Wow, you've just stated what I've been thinking for a number of years, but haven't brought it all together into a coherent statement.
Almost anything can be destructive if done to excess. You could be "addicted" to praying for instance (though few people would be willing to call this destructive). I do think you're right though, addiction should be a term limited to behaviours that exhibit tolerance, withdrawal, etc. Once you go beyond the scope of that definition it starts to lose its meaning.
Oh please. Thanks for the anecdotal evidence based on conversations with "one person".
How can any reasonable person really believe that someone can be "drawn into homesexuality" because of pornography? So you then believe that you personally could "turn gay" by simply just viewing gay porn? Maybe you're just less sure of your sexuality than most people.
I'd be much more apt to believe that people raised to believe homosexuality is a sin just need an excuse to explain their attraction to the same sex. Gay porn is a perfect excuse, with a great amount of plausible deniability later on. "Oh I'm not really gay, it's all that confounded gay porn! Really I'm a good person, not one of them sinners!".
I find this whole anti-gay thing one of the most shamefull things about the Judeo-Christian-Islam religion (though admitedly I'm not certain how anti-gay Judaism is). They're not all the same religion, but they all share this same belief and all believe in different versions of the same god.
That's hardly a natural situation, and I don't think the long-term genetic health of the species will be affected.
Right, because humans exist outside of nature. While the fate of one dolphin is negligible in terms of evolution, humanity is part of nature. I've always found the "not natural" argument to be a fallacy that leads to wrong conclusions.
It's a decent enough question, but I seriously doubt one artificial dolphin flipper has any effect at all on evolution. "Help" is a relative term of course and depends on your value system.
For example, the US Park Service policy of putting out all forrest fires over the last many decades has resulted in a buildup of fuel for much more massive and devastating forrest fires. In "helping" forrests we've really hurt them.
Oh stop with your bleeding heart bullshit. $100,000 is peanuts, and I bet most of the expense is manhours from people at the tire company.
The "money could have been spent elsewhere" argument can go on forever. You've mistaken "philanthropy" for a very cheap PR. Bridgestone just got a LOT of cheap very positive advertising out of this story.
That's even really beside the point. Are people not allowed to spend money anymore because there's some other "better" place that their efforts could have gone? How many lives could have been saved with the money that went to that computer in front of you?
No, I'm saying people don't RELY on games as much as they do on an OS. Stop putting words in my mouth. If you really insist on framing it in a "games don't matter" sense, I would say that games don't matter AS MUCH as an OS because the OS is more relied upon.
As far as the trend, I think activation is a passing fad. It's not going to stop piracy one bit as there will ALWAYS be patched versions of non-online games, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Games have gone through various stages of attempts to copy-protect them. In the 80s just about every computer game had lame-o copy protection on it to the point where they actually poked holes in a specific sector of the floppy drive so it couldn't be written too. (write to that sector, try to read it, if you can don't allow access). People got fed up with it, and it all vanished in the late 80s/early 90s. The same thing will happen again. DRM and copy protection is a losing battle because you can't control bits.
It's the difference between an operating system and a game. Few people rely heavily upon the ability to play a game (and if you do, you've got more problems than just game activation). Inability to re-install an OS on the other hand can be a major problem. If you're stuck somwhere without a phone or 'net access and you need to install XP, you're up shit crick.
Both Microsoft and Valve can decide when to stop authorizing their software (and likely will at some point). Of course the consequences of no longer being able to install an OS are a LOT bigger than not being able to play a 10 year old game. You also have to admit that Microsoft has a much spottier reputation with taking unfair advantage of their monopoly power. Valve doesn't have that reputation, so people are more willing to trust them.
Mostly people in the south, and in rural areas. There's still a lot of ignorant people out their that cling to their beliefs and refuse to even bother learning anything about evolution.
They really should be ignored on Slashdot though. They represent a threat to education, but fight those battles where they need to be fought.
There's enough blame to go around to everyone. In the case of sexual harassment, it would have to be shown the company knew about how the employee was acting, and didn't do anything about it or didn't take sufficient action. That's often the case as employers look the other way at these problems especially if the offending party is high on the food chain.
The same would go for Verizon. Why should they be liable for a sleazebag company that they probably didn't have any prior experience with?
The fact that this is so widespread points to a more general problem with Verizon, and not just a one time mistake. Using your example if suddenly there's a massive class-action lawsuit brought against a company for sexual harassment wouldn't you at least suspect there's something wrong with that company?
Large companies love sub-contracting for the very reason that it gives them plausible deniability when things go wrong. This kind of thing happens all the time, and so the problem continues. The only way it can stop is to hold the contractee to a high standard (perhaps not legally, but in the court of public opinion).
Yah, and I'm still pissed at the Romans for enslaving my ancestors and feeding them to lions. Get over it buddy, the issue is buried and long dead. You're just another American just like me.
Yah, I think the same thing whenever a new space probe is launched and the geocentrists get all uppity and claim it'll crash into the the crystal spheres.
ANd it's not even Verizon's fault, it's the subcontractors.
If you're the one funding all the damage, you're also the one that should take part of the blame. It's Verizon's responsibility to hire competent people to dig. Blaming everything on the sub-contractors is beside the point, since Verizon is the one who hired these clowns.
But my smtp is comcast because that is my ISP. So the from will be my domain but the server will be comcast. So are we going to reject everyone else who refuses to use their ISPs email service but is forced to use their SMTP?
You're totally missunderstanding what domainkeys does. Very simply, your domain publishes a public key that anyone can use to verify that you (and only you) signed a message via the private key. The public key gets published via a DNS record. When you send an outgoing message the sender signs each message with his/her private key. The private key is kept as a secret to only authorized signers. The signing can happen in the email client, or via the SMTP server. In your case this would very likely be done by the mail client.
All that's required to use domainkeys for the sender is the ability to add a TXT record to a domains DNS record, and a mail client (or possibly server) that supports signing mail.
Lastly, I find this plea for help via the Internet rather odd. One might imagine that a well-educated person like mr. Volkerding should be able to find his way to proper medical care.
I actually see some very good advice (and some nonsense). The thing is that intelligent or not, most people don't have a good handle on the journey through our medical system. Our impressions of medicine seem to come from medical shows where doctors are brilliant, diagnosis are fast, easy, and accurate.
The reality is far far away from that. Some doctors don't know what the hell they're doing and make bad diagnosis. Others (quite a few actually) make the first assumption that "it's all in your head", and tell patients to go home and take it easy. Some patients make the mistake of going to multiple doctors and no doctor ever gets a complete picture (this is often a result of problems one and two above).
All of this leads to patients going to their wits end to solve their medical problems. People start researching diseases over the internet, make pleas of help with friends/family, etc. Getting back to the original point, if you or some member of your family don't know your way around the medical system it's often very hard to get treated properly. What I see here on slashdot is a decent map of what to expect from those in the medical community. All too often the response from doctors seems to come from a basic "get them out of here quick as possible" approach. That can mean a quick crappy diagnosis and pushing some common "mostly harmless" cure like anti-biotics, or it can be your initial response of "it's all in your head".
What I would agree with is the "does anyone know someone that'll give me treatment X" approach is the wrong way to go. But really it seems that the reason the guy is taking this approach is a failing of the medical system itself.
As a non yahweh believer I don't really want people asking their deity to help me if I were sick. I wouldn't have a problem with people keeping me in their thoughts, but I've never liked the "ask my god for stuff" method of changing the world.
To some of us who don't believe in this praying business it all just seems like a cop out way to try to "do something" when you're powerless. Can't people just accept that sometimes there's nothing they can do?
One reason is that the higher in frequency you go, the higher potential bandwidth you can use. Also the higher the freq. in the electromagetic spectrum the more particle like the photons become. One of the effects of that is the energy spreads out less over distance. The more the energy spreads out over distance, the less there is to collect at the endpoint (and thus harder to maintain a good signal/noise ratio). Another reason might be that lasers are cheap and easy to produce. If you use a laser you can make a lot more efficient use of your energy since you're concentrating all the signal on only where you want to send it.
They could also use a maser to accomplish the same thing. A maser outputs its energy in the microwave spectrum, instead of the visible spectrum. The advantages would be lower interference from the atmosphere (microwaves can go through clouds much easier than light). The disadvantage is the microwave energy spreads out more over distance due to being a lower frequency.
Photonic forms of energy. Radio is not photonic, therefore is not visible.
Nope, all electromagnetic radiation is transmitted via photons. Photons just mean that energy is transmitted in discreet packets, and not continuously.
That's an easily solveable problem. If the installer can't contact the game servers (and you have a working internet connection) put up a popup suggesting you go to a website to DL a patch. You could also just guarantee activation servers working for x years, and put up the popup if you can't contact activation servers, and it's past the guaranteed date.
My guess is the activation servers will be up for years to come. Running a server is cheap as hell, so there's not much incentive to close them down quickly. In 5-7 years when no one's playing the game the bargain bin argument is dead, and you release the no-activation patch. Hopefully Valve has included some helpfull error message when the game can't reach an activation server.
You're comparing apples and oranges. If the authentication servers go offline there's no reason that Valve couldn't release a patch of some sort that didn't require activiation. Obviously that's not really possible with DiVX.
The whole activation thing is really beside the point anyway. Best Buy is the ones at fault for selling the game before it was released, and Vivendi has every right to not activate the game.
It reads like the gossip column in the local newspaper. If you want to provide a retrospective, great. But I think most of us don't follow UnitedLinux very closely, so a retrospective is more than just one paragraph mentioning a few things that happened with no real detail.
I think you need to learn more about hashcash. The CPU requirements really aren't that great, and stamps can be pre-computed. Even a couple seconds to compute a hash on a powerfull machine is enough to stop a spammer from sending gobs of email. Maybe that'll take a minute or two on a lower power 486.. big deal. Let the software pre-compute stamps for anyone in your address book, then sending mail can occur right away.
It's also likely that your ISP might stamp mail for you anyway, solving the low CPU-powered devices problem outright. This is hardly a solution that gives big corps any power. Computing power is cheap and available.
I never would have thought of it, but I bet you're exactly right. By dragging out this claim Novell has forced this to be the one and only fight SCO can make.
If it's true (and not just do to incompetant corporate record keeping) it's a brilliant strategy.
While the FBI has had a lot of false positives, it hasn't had many false negatives.
How do you know what's a false negative? What percentage of the false negatives do you ever find out were false negatives? Probbably pretty low, that would entail catching the guys you couldn't catch previously.
I'm really tired of all these claims of great success on stopping terrorist attacks. The first WTC bombing was in 1993, a lag of 8 years between attacks on US soil. International attacks haven't stopped either. The march 2004 Madrid bombings are suspected to be of Al-quaida origin. Wikipedia lists many attacks reportedly from Al-quada. While the justice department doesn't have much control over other countries, it sure seems to indicate the rest of US foreign policy hasn't done a whole lot of damage to Al-quaida.
Technically you can have a war on proper nouns. Examples would be Germany, Japan, and possibly Al-Queda (as much as it's possible to have a war on a loosely knit organization). Terrorism, drugs, poverty, communism, etc are all improper nouns and thus you can't have a war on something intangible.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you've just stated what I've been thinking for a number of years, but haven't brought it all together into a coherent statement.
Almost anything can be destructive if done to excess. You could be "addicted" to praying for instance (though few people would be willing to call this destructive). I do think you're right though, addiction should be a term limited to behaviours that exhibit tolerance, withdrawal, etc. Once you go beyond the scope of that definition it starts to lose its meaning.
Oh please. Thanks for the anecdotal evidence based on conversations with "one person".
How can any reasonable person really believe that someone can be "drawn into homesexuality" because of pornography? So you then believe that you personally could "turn gay" by simply just viewing gay porn? Maybe you're just less sure of your sexuality than most people.
I'd be much more apt to believe that people raised to believe homosexuality is a sin just need an excuse to explain their attraction to the same sex. Gay porn is a perfect excuse, with a great amount of plausible deniability later on. "Oh I'm not really gay, it's all that confounded gay porn! Really I'm a good person, not one of them sinners!".
I find this whole anti-gay thing one of the most shamefull things about the Judeo-Christian-Islam religion (though admitedly I'm not certain how anti-gay Judaism is). They're not all the same religion, but they all share this same belief and all believe in different versions of the same god.
That's hardly a natural situation, and I don't think the long-term genetic health of the species will be affected.
Right, because humans exist outside of nature. While the fate of one dolphin is negligible in terms of evolution, humanity is part of nature. I've always found the "not natural" argument to be a fallacy that leads to wrong conclusions.
It's a decent enough question, but I seriously doubt one artificial dolphin flipper has any effect at all on evolution. "Help" is a relative term of course and depends on your value system.
For example, the US Park Service policy of putting out all forrest fires over the last many decades has resulted in a buildup of fuel for much more massive and devastating forrest fires. In "helping" forrests we've really hurt them.
Oh stop with your bleeding heart bullshit. $100,000 is peanuts, and I bet most of the expense is manhours from people at the tire company.
The "money could have been spent elsewhere" argument can go on forever. You've mistaken "philanthropy" for a very cheap PR. Bridgestone just got a LOT of cheap very positive advertising out of this story.
That's even really beside the point. Are people not allowed to spend money anymore because there's some other "better" place that their efforts could have gone? How many lives could have been saved with the money that went to that computer in front of you?
No, I'm saying people don't RELY on games as much as they do on an OS. Stop putting words in my mouth. If you really insist on framing it in a "games don't matter" sense, I would say that games don't matter AS MUCH as an OS because the OS is more relied upon.
As far as the trend, I think activation is a passing fad. It's not going to stop piracy one bit as there will ALWAYS be patched versions of non-online games, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Games have gone through various stages of attempts to copy-protect them. In the 80s just about every computer game had lame-o copy protection on it to the point where they actually poked holes in a specific sector of the floppy drive so it couldn't be written too. (write to that sector, try to read it, if you can don't allow access). People got fed up with it, and it all vanished in the late 80s/early 90s. The same thing will happen again. DRM and copy protection is a losing battle because you can't control bits.
It's the difference between an operating system and a game. Few people rely heavily upon the ability to play a game (and if you do, you've got more problems than just game activation). Inability to re-install an OS on the other hand can be a major problem. If you're stuck somwhere without a phone or 'net access and you need to install XP, you're up shit crick.
Both Microsoft and Valve can decide when to stop authorizing their software (and likely will at some point). Of course the consequences of no longer being able to install an OS are a LOT bigger than not being able to play a 10 year old game. You also have to admit that Microsoft has a much spottier reputation with taking unfair advantage of their monopoly power. Valve doesn't have that reputation, so people are more willing to trust them.
Who listens to creationists anyways?
Mostly people in the south, and in rural areas. There's still a lot of ignorant people out their that cling to their beliefs and refuse to even bother learning anything about evolution.
They really should be ignored on Slashdot though. They represent a threat to education, but fight those battles where they need to be fought.
There's enough blame to go around to everyone. In the case of sexual harassment, it would have to be shown the company knew about how the employee was acting, and didn't do anything about it or didn't take sufficient action. That's often the case as employers look the other way at these problems especially if the offending party is high on the food chain.
The same would go for Verizon. Why should they be liable for a sleazebag company that they probably didn't have any prior experience with?
The fact that this is so widespread points to a more general problem with Verizon, and not just a one time mistake. Using your example if suddenly there's a massive class-action lawsuit brought against a company for sexual harassment wouldn't you at least suspect there's something wrong with that company?
Large companies love sub-contracting for the very reason that it gives them plausible deniability when things go wrong. This kind of thing happens all the time, and so the problem continues. The only way it can stop is to hold the contractee to a high standard (perhaps not legally, but in the court of public opinion).
Yah, and I'm still pissed at the Romans for enslaving my ancestors and feeding them to lions. Get over it buddy, the issue is buried and long dead. You're just another American just like me.
Yah, I think the same thing whenever a new space probe is launched and the geocentrists get all uppity and claim it'll crash into the the crystal spheres.
ANd it's not even Verizon's fault, it's the subcontractors.
If you're the one funding all the damage, you're also the one that should take part of the blame. It's Verizon's responsibility to hire competent people to dig. Blaming everything on the sub-contractors is beside the point, since Verizon is the one who hired these clowns.
But my smtp is comcast because that is my ISP. So the from will be my domain but the server will be comcast. So are we going to reject everyone else who refuses to use their ISPs email service but is forced to use their SMTP?
You're totally missunderstanding what domainkeys does. Very simply, your domain publishes a public key that anyone can use to verify that you (and only you) signed a message via the private key. The public key gets published via a DNS record. When you send an outgoing message the sender signs each message with his/her private key. The private key is kept as a secret to only authorized signers. The signing can happen in the email client, or via the SMTP server. In your case this would very likely be done by the mail client.
All that's required to use domainkeys for the sender is the ability to add a TXT record to a domains DNS record, and a mail client (or possibly server) that supports signing mail.
Lastly, I find this plea for help via the Internet rather odd. One might imagine that a well-educated person like mr. Volkerding should be able to find his way to proper medical care.
I actually see some very good advice (and some nonsense). The thing is that intelligent or not, most people don't have a good handle on the journey through our medical system. Our impressions of medicine seem to come from medical shows where doctors are brilliant, diagnosis are fast, easy, and accurate.
The reality is far far away from that. Some doctors don't know what the hell they're doing and make bad diagnosis. Others (quite a few actually) make the first assumption that "it's all in your head", and tell patients to go home and take it easy. Some patients make the mistake of going to multiple doctors and no doctor ever gets a complete picture (this is often a result of problems one and two above).
All of this leads to patients going to their wits end to solve their medical problems. People start researching diseases over the internet, make pleas of help with friends/family, etc. Getting back to the original point, if you or some member of your family don't know your way around the medical system it's often very hard to get treated properly. What I see here on slashdot is a decent map of what to expect from those in the medical community. All too often the response from doctors seems to come from a basic "get them out of here quick as possible" approach. That can mean a quick crappy diagnosis and pushing some common "mostly harmless" cure like anti-biotics, or it can be your initial response of "it's all in your head".
What I would agree with is the "does anyone know someone that'll give me treatment X" approach is the wrong way to go. But really it seems that the reason the guy is taking this approach is a failing of the medical system itself.
praying != keeping you in your thoughts.
As a non yahweh believer I don't really want people asking their deity to help me if I were sick. I wouldn't have a problem with people keeping me in their thoughts, but I've never liked the "ask my god for stuff" method of changing the world.
To some of us who don't believe in this praying business it all just seems like a cop out way to try to "do something" when you're powerless. Can't people just accept that sometimes there's nothing they can do?
One reason is that the higher in frequency you go, the higher potential bandwidth you can use. Also the higher the freq. in the electromagetic spectrum the more particle like the photons become. One of the effects of that is the energy spreads out less over distance. The more the energy spreads out over distance, the less there is to collect at the endpoint (and thus harder to maintain a good signal/noise ratio). Another reason might be that lasers are cheap and easy to produce. If you use a laser you can make a lot more efficient use of your energy since you're concentrating all the signal on only where you want to send it.
They could also use a maser to accomplish the same thing. A maser outputs its energy in the microwave spectrum, instead of the visible spectrum. The advantages would be lower interference from the atmosphere (microwaves can go through clouds much easier than light). The disadvantage is the microwave energy spreads out more over distance due to being a lower frequency.
Photonic forms of energy. Radio is not photonic, therefore is not visible.
Nope, all electromagnetic radiation is transmitted via photons. Photons just mean that energy is transmitted in discreet packets, and not continuously.
That's an easily solveable problem. If the installer can't contact the game servers (and you have a working internet connection) put up a popup suggesting you go to a website to DL a patch. You could also just guarantee activation servers working for x years, and put up the popup if you can't contact activation servers, and it's past the guaranteed date.
My guess is the activation servers will be up for years to come. Running a server is cheap as hell, so there's not much incentive to close them down quickly. In 5-7 years when no one's playing the game the bargain bin argument is dead, and you release the no-activation patch. Hopefully Valve has included some helpfull error message when the game can't reach an activation server.
You're comparing apples and oranges. If the authentication servers go offline there's no reason that Valve couldn't release a patch of some sort that didn't require activiation. Obviously that's not really possible with DiVX.
The whole activation thing is really beside the point anyway. Best Buy is the ones at fault for selling the game before it was released, and Vivendi has every right to not activate the game.
It reads like the gossip column in the local newspaper. If you want to provide a retrospective, great. But I think most of us don't follow UnitedLinux very closely, so a retrospective is more than just one paragraph mentioning a few things that happened with no real detail.
This isn't a reference to a story, this is a paragraph with a few links thrown in. Where's the news?
I think you need to learn more about hashcash. The CPU requirements really aren't that great, and stamps can be pre-computed. Even a couple seconds to compute a hash on a powerfull machine is enough to stop a spammer from sending gobs of email. Maybe that'll take a minute or two on a lower power 486.. big deal. Let the software pre-compute stamps for anyone in your address book, then sending mail can occur right away.
It's also likely that your ISP might stamp mail for you anyway, solving the low CPU-powered devices problem outright. This is hardly a solution that gives big corps any power. Computing power is cheap and available.
I never would have thought of it, but I bet you're exactly right. By dragging out this claim Novell has forced this to be the one and only fight SCO can make.
If it's true (and not just do to incompetant corporate record keeping) it's a brilliant strategy.
While the FBI has had a lot of false positives, it hasn't had many false negatives.
How do you know what's a false negative? What percentage of the false negatives do you ever find out were false negatives? Probbably pretty low, that would entail catching the guys you couldn't catch previously.
I'm really tired of all these claims of great success on stopping terrorist attacks. The first WTC bombing was in 1993, a lag of 8 years between attacks on US soil. International attacks haven't stopped either. The march 2004 Madrid bombings are suspected to be of Al-quaida origin. Wikipedia lists many attacks reportedly from Al-quada. While the justice department doesn't have much control over other countries, it sure seems to indicate the rest of US foreign policy hasn't done a whole lot of damage to Al-quaida.
Technically you can have a war on proper nouns. Examples would be Germany, Japan, and possibly Al-Queda (as much as it's possible to have a war on a loosely knit organization). Terrorism, drugs, poverty, communism, etc are all improper nouns and thus you can't have a war on something intangible.