Just take a look through any of these radiohead slashdot posts. How many posts do you see from people saying they just bought it to support the distribution medium? I've seen at least a dozen so far.
Now, how long will these 'i dont care for the music but i will pay just to support the idea' sales last? I'd say the number quickly approaches zero as more and more people switch to this distribution method.
Comcast already QoS de-prioritizes encrypted traffic, how many years until it will be socially acceptable to outright drop it 'in the name of terrorism'?
Yeah, you'd break a few popular apps at first, but it's entirely possible to do l7-filtering and only allow SSL connections by certain keys, so you could still allow the big names in https (banks, webmail, etc) while blocking self signed certs and others.
Why does there have to be better for something to suck?
Is firefox any better of a browser because it's competition is worse? No, it still eats an entire cpu core and leaks memory if you leave it running all day.
Yes relativity is important, but sometimes things can be bad relative only to a ideal state that exists in ones mind, there doesn't have to be a better product.
Because google responds to takedown notices, and the intent of their service is a broad and legal 'search results' instead of a narrow and copyright infringing 'heres copies of every major tv show with the comercials removed'
Your ubuntu linux box is probably just rearranging inodes, while the windows box (vista I presume) is likely creating shadow copies so that you can arbitrarily roll back your filesystem after you do something stupid.
You're comparing apples to..candied apples. Yeah, they're both the same thing kinda, but one does other stuff too and you shouldn't blame the candied apple for being worse for your weight.
windows is by all means a horrible OS, I really don't like it, but I've been running it for the pats few years because I don't have a mac and nothing that runs on x86 is what I'd consider desktop worthy, and I was tired of 'making due' with the limitations that running linux on the desktop imposed on me. Mostly missing out on a lot of software that I like (Photoshop, Vegas, the official aim client that STILL has more features than gaim/pidgin, foobar2000, etc). On top of that theres still the games I spend a non-trivial amount of time playing that while some can be ran with hacks like Wine, you're still going to be second class and frankly I don't want to have to wait for a wine update every time theres a game update breaking compatability, or worse getting banned by anticheat that wine doesn't properly support (HL1's VAC had this issue several times). Yes theres a lot of really nice open source "linux software". Except it all runs just as fine on windows if you want it (gnu toolkit, firefox, vim, mplayer, nmap, etc).
Then theres the hardware support.. Linux's sound system is horrid. If I'd open quake3, one of the rare native games, the sound would be fine.. except that it would lock the sound card. Now after an hour of fragging, I hear every one of gaim's sounds that happened back to back for the next 3 minutes. Joy. Run a sound daemon to queue it in software like windows does internally? Okay. Except..now the sounds in quake are desynced along with fps spikes due to artsd having to handle so much real time sound it wasnt designed for. Speaking of sound, getting my 4.1 audio just wasn't an option on my soundcard at the time, making that investment pretty much worthless.
Then on top of that.. lets try and get my dual video cards working. In windows, you just..plug them both in and boot it up. Even runnng 1x nvidia 1x ati worked fine for me when I needed to. In linux.. unless its a card with dual outputs designed for it, you're not getting two monitors working independently. Yeah, your window manager will let you do some worthless virtual desktops, but I'm sorry if I can't see the window at all times I might as well just minimize it.
I'm sure linux has probably gotten a little better on some of those fronts, but even if so its still just playing catchup and not providing a reason to switch, and I know its not catching up on software.
[blockquote]I guess that's what the jury should have and did decide although I find myself not agreeing with jurors as of late in many cases involving my field of study.[/blockquote]
As people get more and more specialized and cases get more and more technical, it becomes increasingly hard to be tried by a "jury of your peers". If someone actually was your peer they would likely be weeded out in the jury duty prescreening as someone with potential bias on the subject.
All you can really do is show up when you're summoned for jury duty and hope you can do your part to make the system better.
Where does it say no external media? Unless I'm overlooking something USB is fine for storage for some things, for others you could store things on the network. For example a home theater pc would be fine with loading movies from any machine on your lan and then displaying them on the no moving parts machine out in the living room thats running quiet and lean.
FWIW, I run linux on my linksys router using USB for storage, it does plenty of useful tasks without ide/scsi/traditional external storage.
I also have linux on my nintendo DS to work as a dumb terminal to get into my router and attach my irc session. Still has storage(access to my SD card), but doesn't really need it.
I'd also love this for recovering the machine during disk errors.
Last time I flew they said to turn wireless features off, but didnt outright ban the device.
The whole thing feels pretty silly to me, considering how much it costs to build an airplane you think they'd tack on an extra $15 worth of a faraday cage around important devices. For that matter, if it's really such a serious issue should the only thing stopping a ZOMG TERR'IST from taking down the plane with his noisy wireless interfering headphones be some small warning from the pilot before takeoff?
Ironicly if you replaced the content in WoW with your own IP, I'm pretty sure you'd be violating the EULA elsewhere. Never actually read it, but that just seems like a big hole for cheating that they'd want to cover.
3) The worst punishment to any project (open source or not) which uses your code is to have an incompatible and adequate replacement for their value added features. This drastically increases the cost of maintenance and usually forces them to either contribute or forego future enhancements.
Thats not always legally possible though. For a hypothetical example, lets say you wrote some special music managing software that did plenty of neat and innovative tricks, and released it bsd.
Now Apple comes along and renames it iLeetMusic, keeping all of your innovative functionality but adding support for their ipod and iphones, but keeping the interface to their hardware private.
What do you do? Reverse engineer the new function and violate at the very least the dmca, likely trademark if you're not careful and maybe a patent or three?
Of course thats not how it is with apple in reality, but any big name company that has access to a related piece of hardware or group of data that they can control the access to can easily add things to your product that you can't compete with.
Note that I'm not opposed to BSD or even for GPL, but just having to counter that point. (I personally prefer the MIT license, which is similar but in my opinion better worded than the BSD license, or public domain depending on the code)
* bind to a privileged port
* chroot
* drop superuser privileges
* interact with untrusted entities via protocol X (where X could be HTTP, DNS, whatever)..
* regain superuser privileges (either via exploit in kernel, setuid app inside chroot, or some way of interacting with another root-owned process locally, or even just seteuid(0) if you're still in a process owned by root that just changed euid.)
* get out of chroot
Technically what you'd do is ship it with no password and have the behavior for handling a null password be generate one based on the MAC address, saving you from having to modify every single ROM you make.
Then just need to use the same formula to generate the stickers, which might be a bit harder.
I'd rather just see them take the approach common wireless routers use-- Hold a button down to auth your device to it. Make this the only way to login initially or reset the pass.
And force you to declare any site that allows user created content as bad. And completely miss the potential cross site scripting vulnerabilites (i.e http://legitbank.com/search.php?q=document.write("PASSWORD PLEASE") type attacks)
Really what needs to be done is certs holding more merit. Get multiple trusted signers to all verify you are who you say you are, and an easy way to show this.
I also wouldn't mind getting rid of the easily stolen user/passes and have someoen work a way to do public key auth via the web to replace it. I've ranted about it many times but does anyone know of any projects even heading that way? Seems everyones going the opposite direction (openid, yahoo's auth, passsport auth) where you do all your authentication through a remote source isntead of a local agent that can then verify you.
Don't feel like digging out links, but google for "Prboom" for Doom1/2, and for quake I'd say EZQuake for multiplayer, DarkPlaces for amazingly beautiful singleplayer (assuming your computer can keep up.. Think Doom3-era requirements due to the complete overhaul of the lighting and particle systems, in addition to replacing the original textures with high res 24bit recreations).
Gun manufacturers aren't responsible for the crimes that gun users commit.
They are if they don't follow all the laws regarding selling of guns (including full background checks on the applicant). If you provided a service where anyone could grab a gun out of a bin in a dark alley behind your house intently set up so that no cameras are around so you purposefully can not tell if its used for legal use or not, you bet your ass you're responsible for what happens with them.
So you have illegal traffic coming from your machine and intentionally can't point out who it came from, and you chose to do this willingly. How are you not liable for that traffic? It would be different if this was just a hosting provider who provided service in good faith that someone took advantage of, this is someone running something INTENTIONALLY untrackable.
If you don't think he should be held accountable for the traffic from his machine, whats to stop anyone from running tor and then either directly or through tor doing any illegal activity?
You could argue most digital crimes shouldnt be crimes at all (and I'd agree), but thats a different argument entirely
I can tell the difference between 60 and 90fps easily, but visually is just the start of it - Most games sync the gameplay to the fps. Higher fps = moving faster, jumping higher, potentially shooting faster, regenerating things faster. I could cite sources if needed, but basically anything based off quake1 (incl. future versions of quake and their derivatives) function this way. If you play competitively, its worth it. Of course, if you're the type to really care this much you probably dont use a 70hz lcd, you use a 100-120hz CRT.
My question is still this: Is it illegal to "steal" something that was already broadcast, typically in High definition, for free??? I guess you could argue that some of these programs are on chanels I can't get for free, and this technically would be stealing, assuming the broadcaster did have some way of collecting revenue (there's no legal standing for theft if there's no provable loss of value or goods, and in the case of free broadcast TV, good luck proving that)
Just because you had rights to one broadcast (with comercials on a specified channel at a specified time) doesn't mean you get unlimitted rights to it. Kind of like songs being on the radio doesn't mean you get to download them for free, or songs that were played at a free concert for that matter.
At least thats how the laws work. Now if you want to argue ethics, thats different.
Soldier of Fortune 2 did this, and it pretty much sucked.
The problem is really that map making is more a creative skill than anything else. Look at how many bad third party maps there are out there for games-- These were made by people actually playing the game who should know better. I doubt a random number generator could do that much better.
I get tired of the repetition as much as anyone, but I'd probably get just as tired of playing yet another randomly generated unbalanced map.
A better alternative is a game like the HalfLife mod Natural Selection -- You have an amazingly beautiful atmosphere rich base of a map with lots of balance built in as far as accesability and things to work with, but then you get variation in how the teams choose to build.
I should elaborate a sec -- NS is a FPS/RPG hybrid. Marines vs aliens, marines have a commander dropping buildings to build like turret factories, teleporters, tech upgrading, etc. Alients build their own structures.
While people run similar strategies often, the give and take lead to a dynamic experience. Unfortunately as the game evolved over the years it got more and more shortened and variation tended to go away too, but lots can be learned from the idea: Let players customize as they play, either directly as in NS's case, or indirectly as in reactively shaping the game based on users choices.
What your product offers over traditional means of doing this (kibitz, multi user screen sessions with full ACL's, ytalk with shell sharing..) is that it's easier to use, and that as pointed out in the video you don't have to give the person helping you an account on your computer.
Thats entirely fine, but you're basically asking people to trust you blindly so that they don't have to trust their knowledgeable friend that they need help from.
I'm not saying I distrust you, just that the inevitable fear uncertainty and doubt around your product isn't unjustified or even a hostile 'attack', just people being untrusting and cautious.
That aside, its actually a neat idea that from the video looks pretty well done. Had it been out back in 2000 or so when a lot of my friends were learning linux I'd definitely have put it to good use.
Slashdot Mirror
Just take a look through any of these radiohead slashdot posts. How many posts do you see from people saying they just bought it to support the distribution medium? I've seen at least a dozen so far.
Now, how long will these 'i dont care for the music but i will pay just to support the idea' sales last? I'd say the number quickly approaches zero as more and more people switch to this distribution method.
Comcast already QoS de-prioritizes encrypted traffic, how many years until it will be socially acceptable to outright drop it 'in the name of terrorism'?
Yeah, you'd break a few popular apps at first, but it's entirely possible to do l7-filtering and only allow SSL connections by certain keys, so you could still allow the big names in https (banks, webmail, etc) while blocking self signed certs and others.
Why does there have to be better for something to suck?
Is firefox any better of a browser because it's competition is worse? No, it still eats an entire cpu core and leaks memory if you leave it running all day.
Yes relativity is important, but sometimes things can be bad relative only to a ideal state that exists in ones mind, there doesn't have to be a better product.
At a real casino the casino is ALWAYS going to be cheating you, online you at least have a chance.
Because google responds to takedown notices, and the intent of their service is a broad and legal 'search results' instead of a narrow and copyright infringing 'heres copies of every major tv show with the comercials removed'
Your ubuntu linux box is probably just rearranging inodes, while the windows box (vista I presume) is likely creating shadow copies so that you can arbitrarily roll back your filesystem after you do something stupid.
You're comparing apples to..candied apples. Yeah, they're both the same thing kinda, but one does other stuff too and you shouldn't blame the candied apple for being worse for your weight.
windows is by all means a horrible OS, I really don't like it, but I've been running it for the pats few years because I don't have a mac and nothing that runs on x86 is what I'd consider desktop worthy, and I was tired of 'making due' with the limitations that running linux on the desktop imposed on me. Mostly missing out on a lot of software that I like (Photoshop, Vegas, the official aim client that STILL has more features than gaim/pidgin, foobar2000, etc). On top of that theres still the games I spend a non-trivial amount of time playing that while some can be ran with hacks like Wine, you're still going to be second class and frankly I don't want to have to wait for a wine update every time theres a game update breaking compatability, or worse getting banned by anticheat that wine doesn't properly support (HL1's VAC had this issue several times).
Yes theres a lot of really nice open source "linux software". Except it all runs just as fine on windows if you want it (gnu toolkit, firefox, vim, mplayer, nmap, etc).
Then theres the hardware support.. Linux's sound system is horrid. If I'd open quake3, one of the rare native games, the sound would be fine.. except that it would lock the sound card. Now after an hour of fragging, I hear every one of gaim's sounds that happened back to back for the next 3 minutes. Joy. Run a sound daemon to queue it in software like windows does internally? Okay. Except..now the sounds in quake are desynced along with fps spikes due to artsd having to handle so much real time sound it wasnt designed for. Speaking of sound, getting my 4.1 audio just wasn't an option on my soundcard at the time, making that investment pretty much worthless.
Then on top of that.. lets try and get my dual video cards working. In windows, you just..plug them both in and boot it up. Even runnng 1x nvidia 1x ati worked fine for me when I needed to. In linux.. unless its a card with dual outputs designed for it, you're not getting two monitors working independently. Yeah, your window manager will let you do some worthless virtual desktops, but I'm sorry if I can't see the window at all times I might as well just minimize it.
I'm sure linux has probably gotten a little better on some of those fronts, but even if so its still just playing catchup and not providing a reason to switch, and I know its not catching up on software.
[blockquote]I guess that's what the jury should have and did decide although I find myself not agreeing with jurors as of late in many cases involving my field of study.[/blockquote]
As people get more and more specialized and cases get more and more technical, it becomes increasingly hard to be tried by a "jury of your peers". If someone actually was your peer they would likely be weeded out in the jury duty prescreening as someone with potential bias on the subject.
All you can really do is show up when you're summoned for jury duty and hope you can do your part to make the system better.
$1 per song... per transaction? Still would add up to a lot. Keep in mind she was charged with distribution.
Where does it say no external media? Unless I'm overlooking something USB is fine for storage for some things, for others you could store things on the network. For example a home theater pc would be fine with loading movies from any machine on your lan and then displaying them on the no moving parts machine out in the living room thats running quiet and lean.
FWIW, I run linux on my linksys router using USB for storage, it does plenty of useful tasks without ide/scsi/traditional external storage.
I also have linux on my nintendo DS to work as a dumb terminal to get into my router and attach my irc session. Still has storage(access to my SD card), but doesn't really need it.
I'd also love this for recovering the machine during disk errors.
Last time I flew they said to turn wireless features off, but didnt outright ban the device.
The whole thing feels pretty silly to me, considering how much it costs to build an airplane you think they'd tack on an extra $15 worth of a faraday cage around important devices. For that matter, if it's really such a serious issue should the only thing stopping a ZOMG TERR'IST from taking down the plane with his noisy wireless interfering headphones be some small warning from the pilot before takeoff?
Hint: they aren't that dangerous.
Ironicly if you replaced the content in WoW with your own IP, I'm pretty sure you'd be violating the EULA elsewhere. Never actually read it, but that just seems like a big hole for cheating that they'd want to cover.
South Park won an emmy for their episode that was done 90% inside of WoW, if that didn't make them money I don't know what would.
Thats not always legally possible though. For a hypothetical example, lets say you wrote some special music managing software that did plenty of neat and innovative tricks, and released it bsd.
Now Apple comes along and renames it iLeetMusic, keeping all of your innovative functionality but adding support for their ipod and iphones, but keeping the interface to their hardware private.
What do you do? Reverse engineer the new function and violate at the very least the dmca, likely trademark if you're not careful and maybe a patent or three?
Of course thats not how it is with apple in reality, but any big name company that has access to a related piece of hardware or group of data that they can control the access to can easily add things to your product that you can't compete with.
Note that I'm not opposed to BSD or even for GPL, but just having to counter that point.
(I personally prefer the MIT license, which is similar but in my opinion better worded than the BSD license, or public domain depending on the code)
* bind to a privileged port ..
* chroot
* drop superuser privileges
* interact with untrusted entities via protocol X (where X could be HTTP, DNS, whatever)
* regain superuser privileges (either via exploit in kernel, setuid app inside chroot, or some way of interacting with another root-owned process locally, or even just seteuid(0) if you're still in a process owned by root that just changed euid.)
* get out of chroot
Technically what you'd do is ship it with no password and have the behavior for handling a null password be generate one based on the MAC address, saving you from having to modify every single ROM you make.
Then just need to use the same formula to generate the stickers, which might be a bit harder.
I'd rather just see them take the approach common wireless routers use-- Hold a button down to auth your device to it. Make this the only way to login initially or reset the pass.
And force you to declare any site that allows user created content as bad.
And completely miss the potential cross site scripting vulnerabilites (i.e http://legitbank.com/search.php?q=document.write("PASSWORD PLEASE") type attacks)
Really what needs to be done is certs holding more merit. Get multiple trusted signers to all verify you are who you say you are, and an easy way to show this.
I also wouldn't mind getting rid of the easily stolen user/passes and have someoen work a way to do public key auth via the web to replace it. I've ranted about it many times but does anyone know of any projects even heading that way? Seems everyones going the opposite direction (openid, yahoo's auth, passsport auth) where you do all your authentication through a remote source isntead of a local agent that can then verify you.
Don't feel like digging out links, but google for "Prboom" for Doom1/2, and for quake I'd say EZQuake for multiplayer, DarkPlaces for amazingly beautiful singleplayer (assuming your computer can keep up.. Think Doom3-era requirements due to the complete overhaul of the lighting and particle systems, in addition to replacing the original textures with high res 24bit recreations).
They are if they don't follow all the laws regarding selling of guns (including full background checks on the applicant). If you provided a service where anyone could grab a gun out of a bin in a dark alley behind your house intently set up so that no cameras are around so you purposefully can not tell if its used for legal use or not, you bet your ass you're responsible for what happens with them.
And the Internet was designed for intelligence sharing and military use. Does that mean I'm not wasting my weekend playing WoW and downloading porn?
Intent on design != only use, or even most common use (see: napster)
So you have illegal traffic coming from your machine and intentionally can't point out who it came from, and you chose to do this willingly. How are you not liable for that traffic? It would be different if this was just a hosting provider who provided service in good faith that someone took advantage of, this is someone running something INTENTIONALLY untrackable.
If you don't think he should be held accountable for the traffic from his machine, whats to stop anyone from running tor and then either directly or through tor doing any illegal activity?
You could argue most digital crimes shouldnt be crimes at all (and I'd agree), but thats a different argument entirely
I can tell the difference between 60 and 90fps easily, but visually is just the start of it - Most games sync the gameplay to the fps. Higher fps = moving faster, jumping higher, potentially shooting faster, regenerating things faster. I could cite sources if needed, but basically anything based off quake1 (incl. future versions of quake and their derivatives) function this way. If you play competitively, its worth it. Of course, if you're the type to really care this much you probably dont use a 70hz lcd, you use a 100-120hz CRT.
Or installed it on a laptop that roams.
Just because you had rights to one broadcast (with comercials on a specified channel at a specified time) doesn't mean you get unlimitted rights to it. Kind of like songs being on the radio doesn't mean you get to download them for free, or songs that were played at a free concert for that matter.
At least thats how the laws work. Now if you want to argue ethics, thats different.
Soldier of Fortune 2 did this, and it pretty much sucked.
The problem is really that map making is more a creative skill than anything else. Look at how many bad third party maps there are out there for games-- These were made by people actually playing the game who should know better. I doubt a random number generator could do that much better.
I get tired of the repetition as much as anyone, but I'd probably get just as tired of playing yet another randomly generated unbalanced map.
A better alternative is a game like the HalfLife mod Natural Selection -- You have an amazingly beautiful atmosphere rich base of a map with lots of balance built in as far as accesability and things to work with, but then you get variation in how the teams choose to build.
I should elaborate a sec -- NS is a FPS/RPG hybrid. Marines vs aliens, marines have a commander dropping buildings to build like turret factories, teleporters, tech upgrading, etc. Alients build their own structures.
While people run similar strategies often, the give and take lead to a dynamic experience. Unfortunately as the game evolved over the years it got more and more shortened and variation tended to go away too, but lots can be learned from the idea: Let players customize as they play, either directly as in NS's case, or indirectly as in reactively shaping the game based on users choices.
What your product offers over traditional means of doing this (kibitz, multi user screen sessions with full ACL's, ytalk with shell sharing..) is that it's easier to use, and that as pointed out in the video you don't have to give the person helping you an account on your computer.
Thats entirely fine, but you're basically asking people to trust you blindly so that they don't have to trust their knowledgeable friend that they need help from.
I'm not saying I distrust you, just that the inevitable fear uncertainty and doubt around your product isn't unjustified or even a hostile 'attack', just people being untrusting and cautious.
That aside, its actually a neat idea that from the video looks pretty well done. Had it been out back in 2000 or so when a lot of my friends were learning linux I'd definitely have put it to good use.