Look, I think Apple's default configuration is the right one, but the grandparent was claiming that you are secure out of the box. That is simply wrong. You are not secure because the software installed at the factory will be out of date by the time you get it. The firewall is OFF BY DEFAULT (to the jackass that called me a "dumbie") so you will be vulnerable to remote attacks while you are downloading updates. You see this problem on Windows XP, where you are infected before you can download the updates.
Now Apple has mitigated the problem to a large degree by releasing point versions frequently and shipping it on new machines. The problem also is less prevalent because there isn't an army of Macs out there spewing out worms. But that doesn't mean you aren't vulnerable. When, not if, a remote vulnerability is discovered in Mac OS X, people with new machines could easily get hit. It is not secure out of the box because the software is necessarily out of date and the firewall is off.
Whatever. Macs are not secure out of the box. One good thing is that Apple updates OS X frequently, but the software on a new Mac will still be out of date. Unless you were smart enough to enable the firewall, your new Mac is vulnerable the second you put it on the internet. The absence of numerous worms does not make the Macintosh any more secure. The worms simply indicate that Windows is terrible and that the script kiddies are having a heyday with it.
Yeah, way to go doofus. Give the hate-monger lunatics the most heavily armed country in the world, and the sane people can be right beside them. I'm going to guess that you're Canadian, because that's a stoner idea.
A"notice and notice" regime in relation to the hosting and file sharing activities of an ISP's subscribers would be provided for. That is, when an ISP receives notice from a rights holder that one of its subscribers is allegedly hosting or sharing infringing material, the ISP would be required to forward the notice to the subscriber. Blocking access to such material would be required only when ordered by a court. Upon receipt of a notice, ISPs would also be required to keep a record of relevant information for a specified time. Rights holders would have the legal means to compel ISPs to comply with the regime. The Government would have the power to prescribe the form that must be used in giving notices and to set fees that may be required to be paid by rights holders to ISPs for processing such notices.
I think this is about as fair a system as you can get. ISPs are protected as carriers of information. Rightsholders are able to proceed with civil actions, but the removal of information requires the finding of a court. And everyone is protected (to some extent) from overzealous rightsholders by the possibility of a "processing fee" to compensate ISPs for their trouble.
People like you simply do not get business. It's far more than just money, it's SUSTAINABLE cash.
I get business, I just don't see many companies trying to give people what they want. iTunes was originally that sort of service, but after so many successful years why is it still crippled ? Why can't I use iTunes to move songs off of an iPod and onto another computer ? If your answer involves the record industry, let me point out that Apple is holding all the cards. They have a player with something like 80% of the market, the iTunes store has no real competitor (for music purchases), and the RIAA is getting a nice big cut so downloaded music isn't going away. Apple could be using this leverage to give their customers more of what they want - freedom, cheaper prices, etc. But they aren't doing that. They treat the iTunes Music Store as a stagnant cash cow.
They won't be the reason, they'll be the scapegoat. In any case, they're fighting the good fight. We may yet retain the right to copy and use information (privately) as we see fit. Maybe you don't see the value in that, but some people do. Way to ridicule their efforts.
Yet another round of the "Apple is secretly good" theory. Apple doesn't give a fuck about you, your rights, the RIAA, or anything else. They are interested in a business model which makes them money. They say bullshit to you (Rip, Mix, Burn, just not more than 5 times), they say bullshit to the RIAA, and they keep everyone satisfied enough to make money. If you think they are on your side then you are hopelessly naive.
iTunes' DRM policy is arbitrary. It has been changed before, and it will be changed again. When you buy a song from Apple, you think you are entering into contract whereby you can play the song, burn it to CD, stream it to X simultaneous people, etc. but that is simply not the case. When you buy a song from Apple you are essentially agreeing to any future terms they might impose. Contracts like this should be illegal because they are essentially one-sided.
A scientist or funding agency threatening to take their publications elsewhere if a journal rejects a manuscript...I just can't see it happening. Papers get rejected all the time...
That's my point. Journals can reject papers freely precisely because they aren't dependant upon submissions for revenue. And there is no shortage of submissions because scientists rarely pay up front for peer-review. These are features of the business model which encourage journal integrity, and under an author-pays model they disappear. Right now, journals can afford to be presigious. They can reject papers with few economic consequences. In the future that may not be the situation, and I think it is important for the scientific community to compensate for this now, before there is a problem. Have university libraries handle the distribution so that journals don't have recurring internet bandwidth and server costs, for example.
I made a suggestion for that. Have university libraries cover the distribution, so that journals aren't responsible for as many recurring costs. link. Not perfect, but maybe good enough.
There are plenty of papers from the 1970's and 80's whose material I would like to read. Some of this stuff is in books, but quite a bit of it is not. Sometimes the books are crappy, and you want to check the original source because they might offer additional insight. Also, anyone wanting to understand the development of their field is going to need to read these papers. Someone elses' summary in the form of a book is what we might expect for information from 2000 years ago. Not 20 years ago.
On further reflection, I think that the only way to ensure the integrity of the process is to have a third model: "everyone pay".
Under the author-pays model, libraries get a free ride. Before we give them all that money back, we should ask them to do something small to help the process. Libraries should cover the distribution costs. A few terabytes here and there isn't going to cost a lot of money, probably the amount that they spend on a single journal now. And putting a copy of all this information in every campus library will be pretty economical - no internet charges for local connections. Libraries could make a vital contribution by simply doing what they have always done, amalgamating information and making it accessible to their local community. Journals wouldn't have to worry about paying thousands of dollars in internet access fees each month, and I wouldn't have to scour through forty different poorly designed web sites to get information.
Scientists pay for review, libraries cover distribution, and journals are the middlemen with few recurring costs. What do people think ?
This is one of the main concerns, but I think it will be mitigated as the publishing model starts to take off. If a paper is important, then it will always get reviewed. Hopefully there will be less of an emphasis on the volume of papers published, with a greater emphasis on quality. The current model is terrible for this. An author may incur few costs when publishing a paper, so there is no disincentive to publish. People start publishing lots of papers to pad their CV, and then it becomes the norm. This is bad for science.
One concern is that the author pays model will replace this phenomenon with something worse. One possibility is that the prestige of the journal will be inferred from the amount that they charge authors. Not so much inferred by scientists, but inferred by funding agencies. I don't think this will be too much of a problem, since funding agencies are generally cheap.
So what are the other problems with this model ? Well, the integrity of all the participants is much more critical than it was under the old model. There will be pressure on journals to publish things - money changing hands will create that expectation. There is far more potential for major corruption and scandal. I can see scientists and funding agencies threatening to take future papers elsewhere if X is not published, because journals will be directly beholden to scientists for revenue. One way around this is to have funding agencies help fund journals as well as scientists, but this creates the opportunity for collusion. There is probably no good solution to this problem, so we should hesitate before making paper submissions the sole source of revenue for journals.
It really is irritating, and more and more people are becoming aware of the problem. In stark contrast to "the rest" of the world's information, much of 20th century science is locked up. People are only going to tolerate this for so long. If the copyright holders won't make it accessible, maybe we should give the rights to someone who will. That could be a type of trust (which would compensate the original rightsholders), or it could be everyone (put it in the public domain). People are willing to pay for this information. They won't pay $40 per article or whatever BS some of these publishing houses are demanding. Make it available or face a revolt.
I think that author pays will be the dominant model in the future. In addition to the economic benefits, I think this model has the potential to produce higher quality science, or at least stem the tide of mediocre papers which are submitted over and over again to different places. Of course, this model places a lot more importance on the integrity of the participants, but this is not a new problem for scientists. We have disreputable scientists and disreputable journals now.
The New York Times really does do a lot of liberal trolling. It's sad, really. The fact that slashdot repeats it for 500+ comments is even more sad. Everyone wants to feel persecuted, it seems. It's a phenomenon no different from all those crazy stories about liberals censoring Christmas that pop up on conservative blogs every year. Ultimately, western society may be unable to sustain intelligent discourse. Some would say we rarely had it at all. In any case, this could be a terminal problem. Our society is built on ideas.
The whole idea of "math" is a preposterous hoax. I mean, what are you supposed to do, work something out ? God will tell you whatever you need to know. He says we should trust our president in a time of war!
Gee, do you think choking off supply translates into lost sales somehow ? The funniest/saddest thing is, artifical scarcity actually does seem to influence some peoples' perceptions of a product.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I think Apple's default configuration is the right one, but the grandparent was claiming that you are secure out of the box. That is simply wrong. You are not secure because the software installed at the factory will be out of date by the time you get it. The firewall is OFF BY DEFAULT (to the jackass that called me a "dumbie") so you will be vulnerable to remote attacks while you are downloading updates. You see this problem on Windows XP, where you are infected before you can download the updates.
Now Apple has mitigated the problem to a large degree by releasing point versions frequently and shipping it on new machines. The problem also is less prevalent because there isn't an army of Macs out there spewing out worms. But that doesn't mean you aren't vulnerable. When, not if, a remote vulnerability is discovered in Mac OS X, people with new machines could easily get hit. It is not secure out of the box because the software is necessarily out of date and the firewall is off.
As of what version of OS X ? I've reinstalled the system before, the firewall was off.
Whatever. Macs are not secure out of the box. One good thing is that Apple updates OS X frequently, but the software on a new Mac will still be out of date. Unless you were smart enough to enable the firewall, your new Mac is vulnerable the second you put it on the internet. The absence of numerous worms does not make the Macintosh any more secure. The worms simply indicate that Windows is terrible and that the script kiddies are having a heyday with it.
Yeah, way to go doofus. Give the hate-monger lunatics the most heavily armed country in the world, and the sane people can be right beside them. I'm going to guess that you're Canadian, because that's a stoner idea.
French-Canadian. It's even in the textbooks.
A"notice and notice" regime in relation to the hosting and file sharing activities of an ISP's subscribers would be provided for. That is, when an ISP receives notice from a rights holder that one of its subscribers is allegedly hosting or sharing infringing material, the ISP would be required to forward the notice to the subscriber. Blocking access to such material would be required only when ordered by a court. Upon receipt of a notice, ISPs would also be required to keep a record of relevant information for a specified time. Rights holders would have the legal means to compel ISPs to comply with the regime. The Government would have the power to prescribe the form that must be used in giving notices and to set fees that may be required to be paid by rights holders to ISPs for processing such notices.
I think this is about as fair a system as you can get. ISPs are protected as carriers of information. Rightsholders are able to proceed with civil actions, but the removal of information requires the finding of a court. And everyone is protected (to some extent) from overzealous rightsholders by the possibility of a "processing fee" to compensate ISPs for their trouble.
IMHO, this mentality is exactly why it has taken Linux distributions so long to become a major player in the desktop market.
You're right, we should do what Apple does... to increase marketshare. HAHAHAHA!
You won't even have time to download all the patches.
People like you simply do not get business. It's far more than just money, it's SUSTAINABLE cash.
I get business, I just don't see many companies trying to give people what they want. iTunes was originally that sort of service, but after so many successful years why is it still crippled ? Why can't I use iTunes to move songs off of an iPod and onto another computer ? If your answer involves the record industry, let me point out that Apple is holding all the cards. They have a player with something like 80% of the market, the iTunes store has no real competitor (for music purchases), and the RIAA is getting a nice big cut so downloaded music isn't going away. Apple could be using this leverage to give their customers more of what they want - freedom, cheaper prices, etc. But they aren't doing that. They treat the iTunes Music Store as a stagnant cash cow.
All of your points have been dead on. Nice job.
This is a great point. Unfortunately few media companies are interested in giving the consumer something, they are mostly focused on taking away.
They won't be the reason, they'll be the scapegoat. In any case, they're fighting the good fight. We may yet retain the right to copy and use information (privately) as we see fit. Maybe you don't see the value in that, but some people do. Way to ridicule their efforts.
Yet another round of the "Apple is secretly good" theory. Apple doesn't give a fuck about you, your rights, the RIAA, or anything else. They are interested in a business model which makes them money. They say bullshit to you (Rip, Mix, Burn, just not more than 5 times), they say bullshit to the RIAA, and they keep everyone satisfied enough to make money. If you think they are on your side then you are hopelessly naive.
iTunes' DRM policy is arbitrary. It has been changed before, and it will be changed again. When you buy a song from Apple, you think you are entering into contract whereby you can play the song, burn it to CD, stream it to X simultaneous people, etc. but that is simply not the case. When you buy a song from Apple you are essentially agreeing to any future terms they might impose. Contracts like this should be illegal because they are essentially one-sided.
A scientist or funding agency threatening to take their publications elsewhere if a journal rejects a manuscript...I just can't see it happening. Papers get rejected all the time...
That's my point. Journals can reject papers freely precisely because they aren't dependant upon submissions for revenue. And there is no shortage of submissions because scientists rarely pay up front for peer-review. These are features of the business model which encourage journal integrity, and under an author-pays model they disappear. Right now, journals can afford to be presigious. They can reject papers with few economic consequences. In the future that may not be the situation, and I think it is important for the scientific community to compensate for this now, before there is a problem. Have university libraries handle the distribution so that journals don't have recurring internet bandwidth and server costs, for example.
I made a suggestion for that. Have university libraries cover the distribution, so that journals aren't responsible for as many recurring costs. link. Not perfect, but maybe good enough.
There are plenty of papers from the 1970's and 80's whose material I would like to read. Some of this stuff is in books, but quite a bit of it is not. Sometimes the books are crappy, and you want to check the original source because they might offer additional insight. Also, anyone wanting to understand the development of their field is going to need to read these papers. Someone elses' summary in the form of a book is what we might expect for information from 2000 years ago. Not 20 years ago.
On further reflection, I think that the only way to ensure the integrity of the process is to have a third model: "everyone pay".
Under the author-pays model, libraries get a free ride. Before we give them all that money back, we should ask them to do something small to help the process. Libraries should cover the distribution costs. A few terabytes here and there isn't going to cost a lot of money, probably the amount that they spend on a single journal now. And putting a copy of all this information in every campus library will be pretty economical - no internet charges for local connections. Libraries could make a vital contribution by simply doing what they have always done, amalgamating information and making it accessible to their local community. Journals wouldn't have to worry about paying thousands of dollars in internet access fees each month, and I wouldn't have to scour through forty different poorly designed web sites to get information.
Scientists pay for review, libraries cover distribution, and journals are the middlemen with few recurring costs. What do people think ?
This is one of the main concerns, but I think it will be mitigated as the publishing model starts to take off. If a paper is important, then it will always get reviewed. Hopefully there will be less of an emphasis on the volume of papers published, with a greater emphasis on quality. The current model is terrible for this. An author may incur few costs when publishing a paper, so there is no disincentive to publish. People start publishing lots of papers to pad their CV, and then it becomes the norm. This is bad for science.
One concern is that the author pays model will replace this phenomenon with something worse. One possibility is that the prestige of the journal will be inferred from the amount that they charge authors. Not so much inferred by scientists, but inferred by funding agencies. I don't think this will be too much of a problem, since funding agencies are generally cheap.
So what are the other problems with this model ? Well, the integrity of all the participants is much more critical than it was under the old model. There will be pressure on journals to publish things - money changing hands will create that expectation. There is far more potential for major corruption and scandal. I can see scientists and funding agencies threatening to take future papers elsewhere if X is not published, because journals will be directly beholden to scientists for revenue. One way around this is to have funding agencies help fund journals as well as scientists, but this creates the opportunity for collusion. There is probably no good solution to this problem, so we should hesitate before making paper submissions the sole source of revenue for journals.
It really is irritating, and more and more people are becoming aware of the problem. In stark contrast to "the rest" of the world's information, much of 20th century science is locked up. People are only going to tolerate this for so long. If the copyright holders won't make it accessible, maybe we should give the rights to someone who will. That could be a type of trust (which would compensate the original rightsholders), or it could be everyone (put it in the public domain). People are willing to pay for this information. They won't pay $40 per article or whatever BS some of these publishing houses are demanding. Make it available or face a revolt.
I think that author pays will be the dominant model in the future. In addition to the economic benefits, I think this model has the potential to produce higher quality science, or at least stem the tide of mediocre papers which are submitted over and over again to different places. Of course, this model places a lot more importance on the integrity of the participants, but this is not a new problem for scientists. We have disreputable scientists and disreputable journals now.
The New York Times really does do a lot of liberal trolling. It's sad, really. The fact that slashdot repeats it for 500+ comments is even more sad. Everyone wants to feel persecuted, it seems. It's a phenomenon no different from all those crazy stories about liberals censoring Christmas that pop up on conservative blogs every year. Ultimately, western society may be unable to sustain intelligent discourse. Some would say we rarely had it at all. In any case, this could be a terminal problem. Our society is built on ideas.
The whole idea of "math" is a preposterous hoax. I mean, what are you supposed to do, work something out ? God will tell you whatever you need to know. He says we should trust our president in a time of war!
Gee, do you think choking off supply translates into lost sales somehow ? The funniest/saddest thing is, artifical scarcity actually does seem to influence some peoples' perceptions of a product.
I just deleted /etc because it was pissing me off. Now I'm posting from a Windows machine. Why won't anybody give me root access ?