Put another way - say I'm node A. None of my neighbors know that I'm node A, they just know that I'm closer to node A than they are, so any packets destined for node A should go through me. Simple enough, yes?
If you read the article, you'd see that you can't actually see who you're sending packets to with this. Say you're node A and you want to send a packet to node B (or node B requests it...whatever). You have a neighbor that may or may not be node B - all you know is that your neighbor is closer to you than node B. It may be node B or it may be node C that sits between you and node B. Doesn't matter, and only node B upon receipt of the packet has the ability to say "Hey, that's for me" and keep it and stop resending it. Nobody else knows who he is or who he's connected to.
I mean...seriously...as many have mentioned, RealPlayer is uber-shitty software. I use Windows Media Player when I'm at my parents' house using their XP machine because it's a decent program (forced DRM issues notwithstanding) and much better / less annoying than RealPlayer. If Windows Media Player weren't included with Windows, I probably would download and use something else, but it sure as hell wouldn't be RealPlayer. I wonder if Real is the right company to be suing over this.
SCO has violently [emphasis added] opposed public disclosure of the code at the heart of the dispute, claiming that doing so would damage its ability to leverage its intellectual property in future.
Wow...violently huh? I'll be waiting with bated breath for the WACO-style takedown of the SCO offices.
A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?
"I know," said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no," said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."
"Well," said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
Well...at least this letter spells out their "GPL is unconstitutional" argument. That's the first time I've seen anything more than vague hand-waving on that one. Even if the argument is misguided (which it is, don't get me wrong), at least there's an argument there now.
If one were to use enough resources to actually degrade the QOS of the paying customer then I agree that at that point you're depriving that person of something they're paying for. However, I definitely take issue with a couple of the statements earlier in this topic...for one thing, copyright owners are not entitled, legally or morally, to compensation for each use of their good in all cases. Fair use may not be a constitutionally guaranteed, but it is a well-enshrined legal tenet and quite honestly, even if it were utterly illegal for me to make a copy of a CD I own to take on a trip so that I don't risk losing the original, I would do it anyway. There are plenty of laws on the books that are either totally immoral or completely ass-backwards and which I therefore don't feel obligated to follow (and in some cases am personally obligated not to follow. Don't forget that history is rife with examples of laws that any reasonable person would have needed to disobey - see US states south of the Mason-Dixon line until 1865 for one.) Now, I'm not equating this situation with slavery, but there are degrees to everything. One statement earlier up said something to the effect of "You're stealing, it's a crime, period". Well, it may be a crime, but the world isn't black and white. If I'm driving down the road perfectly responsibly with the flow of traffic at 70mph, I'm breaking the law. Crime, period, right? (And speeding infractions are criminal offenses in some states) Even if it's illegal, the fact that I'm being perfectly responsible and the knowledge that speed limits are set artificially low to generate revenue from tickets combine to honestly make me just not care.
In any case, my main objection to the whole thing remains that it focused much too much of the story on the wardriving which I think you'll agree is an extremely minor offense compared with the kiddie porn he was downloading.
Between copyright infringement and shoplifting - stealing (at least to me) implies taking property. Using somebody else's cable or internet connection isn't depriving anybody of any property, just (perhaps) the customer's quality of service and the fee you're supposed to be paying to the service provider.
Ahh...well, there are two things there. One is that "stealing" misrepresents the situation - it may be "theft of service" but then again, if somebody is watching TV and you can see in their window and you watch too, that doesn't seem a whole bunch different to me. I admit I don't know the legal details though. Also, as mentioned above wardriving doesn't even necessarily imply using any service anyway, it's just mapping out open access points. I have a hard time imagining there's anything illegal about that.
Investigation showed the man had hooked into a wireless computer network at a nearby house to gain access to a resident's Internet connection and download images from child pornography websites.
The scheme, known as "war driving," allows a computer with wireless Internet capability to tap into a wireless home network and access the World Wide Web, usually without fear of discovery.
Well there's a nice bit of yellow-press tradition. Linking war driving strongly to the child porn aspect and never mentioning that most people who do this aren't doing anything illegal with the information or access they're using. In fairness to the story, most of it was about how stupid in general this guy was being and the disgusting stuff found at his residence later, but three paragraphs at the end of the story seems to shift a lot of attention to a very minor aspect of the crime. He could have been collecting that junk from his home cable modem connection just as easily.
Speaking of Apple commercials...am I the only one who thinks the girls dancing in the hip-hop and punk rock iPod commercials must be really hot? I can't be...
If somebody actually had the balls to take the RIAA to trial, I really wonder if the RIAA would have a shot at a favorable verdict. They're on the right side of the law, but the law is so unreasonable that I'd bet most jurors would refuse to vote in their favor. I don't know what portion of the jury is needed to render a verdict in a civil trial, but it has to be at least a majority and my bet is that the RIAA couldn't get half of any reasonable jury to find anybody, 15 years old or not, liable for $845,000 in damages (much less $165 million) for this type of offense. Nobody can compel a jury to vote based solely on the law - they're free to find however they want for whatever reason they want AFAIK.
It certainly seems as though wire(less)ing up a country as small as S. Korea could hardly cost $80 billion dollars and current wireless technology can already provide 50Mbit speeds. What gives?
If you really want to hurt a spammer, get thousands of people to order a product, then send it back and charge-back the order on their cards. Creditcard merchant accounts have limits on the chargeback rates, and when they get too high the merchant provider will cut you off. Of course you have to front the money and the hassle, and at the end of the day there's only 1 less spammer out of a million (unless he tries to find another merchant provider and succeeds). But for some, perhaps the cost-benefit analysis would still find it worth it.
Unfortunately that's fraud and will get you in a hell of a lot more trouble than the spammer if the spammer can show that you legitimately ordered that product.
Something I've wondered for awhile...why not use a rocket to shoot stuff like this straight at the sun? Gets rid of the space junk problem and it's not like we have to worry about polluting the sun. Surely it couldn't cost $300 million to accomplish that compared with that same amount to burn it up safely over the pacific. Seems to me like that'd be a good method for disposing of nuclear waste also...we already have containers that can withstand rocket launch failures. Granted we have many tons of nuclear waste that would be expensive to launch out, but how expensive is it to build storage facilities and get approval through Congress? Not to mention those folks living in New Mexico for whom no amount of money can be much consolation for having the country's nuclear waste in their backyards.
Things can only get worse. As our society becomes ever more dependent on information technology, the gulf between those who understand computers and those who don't will get wider and wider.
Hey...maybe the job market for software guys will finally pick up then.
afaik all SACDs that have multi-channel info also have a 2-channel layer. I was talking about the SACD/CD hybrid discs, i.e. most SACD discs do not have a regular CD layer that will play in a normal CD player.
The 2.8Mhz sampling rate isn't as ridiculous as it seems - SACD isn't a PCM format like CD and DVD-A...it's a one-bit stream, so the extra-high sampling rate really is necessary. And it really does sound good. Really, really good.
All current players are compatible with standard CDs, and the Sony player I have (DVP-NS500V) also includes digital outputs for the CD and DVD capabilities. No SACD player will ever include digital outs for the SACD stream afaik, but considering the significantly higher quality of SACDs compared to standard CDs, this is something that can be handled. SACD is also significantly higher-resolution than DVD-A, by the way.
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Don't forget the TSA screeners have the ability to ban you from flying. For life. I wouldn't risk it.
Put another way - say I'm node A. None of my neighbors know that I'm node A, they just know that I'm closer to node A than they are, so any packets destined for node A should go through me. Simple enough, yes?
If you read the article, you'd see that you can't actually see who you're sending packets to with this. Say you're node A and you want to send a packet to node B (or node B requests it...whatever). You have a neighbor that may or may not be node B - all you know is that your neighbor is closer to you than node B. It may be node B or it may be node C that sits between you and node B. Doesn't matter, and only node B upon receipt of the packet has the ability to say "Hey, that's for me" and keep it and stop resending it. Nobody else knows who he is or who he's connected to.
I mean...seriously...as many have mentioned, RealPlayer is uber-shitty software. I use Windows Media Player when I'm at my parents' house using their XP machine because it's a decent program (forced DRM issues notwithstanding) and much better / less annoying than RealPlayer. If Windows Media Player weren't included with Windows, I probably would download and use something else, but it sure as hell wouldn't be RealPlayer. I wonder if Real is the right company to be suing over this.
Oops...I'm a moron. Forgot the closing italic tag. And now I'm replying to my own post. *Sigh*
SCO has violently [emphasis added] opposed public disclosure of the code at the heart of the dispute, claiming that doing so would damage its ability to leverage its intellectual property in future.
Wow...violently huh? I'll be waiting with bated breath for the WACO-style takedown of the SCO offices.
From http://www.247joke.com/jokes/programmers01.shtml:
A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?
"I know," said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no," said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."
"Well," said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
Well...at least this letter spells out their "GPL is unconstitutional" argument. That's the first time I've seen anything more than vague hand-waving on that one. Even if the argument is misguided (which it is, don't get me wrong), at least there's an argument there now.
If one were to use enough resources to actually degrade the QOS of the paying customer then I agree that at that point you're depriving that person of something they're paying for. However, I definitely take issue with a couple of the statements earlier in this topic...for one thing, copyright owners are not entitled, legally or morally, to compensation for each use of their good in all cases. Fair use may not be a constitutionally guaranteed, but it is a well-enshrined legal tenet and quite honestly, even if it were utterly illegal for me to make a copy of a CD I own to take on a trip so that I don't risk losing the original, I would do it anyway. There are plenty of laws on the books that are either totally immoral or completely ass-backwards and which I therefore don't feel obligated to follow (and in some cases am personally obligated not to follow. Don't forget that history is rife with examples of laws that any reasonable person would have needed to disobey - see US states south of the Mason-Dixon line until 1865 for one.) Now, I'm not equating this situation with slavery, but there are degrees to everything. One statement earlier up said something to the effect of "You're stealing, it's a crime, period". Well, it may be a crime, but the world isn't black and white. If I'm driving down the road perfectly responsibly with the flow of traffic at 70mph, I'm breaking the law. Crime, period, right? (And speeding infractions are criminal offenses in some states) Even if it's illegal, the fact that I'm being perfectly responsible and the knowledge that speed limits are set artificially low to generate revenue from tickets combine to honestly make me just not care.
In any case, my main objection to the whole thing remains that it focused much too much of the story on the wardriving which I think you'll agree is an extremely minor offense compared with the kiddie porn he was downloading.
Between copyright infringement and shoplifting - stealing (at least to me) implies taking property. Using somebody else's cable or internet connection isn't depriving anybody of any property, just (perhaps) the customer's quality of service and the fee you're supposed to be paying to the service provider.
Ahh...well, there are two things there. One is that "stealing" misrepresents the situation - it may be "theft of service" but then again, if somebody is watching TV and you can see in their window and you watch too, that doesn't seem a whole bunch different to me. I admit I don't know the legal details though. Also, as mentioned above wardriving doesn't even necessarily imply using any service anyway, it's just mapping out open access points. I have a hard time imagining there's anything illegal about that.
Investigation showed the man had hooked into a wireless computer network at a nearby house to gain access to a resident's Internet connection and download images from child pornography websites.
The scheme, known as "war driving," allows a computer with wireless Internet capability to tap into a wireless home network and access the World Wide Web, usually without fear of discovery.
Well there's a nice bit of yellow-press tradition. Linking war driving strongly to the child porn aspect and never mentioning that most people who do this aren't doing anything illegal with the information or access they're using. In fairness to the story, most of it was about how stupid in general this guy was being and the disgusting stuff found at his residence later, but three paragraphs at the end of the story seems to shift a lot of attention to a very minor aspect of the crime. He could have been collecting that junk from his home cable modem connection just as easily.
Speaking of Apple commercials...am I the only one who thinks the girls dancing in the hip-hop and punk rock iPod commercials must be really hot? I can't be...
If somebody actually had the balls to take the RIAA to trial, I really wonder if the RIAA would have a shot at a favorable verdict. They're on the right side of the law, but the law is so unreasonable that I'd bet most jurors would refuse to vote in their favor. I don't know what portion of the jury is needed to render a verdict in a civil trial, but it has to be at least a majority and my bet is that the RIAA couldn't get half of any reasonable jury to find anybody, 15 years old or not, liable for $845,000 in damages (much less $165 million) for this type of offense. Nobody can compel a jury to vote based solely on the law - they're free to find however they want for whatever reason they want AFAIK.
It certainly seems as though wire(less)ing up a country as small as S. Korea could hardly cost $80 billion dollars and current wireless technology can already provide 50Mbit speeds. What gives?
If you really want to hurt a spammer, get thousands of people to order a product, then send it back and charge-back the order on their cards. Creditcard merchant accounts have limits on the chargeback rates, and when they get too high the merchant provider will cut you off. Of course you have to front the money and the hassle, and at the end of the day there's only 1 less spammer out of a million (unless he tries to find another merchant provider and succeeds). But for some, perhaps the cost-benefit analysis would still find it worth it.
Unfortunately that's fraud and will get you in a hell of a lot more trouble than the spammer if the spammer can show that you legitimately ordered that product.
Something I've wondered for awhile...why not use a rocket to shoot stuff like this straight at the sun? Gets rid of the space junk problem and it's not like we have to worry about polluting the sun. Surely it couldn't cost $300 million to accomplish that compared with that same amount to burn it up safely over the pacific. Seems to me like that'd be a good method for disposing of nuclear waste also...we already have containers that can withstand rocket launch failures. Granted we have many tons of nuclear waste that would be expensive to launch out, but how expensive is it to build storage facilities and get approval through Congress? Not to mention those folks living in New Mexico for whom no amount of money can be much consolation for having the country's nuclear waste in their backyards.
Things can only get worse. As our society becomes ever more dependent on information technology, the gulf between those who understand computers and those who don't will get wider and wider.
Hey...maybe the job market for software guys will finally pick up then.
afaik all SACDs that have multi-channel info also have a 2-channel layer. I was talking about the SACD/CD hybrid discs, i.e. most SACD discs do not have a regular CD layer that will play in a normal CD player.
The 2.8Mhz sampling rate isn't as ridiculous as it seems - SACD isn't a PCM format like CD and DVD-A...it's a one-bit stream, so the extra-high sampling rate really is necessary. And it really does sound good. Really, really good.
most SACDs are not hybrid discs, though - you have to keep that in mind.
All current players are compatible with standard CDs, and the Sony player I have (DVP-NS500V) also includes digital outputs for the CD and DVD capabilities. No SACD player will ever include digital outs for the SACD stream afaik, but considering the significantly higher quality of SACDs compared to standard CDs, this is something that can be handled. SACD is also significantly higher-resolution than DVD-A, by the way.