He is viewed as innocent until proven guilty, and Norway only has the death penalty for high treason in wartime. So, nope, he isn't going to be killed, and he sure isn't getting lifetime either. If he's convicted he'll most likely either be fined or made to serve a not-too-long imprisonment. Scandinavian jails aren't usually hell-holes in which he can expect to be raped four times a day or anything. I'm not sure about Norway, but in Denmark it's general practice that prisoners are segregated according to their crimes, so that a young geek who reverse engineered an access control system won't share a cell with Spike the child-raping serial killer.
Hey there,
I think the reason why the RIAA doesn't want to coexist with the 'Net is because it scares them shitless. The 'Net allows artists to easily distribute their music online without having to sell their souls to Sony. What's going on isn't "anti-piracy" or reactive defense, it's an attempted power grab. They want maximum control over this medium, or at least to make music distribution through it as difficult as possible, simply because it will make them obsolete, and they know it.
Abolishing a technology because it has potential for abuse is stupid. There's nothing wrong with P2P (or knowledge about nuclear processes, or mapping the human genome), there's something wrong with the way people are using it. I don't see anything wrong with using a P2P service to listen to a few tracks before going to the record store, so you know what you should be looking for when you get there. The problem is, this isn't how people are using P2P. I realize that this is a sure way to get this post modded into/dev/abyss, but seriously, most P2P users I know download hundreds or thousands of songs and only purchase CDs when they can't find the tracks they're looking for on KaZaA. Then they come up with a lot of trendy political reasons for using Kazaa afterwards. Usually something about the recording industry being evil and wanting to stop them from performing copyright infringement, or something like that.
I hate the big recording industry as much as J. Random Slashdot Poster does. These guys are people who screw over the very people who create the stuff they're selling, and I hate that no matter if it's practiced by factory owners, Bill Gates or some soulless Sony exec. They suck. However, small labels frequently have a completely different attitude, and have a much more respectful way of dealing with the musicians they work with -- some of them are genuinely interested in music, not just in making money. Ironically, such labels are hit harder by warezing of music than the big ones are, simply because they don't have the gigantic swollen wallets of the big music business. Besides, people with obscure music tastes have a lot less to get from Kazaa than those looking for Linkin Bizkit's Greatest Hits. Also, most popular P2P services run on software developed by scum, and I don't want any of their hideous abominations on my system. Not that they make hideous_abomination.tar.bz2 for Linux available, but I guess that might be because Linux users frequently use tinfoil headwear and would go to great lengths in stopping Kazaa from dropping spying and thieving little turds all over their systems.
P2P, in its current incarnation, sucks. Your favourite P2P client doesn't care if you're downloading the latest Sony-produced pop album or if you're downloading Live In Eindhoven. I care, though. I don't like paying for some exec's new car, but I very much like the thought of my money being sent to a donated guitarist's family because they ruined themselves trying to pay for his cancer therapy. You may think you're being really trendy for messing with the big labels, when you might in fact be hurting the good guys.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying you have stupid P2P habits. I'm just trying to say why I've found that the majority of P2P users do, and why I'm not using any P2P software myself.
The record stores I buy music in have a bunch of stereo systems with headphones, I can just go hand the clerk a CD I want to listen to, and he'll put it on so I can indeed try before I buy. Don't American record stores have such an option?
Much as I hate the established music industry, I'm not really sure I buy this one.
I think you're misunderstanding how MD5 and SHA-1 work. These are one-way hash algorithms, meaning that there's no way of identifying what d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e was originally. The algorithm doesn't allow for a "decrypt" function at all.
The method of operation is that if you hash/dev/null (probably not the #1 trojan target though) into d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e, you can store that value somewhere safe (eg. on a secured remote logserver or on read-only media). Then, if/dev/null gets trojaned, a file monitoring system (like AIDE, integrit or TripWire), when running its checks, will notice that the current hash is different from the original one you've stored securely.
Also, hashes are not unique. It's not impossible that your/dev/null hashes to the same value as some other file on another OS. Or to another file on your own system. It's very unlikely that someone can make a trojan that lets the file hash to the same value as the clean version, the slightest change to the file will result in a completely different hash value.
So your proposition that you should be able to put in a hash value and get a *** Trojaned openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz **** response is in fact technically impossible. The system has no idea where that hash value came from. What you could do is retrieve a hash from the database, and compare it to the one your md5 program generates. Making a script to do that shouldn't be rocket science, except in the case of extremely simple rockets.
Remember there's a world outside the MUD. That's easy to say, I know it, but there are a few easy techniques you can use to make sure you never forget that.
1. Every few hours, force yourself away from the computer, and go take a walk. Yes, I do mean outside. Yes, I am serious. Go now. You won't need to be away for THAT long, 20-30 minutes is how long I usually spend when trying to make sure that my passions for programming, knowledge (everything2 is as addictive as any MUD) and mudding don't develop into addictions. Sometimes, when you're feeling particularly reclusive, force yourself to take your walk in a populated area, just to make sure that your subconscious still has a fresh image of what people look like.
2. Remember that the values of the MUD world are not real. You may be the guild master, have a wizard character and a billion XP on your main mortal, but that shouldn't give you satisfaction enough that you forget real-world values. When was the last time you visited a friend? Are you neglecting your {girl|boy}friend? If you're having difficulties keeping these things in mind, a simple way to make sure you don't forget that XP can't give you a hug when you need one is to take
a long mudding break every now and then. I mean at least a couple of weeks. When you get back, some of the competition may have climbed to a higher experience level than you, but you should be able to see that this is not the end of the world.
3. A weak mind is more prone to obsessive behaviour and addiction than a strong one. The mind lives in your brain, and your brain is part of the complex system that is the human body. If you're an anti-social gamer/MUDder/noder/coder, odds are you feed on a strict diet of sugar, starch, spice, caffeine and nicotine, and never get any exercise. I know you don't want to, but you really have to change this. Keep a bowl of fresh fruit nearby instead of the bag of chips. Get some daily exercise. Keep in mind that your body is a system of which your brain is a part. As a computer geek, you should know that overall performance is improved if you eliminate bottlenecks. A possible explanation for the silly old adage that a healthy soul lives in a healthy body is that the supply of blood (with fresh, life-giving oxygen and other goodness!) to your brain possibly becomes more efficient if you keep your body more efficient. This will remind you that you HAVE a body, something computer obsessions make you forget.
4. Make sure you have at least one hobby not related to computers, and make sure you maintain it with the same zeal that powers your computing hobby. Learn how to paint, learn how to play a musical instrument or use your voice as one, take up martial arts, whatever. The point is to make sure you don't forget that your mind can do other things than play MUDs / write e2 nodes / write C code. Aikido and playing the electric bass worked for me, your mileage may vary. This will also give a rich quality to your hobby life / voluntary skill development that you wouldn't have gotten on computers alone. Nowadays I'm as likely to spend a couple of hours honing my slap/pop technique or learning a scale as I am to spend them hacking away on the computer.
5. See people who don't play MUDs. Ideally, people who don't like computers at all. No, they're not lamers. No, they're not ignorant. They just have different interests than you, and "different" does not necessarily imply "superior" or "inferior". Go to your local heavy metal bar, or hang out with your newfound band or martial arts buddies, or whatever. This will help you remember that other people have interesting lives too, which in turn will help you remember that there is a vast and interesting world with billions of rooms and the most well-coded mobs you've ever seen, right in front of you!
An alcoholic / drug addict can never become a social drinker / casual user, but an obsessed gamer, programmer or e2 noder most certainly can develop sane computing habits. Give it a try. Learning to appreciate the real world trains your mind and makes computing more enjoyable, not less. You're a human being, your mind makes you able to do lots of interesting things instead of just focusing on one single skill. Specialization is for insects.
I speak as someone who has been through both an alcohol addiction and a period of obsessive MUDding.
Now that is actually not a bad idea. I wonder if we could adapt a chatbot AI into something that could send automated (and varied enough to not be THAT obvious) replies to spam. If such a thing took off (especially if combined with a more traditional spam filter, so the human user doesn't need to waste time on it -- SpamAssassin or something similar comes to mind), spammers or spam-using companies would start finding thousands of mails in their boxes every day. Let's see how long they could endure that.
China isnt the country locking people up for sharing files, in fact up until recently it was perfectly legal to share your files, they had freedom of speech in that area until WE the so called freedom loving Americans forced them to adopt our censorship laws to protect our intellectual propery from the evil warez pirates of China who cant afford to buy our software anyway.
I think this paragraph totally lacks a sense of perspective. Well, yes, filesharing is illegal in the US, but do you really equate a right of trading music over the Internet to a right of political free speech or even the right to read political material of your own choosing?
Its funny how we complain about every nation, China, Afganastan, Pakistan, Iraq, everywhere but if anyone dares complain about the USA they are unAmerican.
I don't see why one should necessarily exclude the other. I'm not terribly keen on the US government, but they're not the topic we're discussing. This is not about the DMCA, or the recording industry, or filesharing, or Americans saying stupid things. This is about a country which has a government that is denying its own citizens the right to information. This is insanity and must be stopped. I'd hope we could get a discussion about what it's possible for hackers and human rights activists to do about this without resorting to vandalism or script kiddie tactics. Making it a US vs. China discussion is really terribly arrogant, the US and its stupid copyright laws isn't really that relevant in this matter.
Note: I am not an "American patriot". I'm probably as "unAmerican" as it's humanly possible to get: I'm not Christian, I'm an active socialist, I'm not an American citizen, I'm against intellectual property at least in its currently practiced form, and I think George W. Bush is likely to be one of the three stupidest specimens this species has inflicted on the Earth in the million or so years hominids have been around. (the two others would be Steve Ballmer and an anonymous cave-dweller from Central Europe, circa 250.000 B.C.). However, if I could choose between repealing a stupid American copyright law or bringing down the Great Firewall, I'd choose the latter any day. These people have the right to read, nobody should accept a government trying to take that away from them. The fact that America has a stupid government too doesn't make the Chinese one one bit better.
The word consumers shows how these people view us: Our purpose in life is to buy more stuff.
Since they want to sell us more stuff, and we don't necessarily need the things they make, they have to create an artificial need. This sort of sucks by definition, but it sucks even more if they're creating artificial needs by figuring out, at the neural level, how to convince us that we need their products. I think it is, indeed, scary shit.
Isn't corporate acceptance one of the key points of OSS, especially Linux?
Open-Source, perhaps. The concept of Open-Source was devised specifically to sell Free Software to the suits. However, Linux is as much Free Software (which is about freedom, and keeping you in control of your computer) as it is about Open Source, so whether it all boils down to corporate acceptance is completely up to the community. Linus didn't write Linux to sell it to corporations, he wrote it because it was fun. I'm not saying that corporate acceptance is intrinsically a bad thing (it isn't), I'm just saying that a lot of people seem to be forgetting about the whole aspect of having fun, when faced with cold cash.
Surprise -- since Free Software is about freedom, I think it's also about freedom from corporations and the marketplace (well-knowing that even suggesting such vile satanism is sure to get me modded far into/dev/null). It's OK that they use the software our community creates -- freedom is all about not taking that right away from anyone, including them -- but we shouldn't be spending our voluntary programming time sucking up to them for money. The vision of a Linux that is completely "de-geekified" that we sometimes hear about may be attractive to suits, but it sure sounds sterile and boring to me.
But there's also the crusade out there to *prove* to "them" that Linux can hack it in the enterprise, that it stacks up against Solaris and Windows NT. Space in server rooms is at a premium, and it's a victory for open source whenever a rack slot gets filled with a linux or bsd box.
Against Microsoft, I completely agree. Microsoft are bent on our destruction, so yeah, we definitely have to fight them. Against Sun, though? I'm not too keen on Sun and their proprietary software, but seriously, one of the things I liked about Linux (and the BSDs) was how it was a free community-driven effort rather than a market contender like the rest. We're not a competitor, we're an alternative. As an old Amiga nut, I was attracted to this aspect because not being a market contender means traditional market methods won't be able to bring us down. It may slow corporate acceptance, but it won't stop the kernel hackers, or the other volunteers working on projects that they work on because they're fun. I think that such a community will be far harder for Microsoft to kill than a bunch of corporate ass-kissers (not that we are corporate ass-kissers, I just think that there is an increasing tendency towards that sad fate), because they're far better at dealing with corporate opposition than community opposition. This is why Linux got them to shit their pants in the first place. Unfortunately, we can already see how all our "selling Linux to suits" efforts have gotten some suits to make the association "Linux == dotcom fad == stupid business models == cash loss".
The marketplace is a democracy, and every dollar is a vote.
The marketplace is, by definition, a plutocracy. Who has more power in the marketplace, you or Bill Gates? If every dollar is a vote, how can it be democratic, considering the very uneven distribution of "votes"?
.......I think I've run out of things to say about this subject too, interesting as it may be.:.)
I completely agree. I think the inflated hardware requirements of modern games only serve to turn gamers into mindless consumers who have to keep buying more hardware to get high on the latest fix of benchmark scores. If these people did their work right, the upgrade race would be a lot less furious than it is, and we'd have less stress and annoyment to deal with.
Actually, neon tubes use electrically excited gases rather than chemical processes or heated solids. The effect on heat is therefore marginal. Don't believe me? Go hold your hand a few centimeters from a neon tube. Even on direct touch most neon tubes are just very slightly over the temperature of the surroundings. Cold Cathodes also have virtually no heat output. Also, if you're water-cooling your system, case heat is less important than it is with air-cooling.
That said, I think some overclockers are way over the top too. When the price of your cooling kit exceeds that of the hardware it is cooling, I think something is really wrong with your sense of proportion... But hey, if they have fun doing it, who are we to stop them?
I'm afraid part of it might be because of the Linux community itself, though.
After RedHat and VA made it big, way back when, a certain amount of "make money fast!" thinking crept into the Linux community. It started seeping into our news and other "internal" communications too (I mean/., Newsforge, Linux e-zines and that sort of stuff, not the lkml) -- people started focusing more on how one could use Linux and open-source to make profit rather on technological issues. The line between hacker and marketer seemed to be breaking down. A O(1) scheduler is all fine and dandy, but how can my favourite business use it to make more money?
Perhaps I'm seeing something that isn't there -- I hope I am -- but seriously folks, am I the only one who have noticed such a switch of focus? I read the articles at NewsForge about the last LinuxWorld Expo, Roblimo seemed to agree that the old bunch of long-haired hackers in sandals had largely been replaced with business reps -- and to add insult to injury, Microsoft was present.
My fear is that Linux will end up becoming as sterile and dead as other "rebellious" technological (or otherwise) ventures tend to become when they're subjected to corporate clutches. Greed kills.
I think this is actually what the real problem is about. The recording industry isn't afraid of so-called "piracy" per se, what they're afraid of is becoming obsoleted. If recording artists realize that the 'net gives them a possibility to distribute music themselves (perhaps, at some point, a viable business model for online music distribution is invented -- I don't know, I'm not well-versed in business, but I doubt it is impossible). P2P filesharing networks currently seem to be the most successful distribution model that can potentially dethrone the recording industry; if players like Kazaa, Morpheus et.al start making moves that makes it possible for recording artists to make money somehow, the recording industry is seriously screwed. ESPECIALLY because technology also means that it is possible for artists to record music without using prohibitively expensive studio equipment.
.....that said, I don't use P2P myself, nor do I intend to. First there's the possible security implications of those programs, second there's the fact that Kazaa, etc. are absolute slime, and third there's the fact that while I dislike the big recording labels and all they stand for, there are many small labels out there too, labels that are not run by scum in suits and big cars (conversely, I think these stand a much better chance of adapting to different business models, since they don't have the option of buying politicians to keep their old business models alive -- they HAVE to look for new options). Finally -- I think the fair use rights of my home country are pretty reasonable, so I don't want to participate in anything that may end with these rights being dismantled in the political reaction.
Basilisk and other monsters of mythology
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Phoenix To Change Name
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Another lizard monster of mythology is the Basilisk. This bad fucker will turn its prey to stone with a gaze, like the Medusa. There's also a quite cool similarly named real-life lizard, which is capable of running across a water surface without sinking. Other fun mythological monsters that could perhaps make good browser names include the Roc (a gigantic bird, like a Phoenix), Fenris (the wolf monster of Norse mythology), or Jormangund. The latter might in fact be appropriate (although unfortunately long and difficult to pronounce), since Jormangund (also called "Midgaardsormen", the Midgaard Serpent) is a gigantic dragonlike serpent which encircles the realm of humans (Midgaard / Earth). I somehow like the association of a web browser with a creature that encircles the world.
Well, speaking as a guy who actually lives in Denmark.....
Since Summer 2001, various forms of digital copying have been legal in Denmark. Before that, Danish law on this area bore obvious marks of being written by people who had no idea what the whole thing was all about (prohibiting all forms of digital copying without prior permission -- bye bye Internet:) ). The laws are confusing, though. According to Forbrugerrådet (the "Consumer's Council" -- I'm not sure if you Americans have a similar organization), Danish citizens are allowed to:
Perform a digital copy a legally obtained work, eg. a legally purchased CD, book, tape, whatever.
Copy a work, where the artist or copyright holder has permitted copying.
Copy a legal CD borrowed from a friend.
Play a legally copied CD in a social setting such as a party.
Copy to your personal computer with intent for "electronic execution within the home" (ie. home listening, but no P2P warezing)
Listen to your copy at home, in your car, in your summer house, on your boat, on your discman, etc.
We are not allowed to:
Copy a copy of a CD
Copy works fetched from the network that have been placed there without the artist or copyright holder's express permision.
Copy a CD and play it at someone else's party (this I find a little strange -- but oh well)
Listen to a copied CD on your place of work's music system.
I pay for bandwidth. Many ISPs in this country charge their customers according to how much they download. They force me to download something I have not requested, thus costing me money.
It's Mozilla, Galeon and other pop-up blocking measures that are the real "anti-theft" tools.
Slashdot Mirror
He is viewed as innocent until proven guilty, and Norway only has the death penalty for high treason in wartime. So, nope, he isn't going to be killed, and he sure isn't getting lifetime either. If he's convicted he'll most likely either be fined or made to serve a not-too-long imprisonment. Scandinavian jails aren't usually hell-holes in which he can expect to be raped four times a day or anything. I'm not sure about Norway, but in Denmark it's general practice that prisoners are segregated according to their crimes, so that a young geek who reverse engineered an access control system won't share a cell with Spike the child-raping serial killer.
Well, shit in curry, someone DID figure out my master plan.
Guess it's back to the drawing board on this one....
simon@merlin:~$ vi howto_end_overpopulation.txt
Hey there,
I think the reason why the RIAA doesn't want to coexist with the 'Net is because it scares them shitless. The 'Net allows artists to easily distribute their music online without having to sell their souls to Sony. What's going on isn't "anti-piracy" or reactive defense, it's an attempted power grab. They want maximum control over this medium, or at least to make music distribution through it as difficult as possible, simply because it will make them obsolete, and they know it.
Abolishing a technology because it has potential for abuse is stupid. There's nothing wrong with P2P (or knowledge about nuclear processes, or mapping the human genome), there's something wrong with the way people are using it. I don't see anything wrong with using a P2P service to listen to a few tracks before going to the record store, so you know what you should be looking for when you get there. The problem is, this isn't how people are using P2P. I realize that this is a sure way to get this post modded into /dev/abyss, but seriously, most P2P users I know download hundreds or thousands of songs and only purchase CDs when they can't find the tracks they're looking for on KaZaA. Then they come up with a lot of trendy political reasons for using Kazaa afterwards. Usually something about the recording industry being evil and wanting to stop them from performing copyright infringement, or something like that.
I hate the big recording industry as much as J. Random Slashdot Poster does. These guys are people who screw over the very people who create the stuff they're selling, and I hate that no matter if it's practiced by factory owners, Bill Gates or some soulless Sony exec. They suck. However, small labels frequently have a completely different attitude, and have a much more respectful way of dealing with the musicians they work with -- some of them are genuinely interested in music, not just in making money. Ironically, such labels are hit harder by warezing of music than the big ones are, simply because they don't have the gigantic swollen wallets of the big music business. Besides, people with obscure music tastes have a lot less to get from Kazaa than those looking for Linkin Bizkit's Greatest Hits. Also, most popular P2P services run on software developed by scum, and I don't want any of their hideous abominations on my system. Not that they make hideous_abomination.tar.bz2 for Linux available, but I guess that might be because Linux users frequently use tinfoil headwear and would go to great lengths in stopping Kazaa from dropping spying and thieving little turds all over their systems.
P2P, in its current incarnation, sucks. Your favourite P2P client doesn't care if you're downloading the latest Sony-produced pop album or if you're downloading Live In Eindhoven. I care, though. I don't like paying for some exec's new car, but I very much like the thought of my money being sent to a donated guitarist's family because they ruined themselves trying to pay for his cancer therapy. You may think you're being really trendy for messing with the big labels, when you might in fact be hurting the good guys.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying you have stupid P2P habits. I'm just trying to say why I've found that the majority of P2P users do, and why I'm not using any P2P software myself.
The record stores I buy music in have a bunch of stereo systems with headphones, I can just go hand the clerk a CD I want to listen to, and he'll put it on so I can indeed try before I buy. Don't American record stores have such an option?
Much as I hate the established music industry, I'm not really sure I buy this one.
ACK! Don't say those things on a public forum! Next thing you know all ISPs will have to pay royalties to the RIAA.
I think you're misunderstanding how MD5 and SHA-1 work. These are one-way hash algorithms, meaning that there's no way of identifying what d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e was originally. The algorithm doesn't allow for a "decrypt" function at all.
The method of operation is that if you hash /dev/null (probably not the #1 trojan target though) into d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e, you can store that value somewhere safe (eg. on a secured remote logserver or on read-only media). Then, if /dev/null gets trojaned, a file monitoring system (like AIDE, integrit or TripWire), when running its checks, will notice that the current hash is different from the original one you've stored securely.
Also, hashes are not unique. It's not impossible that your /dev/null hashes to the same value as some other file on another OS. Or to another file on your own system. It's very unlikely that someone can make a trojan that lets the file hash to the same value as the clean version, the slightest change to the file will result in a completely different hash value.
So your proposition that you should be able to put in a hash value and get a *** Trojaned openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz **** response is in fact technically impossible. The system has no idea where that hash value came from. What you could do is retrieve a hash from the database, and compare it to the one your md5 program generates. Making a script to do that shouldn't be rocket science, except in the case of extremely simple rockets.
Good reading for understanding one-way hashes (they're also used for storing passwords on Linux and UNIX systems, among other things): http://www.ch280.thinkquest.hostcenter.ch/crypto/o newaye.html
Remember there's a world outside the MUD. That's easy to say, I know it, but there are a few easy techniques you can use to make sure you never forget that.
1. Every few hours, force yourself away from the computer, and go take a walk. Yes, I do mean outside. Yes, I am serious. Go now. You won't need to be away for THAT long, 20-30 minutes is how long I usually spend when trying to make sure that my passions for programming, knowledge (everything2 is as addictive as any MUD) and mudding don't develop into addictions. Sometimes, when you're feeling particularly reclusive, force yourself to take your walk in a populated area, just to make sure that your subconscious still has a fresh image of what people look like.
2. Remember that the values of the MUD world are not real. You may be the guild master, have a wizard character and a billion XP on your main mortal, but that shouldn't give you satisfaction enough that you forget real-world values. When was the last time you visited a friend? Are you neglecting your {girl|boy}friend? If you're having difficulties keeping these things in mind, a simple way to make sure you don't forget that XP can't give you a hug when you need one is to take a long mudding break every now and then. I mean at least a couple of weeks. When you get back, some of the competition may have climbed to a higher experience level than you, but you should be able to see that this is not the end of the world.
3. A weak mind is more prone to obsessive behaviour and addiction than a strong one. The mind lives in your brain, and your brain is part of the complex system that is the human body. If you're an anti-social gamer/MUDder/noder/coder, odds are you feed on a strict diet of sugar, starch, spice, caffeine and nicotine, and never get any exercise. I know you don't want to, but you really have to change this. Keep a bowl of fresh fruit nearby instead of the bag of chips. Get some daily exercise. Keep in mind that your body is a system of which your brain is a part. As a computer geek, you should know that overall performance is improved if you eliminate bottlenecks. A possible explanation for the silly old adage that a healthy soul lives in a healthy body is that the supply of blood (with fresh, life-giving oxygen and other goodness!) to your brain possibly becomes more efficient if you keep your body more efficient. This will remind you that you HAVE a body, something computer obsessions make you forget.
4. Make sure you have at least one hobby not related to computers, and make sure you maintain it with the same zeal that powers your computing hobby. Learn how to paint, learn how to play a musical instrument or use your voice as one, take up martial arts, whatever. The point is to make sure you don't forget that your mind can do other things than play MUDs / write e2 nodes / write C code. Aikido and playing the electric bass worked for me, your mileage may vary. This will also give a rich quality to your hobby life / voluntary skill development that you wouldn't have gotten on computers alone. Nowadays I'm as likely to spend a couple of hours honing my slap/pop technique or learning a scale as I am to spend them hacking away on the computer.
5. See people who don't play MUDs. Ideally, people who don't like computers at all. No, they're not lamers. No, they're not ignorant. They just have different interests than you, and "different" does not necessarily imply "superior" or "inferior". Go to your local heavy metal bar, or hang out with your newfound band or martial arts buddies, or whatever. This will help you remember that other people have interesting lives too, which in turn will help you remember that there is a vast and interesting world with billions of rooms and the most well-coded mobs you've ever seen, right in front of you!
An alcoholic / drug addict can never become a social drinker / casual user, but an obsessed gamer, programmer or e2 noder most certainly can develop sane computing habits. Give it a try. Learning to appreciate the real world trains your mind and makes computing more enjoyable, not less. You're a human being, your mind makes you able to do lots of interesting things instead of just focusing on one single skill. Specialization is for insects.
I speak as someone who has been through both an alcohol addiction and a period of obsessive MUDding.
Now that is actually not a bad idea. I wonder if we could adapt a chatbot AI into something that could send automated (and varied enough to not be THAT obvious) replies to spam. If such a thing took off (especially if combined with a more traditional spam filter, so the human user doesn't need to waste time on it -- SpamAssassin or something similar comes to mind), spammers or spam-using companies would start finding thousands of mails in their boxes every day. Let's see how long they could endure that.
It also needs Object-Orientation, Java, XML and .NET, then it'd be fully Buzzwords-Compliant.
Hey there,
I think this paragraph totally lacks a sense of perspective. Well, yes, filesharing is illegal in the US, but do you really equate a right of trading music over the Internet to a right of political free speech or even the right to read political material of your own choosing?
I don't see why one should necessarily exclude the other. I'm not terribly keen on the US government, but they're not the topic we're discussing. This is not about the DMCA, or the recording industry, or filesharing, or Americans saying stupid things. This is about a country which has a government that is denying its own citizens the right to information. This is insanity and must be stopped. I'd hope we could get a discussion about what it's possible for hackers and human rights activists to do about this without resorting to vandalism or script kiddie tactics. Making it a US vs. China discussion is really terribly arrogant, the US and its stupid copyright laws isn't really that relevant in this matter.
Note: I am not an "American patriot". I'm probably as "unAmerican" as it's humanly possible to get: I'm not Christian, I'm an active socialist, I'm not an American citizen, I'm against intellectual property at least in its currently practiced form, and I think George W. Bush is likely to be one of the three stupidest specimens this species has inflicted on the Earth in the million or so years hominids have been around. (the two others would be Steve Ballmer and an anonymous cave-dweller from Central Europe, circa 250.000 B.C.). However, if I could choose between repealing a stupid American copyright law or bringing down the Great Firewall, I'd choose the latter any day. These people have the right to read, nobody should accept a government trying to take that away from them. The fact that America has a stupid government too doesn't make the Chinese one one bit better.
The word consumers shows how these people view us: Our purpose in life is to buy more stuff.
Since they want to sell us more stuff, and we don't necessarily need the things they make, they have to create an artificial need. This sort of sucks by definition, but it sucks even more if they're creating artificial needs by figuring out, at the neural level, how to convince us that we need their products. I think it is, indeed, scary shit.
Never underestimate the mail-filtering value of a well-placed explosive device.
You wrote:
Open-Source, perhaps. The concept of Open-Source was devised specifically to sell Free Software to the suits. However, Linux is as much Free Software (which is about freedom, and keeping you in control of your computer) as it is about Open Source, so whether it all boils down to corporate acceptance is completely up to the community. Linus didn't write Linux to sell it to corporations, he wrote it because it was fun. I'm not saying that corporate acceptance is intrinsically a bad thing (it isn't), I'm just saying that a lot of people seem to be forgetting about the whole aspect of having fun, when faced with cold cash.
Surprise -- since Free Software is about freedom, I think it's also about freedom from corporations and the marketplace (well-knowing that even suggesting such vile satanism is sure to get me modded far into /dev/null). It's OK that they use the software our community creates -- freedom is all about not taking that right away from anyone, including them -- but we shouldn't be spending our voluntary programming time sucking up to them for money. The vision of a Linux that is completely "de-geekified" that we sometimes hear about may be attractive to suits, but it sure sounds sterile and boring to me.
Against Microsoft, I completely agree. Microsoft are bent on our destruction, so yeah, we definitely have to fight them. Against Sun, though? I'm not too keen on Sun and their proprietary software, but seriously, one of the things I liked about Linux (and the BSDs) was how it was a free community-driven effort rather than a market contender like the rest. We're not a competitor, we're an alternative. As an old Amiga nut, I was attracted to this aspect because not being a market contender means traditional market methods won't be able to bring us down. It may slow corporate acceptance, but it won't stop the kernel hackers, or the other volunteers working on projects that they work on because they're fun. I think that such a community will be far harder for Microsoft to kill than a bunch of corporate ass-kissers (not that we are corporate ass-kissers, I just think that there is an increasing tendency towards that sad fate), because they're far better at dealing with corporate opposition than community opposition. This is why Linux got them to shit their pants in the first place. Unfortunately, we can already see how all our "selling Linux to suits" efforts have gotten some suits to make the association "Linux == dotcom fad == stupid business models == cash loss".
The marketplace is, by definition, a plutocracy. Who has more power in the marketplace, you or Bill Gates? If every dollar is a vote, how can it be democratic, considering the very uneven distribution of "votes"?
.......I think I've run out of things to say about this subject too, interesting as it may be. :.)
:s/correct all the mistakes they made in/make more money on
I completely agree. I think the inflated hardware requirements of modern games only serve to turn gamers into mindless consumers who have to keep buying more hardware to get high on the latest fix of benchmark scores. If these people did their work right, the upgrade race would be a lot less furious than it is, and we'd have less stress and annoyment to deal with.
Actually, neon tubes use electrically excited gases rather than chemical processes or heated solids. The effect on heat is therefore marginal. Don't believe me? Go hold your hand a few centimeters from a neon tube. Even on direct touch most neon tubes are just very slightly over the temperature of the surroundings. Cold Cathodes also have virtually no heat output. Also, if you're water-cooling your system, case heat is less important than it is with air-cooling.
That said, I think some overclockers are way over the top too. When the price of your cooling kit exceeds that of the hardware it is cooling, I think something is really wrong with your sense of proportion... But hey, if they have fun doing it, who are we to stop them?
I'm afraid part of it might be because of the Linux community itself, though.
After RedHat and VA made it big, way back when, a certain amount of "make money fast!" thinking crept into the Linux community. It started seeping into our news and other "internal" communications too (I mean /., Newsforge, Linux e-zines and that sort of stuff, not the lkml) -- people started focusing more on how one could use Linux and open-source to make profit rather on technological issues. The line between hacker and marketer seemed to be breaking down. A O(1) scheduler is all fine and dandy, but how can my favourite business use it to make more money?
Perhaps I'm seeing something that isn't there -- I hope I am -- but seriously folks, am I the only one who have noticed such a switch of focus? I read the articles at NewsForge about the last LinuxWorld Expo, Roblimo seemed to agree that the old bunch of long-haired hackers in sandals had largely been replaced with business reps -- and to add insult to injury, Microsoft was present.
My fear is that Linux will end up becoming as sterile and dead as other "rebellious" technological (or otherwise) ventures tend to become when they're subjected to corporate clutches. Greed kills.
cheer!
Why does it seem that so many people in the current Linux community *think* that it's about marketing and money, though? *sigh*
It is, unless you're a big commercial company.
Amnesty's political agenda IS human rights.
It's the only purpose the organization has.
I think this is actually what the real problem is about. The recording industry isn't afraid of so-called "piracy" per se, what they're afraid of is becoming obsoleted. If recording artists realize that the 'net gives them a possibility to distribute music themselves (perhaps, at some point, a viable business model for online music distribution is invented -- I don't know, I'm not well-versed in business, but I doubt it is impossible). P2P filesharing networks currently seem to be the most successful distribution model that can potentially dethrone the recording industry; if players like Kazaa, Morpheus et.al start making moves that makes it possible for recording artists to make money somehow, the recording industry is seriously screwed. ESPECIALLY because technology also means that it is possible for artists to record music without using prohibitively expensive studio equipment.
.....that said, I don't use P2P myself, nor do I intend to. First there's the possible security implications of those programs, second there's the fact that Kazaa, etc. are absolute slime, and third there's the fact that while I dislike the big recording labels and all they stand for, there are many small labels out there too, labels that are not run by scum in suits and big cars (conversely, I think these stand a much better chance of adapting to different business models, since they don't have the option of buying politicians to keep their old business models alive -- they HAVE to look for new options). Finally -- I think the fair use rights of my home country are pretty reasonable, so I don't want to participate in anything that may end with these rights being dismantled in the political reaction.
Another lizard monster of mythology is the Basilisk. This bad fucker will turn its prey to stone with a gaze, like the Medusa. There's also a quite cool similarly named real-life lizard, which is capable of running across a water surface without sinking. Other fun mythological monsters that could perhaps make good browser names include the Roc (a gigantic bird, like a Phoenix), Fenris (the wolf monster of Norse mythology), or Jormangund. The latter might in fact be appropriate (although unfortunately long and difficult to pronounce), since Jormangund (also called "Midgaardsormen", the Midgaard Serpent) is a gigantic dragonlike serpent which encircles the realm of humans (Midgaard / Earth). I somehow like the association of a web browser with a creature that encircles the world.
I'm confused, do you mean if the MS folks know how to read, or how to keep it simple? ;)
Well, speaking as a guy who actually lives in Denmark.....
Since Summer 2001, various forms of digital copying have been legal in Denmark. Before that, Danish law on this area bore obvious marks of being written by people who had no idea what the whole thing was all about (prohibiting all forms of digital copying without prior permission -- bye bye Internet :) ). The laws are confusing, though. According to Forbrugerrådet (the "Consumer's Council" -- I'm not sure if you Americans have a similar organization), Danish citizens are allowed to:
We are not allowed to:
(from Forbrugerrådet's web page)
I hope this helps shed a little light on the situation.
I pay for bandwidth. Many ISPs in this country charge their customers according to how much they download. They force me to download something I have not requested, thus costing me money.
It's Mozilla, Galeon and other pop-up blocking measures that are the real "anti-theft" tools.