"I'd say that the majority of programmers, tech writers, and other creative folks who produced copyrighted work for hire provide a lot more benefit to society that the majority of musicians and filmmakers."
This is really good stuff. You're a programmer, so you don't have a problem with your employer selling licenses to your work (and presumably paying your salary). But other people's work.. that should be freely distributed.
Maybe we should summarize your philosophy as "Other people's information wants to be free."
An attractive proposition to be sure, but perhaps not very just.
You're always so cute when you try to add philosophical trappings to what comes down to simple entitlement.
"Your created rights of copyright impinge on my natural freedom to download music for my iPod."
Some people might be embarrassed to tell musicians and movie makers that they shouldn't be compensated for the work they do, but in the blue green world of news for nerds, it's considered a noble crusade.
The RIAA has conducted about 26,000 lawsuits, and there are more than 15 million music downloaders. Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research said it best: "If you're a file sharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid."
Over 1 in every 1000 people is going to be hit by asteroids! Crap!
I loved DX1, and finally got around to DX2 (after avoiding it for a long time). It wasn't that great, but also probably not as bad as it was made out to be (dashed expectations and so on).
But it is true that so far, the quality of DX games has been directly proportional to the involvement of Warren Spector. Since this next one doesn't involve him at all....
Why would I have to RTFA, when I've PTFG (Played the f***g games)?
The system is identical as many people responding to you point out. Just because your modern PC can process the load times in less than a second, where my old PC used to sit there for 20 seconds while I went to get a coke from the fridge, doesn't mean that HL1 doesn't have level loads...
Perhaps you're too young to have played the game when it came out...
Heh. I'm a 37 year old computer professional, know-it-all.
You're posting anonymously, so I'm not sure who I'm addressing here. But if you look at Jelle's post that started this little subtree, he says,
"Such as somebody with access to the terminal for 15 seconds when you're logged in and distracted (or a piece of spyware), and who would like to take the machine home overnight (after you think it's safely encrypted and turned off), to have plenty of time to secretly copy the whole 250GB of valuable data off it?"
This is the post that you've chosen to defend here. Clearly incorrect. This feature doesn't help someone with 15 seconds of unsupervised access to a machine, as I tersely pointed out, because they would need the pass-phrase to use the feature, and if they have the pass-phrase, you're lost already.
He also says, "I understand that the 'feature' (aka BUG) is hidden from many of its users..."
Which again betrays his lack of understanding, because if the people with access to the pass-phrase are unaware of the feature, then it can never cause them problems.
So, here's what it comes down to: This whole story purports to being about a security vulnerability in a disk encryption product. People immediately start crying "backdoor" (see the opening post to this thread, and it's immediate child). If this were true, it would be worthy of a story on Slashdot and worth our time to know about.
But in fact, to be vulnerable, you have to have a special need to reboot your machines remotely, go to their website or talk with their tech support find out there is a feature that makes this possible. Then you have to misuse this feature in a pointless way in order to make yourself vulnerable. Is there a warning message telling you to reboot immediately? I'm sure neither of us have any idea.
There simply isn't any meat here, just a little gristle and some juice. You can keep beating the issue around, looking for something to grab hold of, but anything you can carve off isn't going to satisfy.
Properly used, this feature does no such thing. Sure, if you set a password, and then didn't reboot immediately, you would disable encryption. But that would be foolish. There is no need to do something like that.
The feature is designed with an immediate reboot in mind. After the reboot, the password is removed, and there is no danger.
This does an attacker no good, since they are unable to set the password without knowing what it is.
Please explain your attack in detail, if you still think there is one. If not, think twice next time before you post.
There isn't a backdoor. If you encrypt your hard drive, then lose it, nobody can read it.
If on the other hand, if you've encrypted your boot disk, and you want to remotely reboot your machine, you're going to need someway to feed the password to it before it can bring up the OS (and the networking layer).
This feature allows you to store a password for 1 time use. Then you reboot the machine, and when it comes up, it reads the password and erases it.
It's a useful feature. Doesn't effect you if you don't use it. Even if you do use it, you'd have to set the password then forget to reboot for it to be a problem.
Basically this whole story is a non-issue. The moderation on the grandparent is a reflection of his failure to reason through this.
Here's another vote for Science News. A little dry perhaps for the average person, but perfect for the enthusiastic amateur.
From the original post: Now, can someone unfamiliar with a particular field, nay, a sub-discipline of that field, recognize these assumptions for what they are?"
One of the things that a good scientific journalist does is get opinions from the other big players in the field that the new paper is being published in. It's often the most interesting part of the article. When they say, "It's an interesting paper, but I won't be convinced until I see more data on..." we as the general public can get a better idea of just how far along the research really is.
He says that "the GPLv3 is a fine choice" in the context that he believes that everyone should be able to release code under whatever license they want to.
But as far as his own views go, he states:
"So I claim that for *me* the right choice is GPLv2 (or something similar). I think the GPLv3 is overreaching."
So, getting back to the original statement: When you have one of the most influential people in Open Source refuse to accept the license.
Perhaps "refuse to accept" isn't exactly right, but clearly he disagrees with the direction that the GPLv3 has gone with, and has no interest in adopting it.
Linus's email was dated June 20th, 2007. That was less than a month ago. I suspect the text of the GPLv3 license he was commenting on didn't change between that date and the date it was released: June 29th, 2007.
If we were to eliminate jail times for non-violent offenses, then you would reduce our system of laws to an ala carte menu... If you have enough money, you pick and choose which ones you want to obey.
the whole concept of intellectual property is such a farce
Hah... we are on SlashDot, aren't we.
Only here can somebody take an issue that doesn't involve intellectual property (a company angry about their ideas being ripped off, which isn't against the law), and use it to damn all intellectual property. . I swear we could have a story on walruses, and someone would twist it into a scathing attack on the RIAA.
Copyright, for example, is pretty easy to understand and distinguish. If you copy my song, my movie, my program, without my license you have violated my copyright. If you copy my idea, you have not.
Sure it can be more complicated than that, but 99% of copyright issues are just that simple.
Ah, go to bed. You shouldn't be up after midnight drinking red wine and commenting on Slash dot global warming threads... what good could come of it?;)
The first rule of optimization is: Don't do it. The second rule of optimization (for experts only) is: Don't do it yet.
Of course, in these cases, what they're really saying is, don't start out sacrificing simplicity to achieve what you imagine to be greater performance. When you have achieved correctness in your program, this is a good time to whip out your profiler and actually figure out what does need speeding up. Always measure the before and after performance of your application. Often enough you'll find that your brilliant optimization doesn't speed things up at all, or worse yet, makes it slower.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'd say that the majority of programmers, tech writers, and other creative folks who produced copyrighted work for hire provide a lot more benefit to society that the majority of musicians and filmmakers."
This is really good stuff. You're a programmer, so you don't have a problem with your employer selling licenses to your work (and presumably paying your salary). But other people's work.. that should be freely distributed.
Maybe we should summarize your philosophy as "Other people's information wants to be free."
An attractive proposition to be sure, but perhaps not very just.
You slash dot kids.
You're always so cute when you try to add philosophical trappings to what comes down to simple entitlement.
"Your created rights of copyright impinge on my natural freedom to download music for my iPod."
Some people might be embarrassed to tell musicians and movie makers that they shouldn't be compensated for the work they do, but in the blue green world of news for nerds, it's considered a noble crusade.
So, your proof is a rumor that has been immediately denied by the people actually running the site?
QED! QED! You go man!
Your story is very close to that of one of my friends.
He found out his boss was doing illegal stuff and even wrote them a memo saying that it was illegal. But, he didn't report them to the police or quit.
When they did get busted, his boss disappeared to South America. He cooperated with the cops, never imagining that they would come after him.
They did. He was convicted of a felony and served 6 months in federal prison.
Actually, I think you've described it quite accurately and succinctly.
"Any aeai [artificial intelligence] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it." --Ian McDonald, _River of Gods_
Use lftp
It will let you connect to sftp servers, and have a sane command line experience. It also has many nifty mirroring commands.
The RIAA has conducted about 26,000 lawsuits, and there are more than 15 million music downloaders. Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research said it best: "If you're a file sharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid."
Over 1 in every 1000 people is going to be hit by asteroids! Crap!
I loved DX1, and finally got around to DX2 (after avoiding it for a long time). It wasn't that great, but also probably not as bad as it was made out to be (dashed expectations and so on).
But it is true that so far, the quality of DX games has been directly proportional to the involvement of Warren Spector. Since this next one doesn't involve him at all....
Why would I have to RTFA, when I've PTFG (Played the f***g games)?
The system is identical as many people responding to you point out. Just because your modern PC can process the load times in less than a second, where my old PC used to sit there for 20 seconds while I went to get a coke from the fridge, doesn't mean that HL1 doesn't have level loads...
Perhaps you're too young to have played the game when it came out...
He's pointing out that HL1 and HL2 work the same way. So making a distinction between them (as is done in the summary) makes no sense.
Oh, yeah, that's good... right there.. yeah.. HEY! LESS STING! LESS STING!
Heh. I'm a 37 year old computer professional, know-it-all.
You're posting anonymously, so I'm not sure who I'm addressing here. But if you look at Jelle's post that started this little subtree, he says,
"Such as somebody with access to the terminal for 15 seconds when you're logged in and distracted (or a piece of spyware), and who would like to take the machine home overnight (after you think it's safely encrypted and turned off), to have plenty of time to secretly copy the whole 250GB of valuable data off it?"
This is the post that you've chosen to defend here. Clearly incorrect. This feature doesn't help someone with 15 seconds of unsupervised access to a machine, as I tersely pointed out, because they would need the pass-phrase to use the feature, and if they have the pass-phrase, you're lost already.
He also says, "I understand that the 'feature' (aka BUG) is hidden from many of its users..."
Which again betrays his lack of understanding, because if the people with access to the pass-phrase are unaware of the feature, then it can never cause them problems.
So, here's what it comes down to: This whole story purports to being about a security vulnerability in a disk encryption product. People immediately start crying "backdoor" (see the opening post to this thread, and it's immediate child). If this were true, it would be worthy of a story on Slashdot and worth our time to know about.
But in fact, to be vulnerable, you have to have a special need to reboot your machines remotely, go to their website or talk with their tech support find out there is a feature that makes this possible. Then you have to misuse this feature in a pointless way in order to make yourself vulnerable. Is there a warning message telling you to reboot immediately? I'm sure neither of us have any idea.
There simply isn't any meat here, just a little gristle and some juice. You can keep beating the issue around, looking for something to grab hold of, but anything you can carve off isn't going to satisfy.
Heh, until orange portal goes into the ceiling above the lava, and blue portal gets shot under your opponenets feet! ;)
Properly used, this feature does no such thing. Sure, if you set a password, and then didn't reboot immediately, you would disable encryption. But that would be foolish. There is no need to do something like that.
The feature is designed with an immediate reboot in mind. After the reboot, the password is removed, and there is no danger.
This does an attacker no good, since they are unable to set the password without knowing what it is.
Please explain your attack in detail, if you still think there is one. If not, think twice next time before you post.
What part of "You have to have the passphrase" didn't you understand.
If they have the passphrase, then they don't need to do anything fancy. They just take it home and decrypt it.
Because he failed to read the article correctly.
There isn't a backdoor. If you encrypt your hard drive, then lose it, nobody can read it.
If on the other hand, if you've encrypted your boot disk, and you want to remotely reboot your machine, you're going to need someway to feed the password to it before it can bring up the OS (and the networking layer).
This feature allows you to store a password for 1 time use. Then you reboot the machine, and when it comes up, it reads the password and erases it.
It's a useful feature. Doesn't effect you if you don't use it. Even if you do use it, you'd have to set the password then forget to reboot for it to be a problem.
Basically this whole story is a non-issue. The moderation on the grandparent is a reflection of his failure to reason through this.
Here's another vote for Science News. A little dry perhaps for the average person, but perfect for the enthusiastic amateur.
From the original post:
Now, can someone unfamiliar with a particular field, nay, a sub-discipline of that field, recognize these assumptions for what they are?"
One of the things that a good scientific journalist does is get opinions from the other big players in the field that the new paper is being published in. It's often the most interesting part of the article. When they say, "It's an interesting paper, but I won't be convinced until I see more data on..." we as the general public can get a better idea of just how far along the research really is.
He says that "the GPLv3 is a fine choice" in the context that he believes that everyone should be able to release code under whatever license they want to.
But as far as his own views go, he states:
"So I claim that for *me* the right choice is GPLv2 (or something similar).
I think the GPLv3 is overreaching."
So, getting back to the original statement: When you have one of the most influential people in Open Source refuse to accept the license.
Perhaps "refuse to accept" isn't exactly right, but clearly he disagrees with the direction that the GPLv3 has gone with, and has no interest in adopting it.
Linus's email was dated June 20th, 2007. That was less than a month ago. I suspect the text of the GPLv3 license he was commenting on didn't change between that date and the date it was released: June 29th, 2007.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/20/223
http://www.fsf.org/news/gplv3_launched
The "pretty ok" article you link, however, is dated several months ago: March 28, 2007.
If we were to eliminate jail times for non-violent offenses, then you would reduce our system of laws to an ala carte menu... If you have enough money, you pick and choose which ones you want to obey.
Does that sound democratic to you?
the whole concept of intellectual property is such a farce
Hah... we are on SlashDot, aren't we.
Only here can somebody take an issue that doesn't involve intellectual property (a company angry about their ideas being ripped off, which isn't against the law), and use it to damn all intellectual property. . I swear we could have a story on walruses, and someone would twist it into a scathing attack on the RIAA.
Copyright, for example, is pretty easy to understand and distinguish. If you copy my song, my movie, my program, without my license you have violated my copyright. If you copy my idea, you have not.
Sure it can be more complicated than that, but 99% of copyright issues are just that simple.
Ah, go to bed. You shouldn't be up after midnight drinking red wine and commenting on Slash dot global warming threads... what good could come of it? ;)
I also like:
The first rule of optimization is: Don't do it.
The second rule of optimization (for experts only) is: Don't do it yet.
Of course, in these cases, what they're really saying is, don't start out sacrificing simplicity to achieve what you imagine to be greater performance. When you have achieved correctness in your program, this is a good time to whip out your profiler and actually figure out what does need speeding up. Always measure the before and after performance of your application. Often enough you'll find that your brilliant optimization doesn't speed things up at all, or worse yet, makes it slower.
So you own no commercial music? no commercial games? no commercial software? don't watch commercial movies?
You won't even be a little sad after you've destroyed that world?