the value of many legitimate copies of software). The user can just run an update program, and the software is updated, etc. Not going to work on a cracked binary.
My take: This can work well, in certain situations. If updates are frequently released, it may be worthwhile -- the problem is that many people are just going to ignore updates. Releasing a buggy piece of software that needs updates to help facilitate this irritates users, and is disadvantageous in competition with other pieces of software. Multiplayer games are a good example of somewhere this can be done -- if updating is extremely easy, protocol changes can be made that break compatibility with older clients, which forces people to keep upgrading. The problem is that unless the copy-protection scheme is updated each update in the software (expensive and error-prone), it's generally pretty easy for crackers to just release updated patches. This is still a pretty good incentive. Half-Life/(Counterstrike) multiplayer used this in one of the most effective approaches I've seen, with proxied authentication. Sure, you could crack the client and play only on cracked servers, but it was enough of a pain in the ass that most people weren't interested in hassling with it.
* Guarantee of quality. The user knows that the software is not trojaned or broken.
My take: This is currently under-leveraged by software vendors. It is illegal for vendors to provide maliciously trojaned copies of their software, but they could deliberately break cracked releases in ways that are not immediately obvious -- a user gets to stage three in their game, or attempts to print, and just sees a dialog "This copy is pirated. Please purchase a legitimate copy of this software." and exits. Currently, there is only rudimentary work to detect fake pirate releases in the P2P world, and all the current efforts that I know of rely upon a centralized server (a la ShareReactor's fakes database). Such a server has heavy bandwidth requirements. There are unlikely to be many of such servers, and they can easily be tracked down by publishers. A business could provide a service of flooding P2P networks with bogus copies of software (as was attempted by the RIAA with Madonna's music) and shutting down all fake detection servers. It would be possible to set up a PKI trust network endorsing valid software to avoid a centralized server, but this has a number of problems of its own, in
He's just bumped up technology a bit more. The whole P2P arms race is producing some of the fastest and best improvements in software ever. Encryption (aside from e-commerce) is essentially nonexistent -- except in P2P systems like WASTE and Freenet. I'm all for this -- he'll drive people to use encrypted systems, which I would have liked to see a long time ago.
It'd be awesome if people started distributing software that logged, spied upon, and retransmitted email by sniffing networks. We'd have PGP deployment en masse for the first time.
Because the Bush Administration was installed and has a primary support base among religiously conservative and poorly-educated types. These people do not generally read Slashdot. As a result, a disproportionate number of people on Slashdot don't like Bush much.
There are a lot of people that worry that the country is going to the dogs, that immorality is running rampant, and that some good old-style religious family values will keep things together.
Once the Baby Boomers start dying off from old age, I'm guessing and hoping that things will be different.
I certianly have the RIGHT to have the crack and keygen to any software I legally own.
Perhaps if you're arguing an ethical right. If you are talking about legal rights, however, and are a resident of the United States, not only do you not have the right to use intended-for-noninfringing-use cracks, but have not had it for some time. The DMCA made circumvention of copy protection mechanisms illegal.
I dunno. Fairlight and Class released a lot of software. This *is* going to put at least a short-term dent in things.
Really, though, a lot of warez groups had gotten much less shadowy and more open, with websites and whatnot, and were kind of pushing the limits.
You don't need a group with twenty members and a high profile to crack software, though. People can work pretty effectively buried a bit more underground.
I wonder how much longer it will be until someone produced a dedicated app just for doing machinima. The engine has to look good, and be easy to use, but realtime requirements don't really exist.
Currently, our 3d modelling and animation programs have interfaces that are designed around extreme control, but take *forever* to actually model something. If someone can produce an effective visual side to an animation with nothing more than some people walking around (but can't draw worth a damn or act well), having tools to suit them would be quite useful.
This could actually make an interesting open source project, maybe using something like Crystal Space. Tradtionally , games have not done well in the open source world because of the way games work. Until a game is about 90% complete, it's generally not much fun to play. Open source generally needs interested people using a piece of software and identifying features that they'd like to have -- and implementing those features. In a game, this unbalances things. In a game engine used for machinima, it's possible to later on add in a "flying" feature and still benefit from the existing software that doesn't have such a feature. In a game, adding "flying" would severely unbalance the game.
So now it's actually feasible for a purely lesbian society to exist and reproduce?
This should pose some interesting questions for the Christian right's arguments against homosexuality based on infeasiblity of universalization in nature.
So... that means that we should believe random people's unsubstantiated claims?
Of course not. That's not what I was commenting on -- I quoted your phrase I mean, come on. 'BurnAllGIFS.' It practically reeks of professionalism and years of law school. That and that alone was the sentence that I took issue with. It makes no more sense to ignore someone as "unprofessional" because the name of their domain is "burnallgifs.com" than it does to ignore someone because the name of their domain is "sickfuck.org" [meaningful glance at Phexro's homepage link].
I hereby begin my protest against the wearing of pants.
We'll see how long it takes until Big Brother starts oppressing you on that one, eh?
I'll bet the poor guy is underappreciated
on
Our Man In Black
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Greenpeace sinks ships and stages disruptive protests, but I'll bet they've never so much as sent a nice thank you card to their Planetary Protection Officer.
As a final note, having Iraq be free is important to our National Defence because, regardless of what those in DC say, part of the war in Iraq is securing access to vital resources for the American Economy. In other words oil.
While it may be in American interests to seize control of oil (and as such, you might even argue that it is a justified goal of the US government), it is definitely not "defense". If there was a war being conducted and the US had no oil reserves (not the case by a hell of a long shot), then seizure of oil *might* be considered defense.
Of course, you've been on my Foes list for a long while, which probably means that you regularly troll, and that this is just one of them.
The group is a bunch of dorks who get together to drink soda and talk about computers on Friday nights instead of getting laid
I was going to say "I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't use Linux, if that's your view of LUG members", but then I noticed that you said that you don't use Linux in your journal, which sort of spoiled the point.
Depending on the person not wearing pants (I could definitely see this acting as an *incentive* to purchase peach pie), I could see this working. If one of my housemates refused to wear pants every time I purchased peach pie, I'd probably quit purchasing said pie.
You do have to admit -- this guy got a *hell* of a lot of publicity out of resigning from the group.
And I have a hard time bashing anyone for doing something that opposes the War for Oil...
But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
Clearly it's time to start up a Sourceforge project. The world has a notable lack of FLOSS device-control software for baby-mulching machines.
I have a sneaking suspicion that members of the military are more likely to be upset about arbitrary "wars" created for financial reasons than a typical civilian. The civilian has to deal with wasted tax dollars -- the member of the military is having being placed in the line of bullets, but to make a few rich oilmen richer, not to defend their country. I'd be pissed off too.
The United States military is not George W. Bush's personal grudge-fighting machine. If he wants to carry on family feuds, he can arm-wrestle Saddam Hussein. The funds and lives put into the military are for the sole and express purpose of defense of the United States of America.
terrorism != acts of killing. Terrorism is the act of imposing terror against civilians as a political tool. It is possible to have terrorist regimes. It is possible to have non-terrorist killers.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you phrase it that way because you're a professional reporter and are used to getting paid to scare people into buying the crap you write, or are you just being a troll?
I agree, and am similarly irritated.
Posting deliberately misleading stories is enough to get a Foe rating from me, at least.
Since there are plenty of women who are both stupid AND ugly, such as Rush Limbaugh...
Wow. That may be the most impressive anti-conservative zing I've heard yet. Definitely got a chuckle here.
I have had a hell of a time with memory on a dual Xeon server I built recently; I know I wouldn't want to be mixing modules from different manufacturers on it!
I just buy a bin above what I need, and don't worry about compatibility issues.
Encryption only works if other people do it too.
I use GPG. Nobody else that I know does, and so I cannot encrypt email to them.
How many people really use WASTE?
As for AIM encryption, how many people are using gaim, have the encryption plugin compiled in (which frequently doesn't work with the latest version of gaim), and don't mind the occasional compatibility problems the encryption plugin causes with other AIM clients? I've come to the conclusion that the *only* instant-messaging protocol that I know of with effective and widespread encryption is Jabber, but few people use Jabber -- sure, it's great for talking to your techie friends, but not everyone in the world is a techie.
When did trading copyrighted music online become one of my "rights"?
It isn't (usually) legally a right.
However, I think some are speaking of ethical rights. Clearly, a lot of people do take issue with many current laws, be it drug law, the extremely-extended copyright law, or whatnot. They may not feel that the law is just.
Actually, I suspect that few people's ethics actually match up perfectly with US law. Do you believe that you cannot safely drink alcohol until 21 (a law that contrasts with most of the rest of the world)? Do you find yourself attracted to nude 18-year-olds, but repelled by nude 17-year-olds? Despite the fact that it's legal for an Olympic swimmer to stand by and point and laugh at a drowning person, would you consider it ethical? Is it ethical to continue to enforce a monopoly on reproduction of someone's writings sixty years after the producer of those writings has passed away? Is what SCO is doing ethical, even though US law shields executives of a corporation from criminal charges under almost all circumstances, leaving them free to continue doing what they're doing? Does your sense of ethics agree with the imprisonments that result from people using marijuana?
I'm sure that there are a few people out there that have an ethical system that fits *exactly* with all of the points above. However, I suspect that they are in the minority.
If you really want to end piracy, it's a matter of creating a climate where users don't want to pirate - they'd prefer to buy, because they feel like they're getting something for their money.
Antipiracy work is not, fundamentally, an invalid method of doing this -- it devalues pirating, rather than increasing the value of the product, but it still produces a difference between the two.
The problem that content producers have is that, aside from tying a product to a service (a la MMORPGs), it's awfully hard to improve the value of your product without the value of the pirated product increasing an equal amount. How would you suggest that they convince people to purchase their product rather than pirate it?
Currently, the main benefits that a non-pirated version of software provides are (we'll leave out music and movies, which are even more difficult to differentiate from pirated versions):
* Support. Pretty much theoretical. A publisher can't profitably provide much support with the amount they make on a game.
My take: I don't think that support is a very useful factor. You can have "help forums" and require a login obtained through registration, but this is a severe impediment to all users, and it's easy to just use another non-publisher-affiliated forum.
* Ease of use, especially relating to updates. Generally, pirated copies of software are more difficult to install/use than non-pirated copies (though the fact that the user doesn't have to screw with putting his CD in the drive each time seriously impacts the value of many legitimate copies of software). The user can just run an update program, and the software is updated, etc. Not going to work on a cracked binary.
My take: This can work well, in certain situations. If updates are frequently released, it may be worthwhile -- the problem is that many people are just going to ignore updates. Releasing a buggy piece of software that needs updates to help facilitate this irritates users, and is disadvantageous in competition with other pieces of software. Multiplayer games are a good example of somewhere this can be done -- if updating is extremely easy, protocol changes can be made that break compatibility with older clients, which forces people to keep upgrading. The problem is that unless the copy-protection scheme is updated each update in the software (expensive and error-prone), it's generally pretty easy for crackers to just release updated patches. This is still a pretty good incentive. Half-Life/(Counterstrike) multiplayer used this in one of the most effective approaches I've seen, with proxied authentication. Sure, you could crack the client and play only on cracked servers, but it was enough of a pain in the ass that most people weren't interested in hassling with it.
* Guarantee of quality. The user knows that the software is not trojaned or broken.
My take: This is currently under-leveraged by software vendors. It is illegal for vendors to provide maliciously trojaned copies of their software, but they could deliberately break cracked releases in ways that are not immediately obvious -- a user gets to stage three in their game, or attempts to print, and just sees a dialog "This copy is pirated. Please purchase a legitimate copy of this software." and exits. Currently, there is only rudimentary work to detect fake pirate releases in the P2P world, and all the current efforts that I know of rely upon a centralized server (a la ShareReactor's fakes database). Such a server has heavy bandwidth requirements. There are unlikely to be many of such servers, and they can easily be tracked down by publishers. A business could provide a service of flooding P2P networks with bogus copies of software (as was attempted by the RIAA with Madonna's music) and shutting down all fake detection servers. It would be possible to set up a PKI trust network endorsing valid software to avoid a centralized server, but this has a number of problems of its own, in
Why harass him?
He's just bumped up technology a bit more. The whole P2P arms race is producing some of the fastest and best improvements in software ever. Encryption (aside from e-commerce) is essentially nonexistent -- except in P2P systems like WASTE and Freenet. I'm all for this -- he'll drive people to use encrypted systems, which I would have liked to see a long time ago.
It'd be awesome if people started distributing software that logged, spied upon, and retransmitted email by sniffing networks. We'd have PGP deployment en masse for the first time.
Because the Bush Administration was installed and has a primary support base among religiously conservative and poorly-educated types. These people do not generally read Slashdot. As a result, a disproportionate number of people on Slashdot don't like Bush much.
There are a lot of people that worry that the country is going to the dogs, that immorality is running rampant, and that some good old-style religious family values will keep things together.
Once the Baby Boomers start dying off from old age, I'm guessing and hoping that things will be different.
I certianly have the RIGHT to have the crack and keygen to any software I legally own.
Perhaps if you're arguing an ethical right. If you are talking about legal rights, however, and are a resident of the United States, not only do you not have the right to use intended-for-noninfringing-use cracks, but have not had it for some time. The DMCA made circumvention of copy protection mechanisms illegal.
Nah. Warez groups were becoming very high profile and open. Not a good thing. They just need to be shadowy again, and the problem goes away.
I dunno. Fairlight and Class released a lot of software. This *is* going to put at least a short-term dent in things.
Really, though, a lot of warez groups had gotten much less shadowy and more open, with websites and whatnot, and were kind of pushing the limits.
You don't need a group with twenty members and a high profile to crack software, though. People can work pretty effectively buried a bit more underground.
I wonder how much longer it will be until someone produced a dedicated app just for doing machinima. The engine has to look good, and be easy to use, but realtime requirements don't really exist.
Currently, our 3d modelling and animation programs have interfaces that are designed around extreme control, but take *forever* to actually model something. If someone can produce an effective visual side to an animation with nothing more than some people walking around (but can't draw worth a damn or act well), having tools to suit them would be quite useful.
This could actually make an interesting open source project, maybe using something like Crystal Space. Tradtionally , games have not done well in the open source world because of the way games work. Until a game is about 90% complete, it's generally not much fun to play. Open source generally needs interested people using a piece of software and identifying features that they'd like to have -- and implementing those features. In a game, this unbalances things. In a game engine used for machinima, it's possible to later on add in a "flying" feature and still benefit from the existing software that doesn't have such a feature. In a game, adding "flying" would severely unbalance the game.
Crystal Space might be a good base for this.
So now it's actually feasible for a purely lesbian society to exist and reproduce?
This should pose some interesting questions for the Christian right's arguments against homosexuality based on infeasiblity of universalization in nature.
So... that means that we should believe random people's unsubstantiated claims?
Of course not. That's not what I was commenting on -- I quoted your phrase I mean, come on. 'BurnAllGIFS.' It practically reeks of professionalism and years of law school. That and that alone was the sentence that I took issue with. It makes no more sense to ignore someone as "unprofessional" because the name of their domain is "burnallgifs.com" than it does to ignore someone because the name of their domain is "sickfuck.org" [meaningful glance at Phexro's homepage link].
I hereby begin my protest against the wearing of pants.
We'll see how long it takes until Big Brother starts oppressing you on that one, eh?
Greenpeace sinks ships and stages disruptive protests, but I'll bet they've never so much as sent a nice thank you card to their Planetary Protection Officer.
Except that I doubt that Bush's stint in the military was for the money -- Bushies hardly lack for it.
My favorites were when the animal-rights students locked themselves in cages every year.
I assume that, after being rounded up by the police, they are locked in jail cells?
As a final note, having Iraq be free is important to our National Defence because, regardless of what those in DC say, part of the war in Iraq is securing access to vital resources for the American Economy. In other words oil.
While it may be in American interests to seize control of oil (and as such, you might even argue that it is a justified goal of the US government), it is definitely not "defense". If there was a war being conducted and the US had no oil reserves (not the case by a hell of a long shot), then seizure of oil *might* be considered defense.
Of course, you've been on my Foes list for a long while, which probably means that you regularly troll, and that this is just one of them.
The group is a bunch of dorks who get together to drink soda and talk about computers on Friday nights instead of getting laid
I was going to say "I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't use Linux, if that's your view of LUG members", but then I noticed that you said that you don't use Linux in your journal, which sort of spoiled the point.
Depending on the person not wearing pants (I could definitely see this acting as an *incentive* to purchase peach pie), I could see this working. If one of my housemates refused to wear pants every time I purchased peach pie, I'd probably quit purchasing said pie.
You do have to admit -- this guy got a *hell* of a lot of publicity out of resigning from the group.
And I have a hard time bashing anyone for doing something that opposes the War for Oil...
But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
Clearly it's time to start up a Sourceforge project. The world has a notable lack of FLOSS device-control software for baby-mulching machines.
I have a sneaking suspicion that members of the military are more likely to be upset about arbitrary "wars" created for financial reasons than a typical civilian. The civilian has to deal with wasted tax dollars -- the member of the military is having being placed in the line of bullets, but to make a few rich oilmen richer, not to defend their country. I'd be pissed off too.
The United States military is not George W. Bush's personal grudge-fighting machine. If he wants to carry on family feuds, he can arm-wrestle Saddam Hussein. The funds and lives put into the military are for the sole and express purpose of defense of the United States of America.
terrorism (acts of killing)
terrorism != acts of killing. Terrorism is the act of imposing terror against civilians as a political tool. It is possible to have terrorist regimes. It is possible to have non-terrorist killers.
Just because the GPL allows someone to do something doesn't mean that you need to endorse or support their doing so.
Currently, people can do all kinds of things that are legal that I am quite happy discouraging.
Unless you want the legal system to define your ethics, it is quite appropriate to do things that support your views.