If you read the article, he says that they have not yet implemented optimization based on the similarities between the left and right channels on a stereo recording. Thus, the only way to compare the results at equivalent bitrates is to use a mono stream, on which the stereo optimizations can't be done. I never heard of the Vorbis project before this morning, but their claim is that they will do better than mp3 eventually, not that they are there for general purpose just yet. But if you have any mono spoken voice streams to encode, Vorbis away!
It's that there is now way to come up with a set of keywords that blocks all the bad stuff, while letting the innocuous stuff go through. My favorite personal example, which happened to me, was when I was looking at the weather forecast on Intellicast through a SurfWatch filter. I wanted to see the map of Ohio on the satellite image, but it was blocked. The reason? The form output had a string that went something like "&country=us&map=OH". Seems harmless, except for the prohibition against the word "s&m" appearing in a URL.
Pretty much you have to resign yourself to only allowing a whitelist of sites to display, and having an actual human update it with know harmless sites. Does anyone know of a high-quality whitelist that's maintained by reasonable people? That's something that might be well-suited to pasting on top of a trust network like Advogato, and could be maintained in a distributed environment.
Walt
Re:Blackholing spammers and their ISPs is key
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
·
· Score: 3
Am I the only one who remembers what an incredible pain in the ass cancelbots, blackholes, crossposting filters, etc. are? It's a tremendous inconvenience, even more so on a completely distributed system where you have not just each site but each individual *user* to worry about. Does anyone really think that Gnutella spam filtering will be more effective than email spam filtering? ISP's have an incentive to block spam since it clogs up their bandiwdth and mail servers. Do they have any real reason to bother with Gnutella? Why would they care if a bunch of their file-stealing customers get bad results? I bet their bandwidth costs for the average Gnutella user are 10x that of their average customer. If people stopped using Gnutella, they'd be happy!
I regard this post's parent and the replies to be fairly offensive. If/. is truly a discussion site and not a club, moderators should see this for what it is: harassment based on race.
Attitude has nothing to do with law. What the policeman was asking him to do was surrender his rights, explicitly granted by the 4th amendment, not to be searched unreasonably. Under the circumstances, I would say it was totally reasonable, if not polite.
Walt
P.S. Come to think of it, when you consider 1st vs 3rd degreee murder, intent / attitude does matter. But not in the case of the cop.
There is a phrase around Apple called "getting Steved". This happens when someone argues too forcefully with Jobs in a meeting, and crosses some imaginary line. That person is fired on the spot, a.k.a. "Steved". I think the same mentality is behind this legal action. Jobs may not be able to make non-employees lose their jobs for leaking the photos, but he'll make things as disagreeable as he can.
you can't hurt anyone *else* because you don't wear *your* seatbelt
Actually, it's fairly common for unbelted adults to seriously injure children in carseats, etc. You have such tremendous momentum that you push forward on the seat in front of you with a force of thousands of pounds, potentially crushing the person in front of you against the dash.
A couple of minor quibbles with this article. First, Objectivism, according to Rand herself, is simply the philosophy that she put forth. She makes the further claim that it is the philosophy of reason, but this is a tremendous stretch, and I believe, as do many others, that Rand got a lot of things wrong. In any case, whether Objectivism is the philosophy of elightened self-interest is up to debate.
Also, charitable giving is OK, and is in fact mandatory, as long as it is in your own self-interest to give. Where the confusion comes is that most of the reasons why people usually give to charity are not valid. Rational egoists do not give because someone else needs the money more, or because it is their duty.
As for the issue of Objectivism and Libertarianism, there is a pamphlet put out by the Ayn Rand Institute called "Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty". So we can see where Objectvists (the official ones, with the capital O) stand on the issue. Of course, all the other parties are even worse, but it is frequently the policy of official objectivists to expel and denigrate those who have similar beliefs but also serious disagreements.
YHBT - You Have Been Trolled Congratulations, the troll has succeeded in convincing you to act disagreeably and contribute to the already abysmal S/N ratio around here. In fact, your reply to the flamer was so vociferous as to make me think that maybe you did it on purpose, meaning that an astute moderator should mark your comment as flamebait. In any case, the comment certainly had nothing to add to the discussion. As for this commment, it too decreases the amount of on-topic discussion, but hopefully others will see it and maybe think twice before feeding the GODDAMN trolls!
Whoops, my bad, it says in the next page that in the case of the Sony decision, "the primary use of the machine for most owners" was non-infringing. So that is the standard that might be used by the court. Still, I can see that in the face of usable digital distribution by RIAA, the percentage of piracy on Napster might drop low enough that only a quarter of users would be suing it for piracy, while the rest would be downloading authorized artists. Is it then legal for Napster to exist, since primarily it's not being used for copying? That seems like a stupid way to determine illegal vs. legal. Heck, I could write a Gnutella client that would take two categories of upload directories: one authorized and one unauthorized. Then I could restrict downloads of the unauthorized files to one less than the number of downloads of authorized files. Voila, the majority of downloads are authorized, and I'm legal. Somehow I doubt that would fly with the court system.
Later on in the document, they make a comparison between Napster and Sony producing VCR's. Sony argued ( apparently successfully) that their involvement ended the moment the VCR was sold, and they were not responsible for any copyright violations that were done with the VCR. However, Napster is providing an ongoing service, and obviously they need to preserve the supply of pirated music in order to keep their users coming back. What I'm wondering about is what happens when 90% of the software I use resides on a network host. I already use calendaring and messaging over the Net, pretty soon all of the software I use will be "service" in the sense of having the ongoing support of the company that sold it to me. What if I use, say, hotmail to send out song lyrics to all my friends, or maybe to a whole mailing list of people that have signed up to get the lyrics from me. MS is providing a service to me that allows me to pirate lyrics; where does one draw the line between this and the Napster service. Obviously, Napster wasn't created with or used for pure goodness, but there will come a time when a pure site is used for bad things, and then we've got ourselves a distinction to make.
We went over this with the fluorinert immersion. Pure water does in fact have some ions that would allow for current to be carried across the water. Those ions are H+ and OH-, and the level of them is the function p(H+), better known as pH. I don't know how much current that would be, but probably enough to hose you. Not to mention that having a potential between two points would result in electrical splitting of the water into H2 and O2, a popular combustible and a popular accelerant, respectively.
The author is not clueless; he's being very calculating. He knows that people are wary of the big, bad internet, and that these same people are the ones who can't help but open binary attachments in their mail. They just aren't smart / thoughtful / informed enough to figure out that Gnutella won't do anything on its own. If millions of people will believe some stupid hoax about a virus that erases your hard drive, they will also believe that you can get a virus through the internet with Gnutella. It may be FUD, but it's semi-believable FUD for a lot of people.
Walt
P.S. There is some small risk in other people knowing your IP, but it ain't safe to be connected to the internet if that's an actual risk for you.
It's not an MSNBC article, it's a Wall Street Journal article. Check the byline at the top in teeny letters. The story has a big picture on the front page of the "Marketplace" section in today's Journal.
Moderators, please get rid of this post's silly +1 bonus.
Just a note that even the much vaunted "low-friction" ecommerce hasn't figured out a way to get around charging US$.25 for each transaction, or more. I bet he maybe only took in half that after Amazon's and the credit company's fees.
This must be a troll, but the fact is, most of the traffic in the world gets carried through the enourmous pipes of the US backbone. Not to imply that there is not substantial traffic outside the US, but I bet if you traceroute a site in Japan from Europe, it will go through a US provider.
I too found Magneto more misguided than actively evil. Probably the best reason to hate him is that he behaves in a lot of ways like a terrorist, not like someone actually trying to save mutants.
I do have to fault Katz for complaining about when Magneto's holocaust connection was written in. Who cares? When you're trying to encapsulate an entire world and worldview in 90 minutes, you use whatever devices are available to you.
The tragedy of the commons is only directly applicable in a case of scarcity or other exclusive use of a resource. In this case, since the resource desired (pirated music) can be created essentially for free, there is no way to wreck it for the majority of the users. Annoy some people, sure, but in order to affect any fraction of the users, RIAA would need a lot of hackers and huge bandwidth and a lot of well-hidden hosts.
They had a prototype of this thing at IBM almost a year ago. It took them a full year to announce it as a product, i.e., to put it into industrial production. Somehow I think it unlikely that they will halve the price after putting in a full year of production development and who knows how many years of research.
Maybe we need a section for short, "X Book Considered Harmful" style reviews that people could post. Although frankly, that would be so much extra work for the/. crew, it would probably be better suited to a smaller site with user story posting moderation, like kuro5hin.
You hit the nail right on the head. I have a friend who lives very frugally so that he can spend nine months out of the year at the Library of Congress researching whatever topics he pleases. The other three months, he works on the farm he owns. So for him, the answer to that question is: about 10 hours a week, on average. This same man figured out that by buying grain, vitamins and powdered milk in bulk, it is possible to get a nutritionally complete diet for US$0.17 a day.
Thus if you assume rent at US$300/mo (not unreasonable for a room) and health care at US$200/mo, we're looking at less than $20 a day. Not hard to do when many fast food places are offering better than minimum wage. So if you are willing to live very frugally, without dependents, surviving at the hunter gatherer level (and probably in better health) costs maybe 20 hours a week. Of course, if you're willing to work as a web developer, it's probably closer to 2 hours a week. Me, I want my DSL and my wine cabinet and my car and my (future) house and my meals out. But it can be done.
... That membership is still voluntary! I bet when Microsoft.net comes out we'll have to fill out a registration form *and* a "Freedom to Innovate" membership form before we're allowed to use our applications!
I'm pretty sure your post is a troll, but here goes. While it is theoretically possible to double the number of states that a quantum computer can evaluate by adding a single extra "qbit", noone has yet developed a quantum computer with the capacity to handle something of this magnitude. Furthermore, the simulation of the weapons is done through an iterative differential equation solver that is deterministic! That's right, no search, no funny stuff of any kind, just solve a set of DE's to a specified tolerance, and repeat. So, until some other kind of computer comes along that can do that faster than ASCI White, that's what we're going to use.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the article, he says that they have not yet implemented optimization based on the similarities between the left and right channels on a stereo recording. Thus, the only way to compare the results at equivalent bitrates is to use a mono stream, on which the stereo optimizations can't be done. I never heard of the Vorbis project before this morning, but their claim is that they will do better than mp3 eventually, not that they are there for general purpose just yet. But if you have any mono spoken voice streams to encode, Vorbis away!
Walt
It's that there is now way to come up with a set of keywords that blocks all the bad stuff, while letting the innocuous stuff go through. My favorite personal example, which happened to me, was when I was looking at the weather forecast on Intellicast through a SurfWatch filter. I wanted to see the map of Ohio on the satellite image, but it was blocked. The reason? The form output had a string that went something like "&country=us&map=OH". Seems harmless, except for the prohibition against the word "s&m" appearing in a URL.
Pretty much you have to resign yourself to only allowing a whitelist of sites to display, and having an actual human update it with know harmless sites. Does anyone know of a high-quality whitelist that's maintained by reasonable people? That's something that might be well-suited to pasting on top of a trust network like Advogato, and could be maintained in a distributed environment.
Walt
Am I the only one who remembers what an incredible pain in the ass cancelbots, blackholes, crossposting filters, etc. are? It's a tremendous inconvenience, even more so on a completely distributed system where you have not just each site but each individual *user* to worry about. Does anyone really think that Gnutella spam filtering will be more effective than email spam filtering? ISP's have an incentive to block spam since it clogs up their bandiwdth and mail servers. Do they have any real reason to bother with Gnutella? Why would they care if a bunch of their file-stealing customers get bad results? I bet their bandwidth costs for the average Gnutella user are 10x that of their average customer. If people stopped using Gnutella, they'd be happy!
Walt
I regard this post's parent and the replies to be fairly offensive. If /. is truly a discussion site and not a club, moderators should see this for what it is: harassment based on race.
Sorry for my rant,
Walt
Attitude has nothing to do with law. What the policeman was asking him to do was surrender his rights, explicitly granted by the 4th amendment, not to be searched unreasonably. Under the circumstances, I would say it was totally reasonable, if not polite.
Walt
P.S. Come to think of it, when you consider 1st vs 3rd degreee murder, intent / attitude does matter. But not in the case of the cop.
There is a phrase around Apple called "getting Steved". This happens when someone argues too forcefully with Jobs in a meeting, and crosses some imaginary line. That person is fired on the spot, a.k.a. "Steved". I think the same mentality is behind this legal action. Jobs may not be able to make non-employees lose their jobs for leaking the photos, but he'll make things as disagreeable as he can.
Walt
you can't hurt anyone *else* because you don't wear *your* seatbelt
Actually, it's fairly common for unbelted adults to seriously injure children in carseats, etc. You have such tremendous momentum that you push forward on the seat in front of you with a force of thousands of pounds, potentially crushing the person in front of you against the dash.
Walt
A couple of minor quibbles with this article. First, Objectivism, according to Rand herself, is simply the philosophy that she put forth. She makes the further claim that it is the philosophy of reason, but this is a tremendous stretch, and I believe, as do many others, that Rand got a lot of things wrong. In any case, whether Objectivism is the philosophy of elightened self-interest is up to debate.
Also, charitable giving is OK, and is in fact mandatory, as long as it is in your own self-interest to give. Where the confusion comes is that most of the reasons why people usually give to charity are not valid. Rational egoists do not give because someone else needs the money more, or because it is their duty.
As for the issue of Objectivism and Libertarianism, there is a pamphlet put out by the Ayn Rand Institute called "Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty". So we can see where Objectvists (the official ones, with the capital O) stand on the issue. Of course, all the other parties are even worse, but it is frequently the policy of official objectivists to expel and denigrate those who have similar beliefs but also serious disagreements.
Walt
Sorry to shout, but some of us actually want the ending to BE A SURPRISE!!! So for god's sake, TELL US IT'S A SPOILER!
Walt
YHBT - You Have Been Trolled
Congratulations, the troll has succeeded in convincing you to act disagreeably and contribute to the already abysmal S/N ratio around here. In fact, your reply to the flamer was so vociferous as to make me think that maybe you did it on purpose, meaning that an astute moderator should mark your comment as flamebait. In any case, the comment certainly had nothing to add to the discussion. As for this commment, it too decreases the amount of on-topic discussion, but hopefully others will see it and maybe think twice before feeding the GODDAMN trolls!
Walt
Whoops, my bad, it says in the next page that in the case of the Sony decision, "the primary use of the machine for most owners" was non-infringing. So that is the standard that might be used by the court. Still, I can see that in the face of usable digital distribution by RIAA, the percentage of piracy on Napster might drop low enough that only a quarter of users would be suing it for piracy, while the rest would be downloading authorized artists. Is it then legal for Napster to exist, since primarily it's not being used for copying? That seems like a stupid way to determine illegal vs. legal. Heck, I could write a Gnutella client that would take two categories of upload directories: one authorized and one unauthorized. Then I could restrict downloads of the unauthorized files to one less than the number of downloads of authorized files. Voila, the majority of downloads are authorized, and I'm legal. Somehow I doubt that would fly with the court system.
Walt
Later on in the document, they make a comparison between Napster and Sony producing VCR's. Sony argued ( apparently successfully) that their involvement ended the moment the VCR was sold, and they were not responsible for any copyright violations that were done with the VCR. However, Napster is providing an ongoing service, and obviously they need to preserve the supply of pirated music in order to keep their users coming back.
What I'm wondering about is what happens when 90% of the software I use resides on a network host. I already use calendaring and messaging over the Net, pretty soon all of the software I use will be "service" in the sense of having the ongoing support of the company that sold it to me. What if I use, say, hotmail to send out song lyrics to all my friends, or maybe to a whole mailing list of people that have signed up to get the lyrics from me. MS is providing a service to me that allows me to pirate lyrics; where does one draw the line between this and the Napster service. Obviously, Napster wasn't created with or used for pure goodness, but there will come a time when a pure site is used for bad things, and then we've got ourselves a distinction to make.
Walt
We went over this with the fluorinert immersion. Pure water does in fact have some ions that would allow for current to be carried across the water. Those ions are H+ and OH-, and the level of them is the function p(H+), better known as pH. I don't know how much current that would be, but probably enough to hose you. Not to mention that having a potential between two points would result in electrical splitting of the water into H2 and O2, a popular combustible and a popular accelerant, respectively.
Walt
The author is not clueless; he's being very calculating. He knows that people are wary of the big, bad internet, and that these same people are the ones who can't help but open binary attachments in their mail. They just aren't smart / thoughtful / informed enough to figure out that Gnutella won't do anything on its own. If millions of people will believe some stupid hoax about a virus that erases your hard drive, they will also believe that you can get a virus through the internet with Gnutella. It may be FUD, but it's semi-believable FUD for a lot of people.
Walt
P.S. There is some small risk in other people knowing your IP, but it ain't safe to be connected to the internet if that's an actual risk for you.
It's not an MSNBC article, it's a Wall Street Journal article. Check the byline at the top in teeny letters. The story has a big picture on the front page of the "Marketplace" section in today's Journal.
Moderators, please get rid of this post's silly +1 bonus.
Walt
Just a note that even the much vaunted "low-friction" ecommerce hasn't figured out a way to get around charging US$.25 for each transaction, or more. I bet he maybe only took in half that after Amazon's and the credit company's fees.
Walt
This must be a troll, but the fact is, most of the traffic in the world gets carried through the enourmous pipes of the US backbone. Not to imply that there is not substantial traffic outside the US, but I bet if you traceroute a site in Japan from Europe, it will go through a US provider.
Walt
I too found Magneto more misguided than actively evil. Probably the best reason to hate him is that he behaves in a lot of ways like a terrorist, not like someone actually trying to save mutants.
I do have to fault Katz for complaining about when Magneto's holocaust connection was written in. Who cares? When you're trying to encapsulate an entire world and worldview in 90 minutes, you use whatever devices are available to you.
Walt
Whoops, I mis-moderated. Just posting to undo the mod.
Sorry,
Walt
The tragedy of the commons is only directly applicable in a case of scarcity or other exclusive use of a resource. In this case, since the resource desired (pirated music) can be created essentially for free, there is no way to wreck it for the majority of the users. Annoy some people, sure, but in order to affect any fraction of the users, RIAA would need a lot of hackers and huge bandwidth and a lot of well-hidden hosts.
Walt
They had a prototype of this thing at IBM almost a year ago. It took them a full year to announce it as a product, i.e., to put it into industrial production. Somehow I think it unlikely that they will halve the price after putting in a full year of production development and who knows how many years of research.
Walt
Maybe we need a section for short, "X Book Considered Harmful" style reviews that people could post. Although frankly, that would be so much extra work for the /. crew, it would probably be better suited to a smaller site with user story posting moderation, like kuro5hin.
Walt
You hit the nail right on the head. I have a friend who lives very frugally so that he can spend nine months out of the year at the Library of Congress researching whatever topics he pleases. The other three months, he works on the farm he owns. So for him, the answer to that question is: about 10 hours a week, on average. This same man figured out that by buying grain, vitamins and powdered milk in bulk, it is possible to get a nutritionally complete diet for US$0.17 a day.
Thus if you assume rent at US$300/mo (not unreasonable for a room) and health care at US$200/mo, we're looking at less than $20 a day. Not hard to do when many fast food places are offering better than minimum wage. So if you are willing to live very frugally, without dependents, surviving at the hunter gatherer level (and probably in better health) costs maybe 20 hours a week. Of course, if you're willing to work as a web developer, it's probably closer to 2 hours a week. Me, I want my DSL and my wine cabinet and my car and my (future) house and my meals out. But it can be done.
Walt
... That membership is still voluntary! I bet when Microsoft.net comes out we'll have to fill out a registration form *and* a "Freedom to Innovate" membership form before we're allowed to use our applications!
Walt
I'm pretty sure your post is a troll, but here goes. While it is theoretically possible to double the number of states that a quantum computer can evaluate by adding a single extra "qbit", noone has yet developed a quantum computer with the capacity to handle something of this magnitude. Furthermore, the simulation of the weapons is done through an iterative differential equation solver that is deterministic! That's right, no search, no funny stuff of any kind, just solve a set of DE's to a specified tolerance, and repeat. So, until some other kind of computer comes along that can do that faster than ASCI White, that's what we're going to use.
Walt