Situation 1: no law is passed, just a threat. Scapegoat: the ISP Situation 2: law is passed. Scapegoat: the Government
Am I the only one who feels like threatening to pass a law is an abuse of power? Why are ISP's even stupid enough to fall for this, basically making themselves unpopular for something that (apparently) they are not obligated to enforce (yet)? Give them the finger, tell them to pass their stupid law, and when customers complain, clearly point the finger at the arses that passed it.
How are you going to *enforce* it. It's not even something like drunk driving where you can give the guy a blood test and find out if he's been drinking. It'd be damn near impossible to prove that that specific person was on the phone at the moment of the accident, unless the phone gets embedded in their cheek.
Yeah, it's not like records are kept on cellphone conversations or anything.
Perhaps. But one can also include error correction information in the image, allowing even partial or damaged images to reconstruct the torrent file. Assuming of course it is not damaged beyond recognition or cropped too much (but I doubt such image hosting sites would live long).
Even if it WAS an invalid PNG file, if IE crashed because of that then you have much bigger problems to worry about (hint: such "crashes" are exactly the thing hackers exploit to gain access to your machine). IE should not crash on any invalid data it is fed, that includes images, HTML, bad javascripting, and so on. If a bad image file crashes IE, then it is possible hackers could craft an image file that doesn't crash IE but may do something nasty instead.
It would defeat this scheme yes. However, it would not defeat a scheme where the data hidden is also partially redundant to facility automatic error correction. You could do the equivalent of storing PAR2 style blocks in the image, try to decode the image, and assuming the data had sufficient redundancy, the error correction algorithm would be able to recover the original file.
A well chosen way of hiding the data with enough redundancy could even survive being recompressed as JPEG, assuming your not using a ridiculously high compression level.
PNG is extensible. If they donot convert the image from PNG to something else, then you can just add another block of data. Every compliant decoder will skip the unknown data automatically.
If they DO convert it, then this technique seems pointless, unless these hidden torrents survive automatic conversion to for example JPEG. Somehow I doubt that though as it is simply not possible to hide that much random data (hash values) in a file that's lossy compressed to something that's likely smaller than the original torrent file:)
If they want to get rid of the problem, all they have to do is target offending porno sites with a massive DDOS attack. They could slave every idle govt PC in the country to the task, and there are an awful lot of idle govt PCs.
Yeah, cause you know, there's no collateral damage when doing a massive DDOS attack.
I've got literally hundreds of thousands of files. I cannot be bothered to tag these in any way. Any tags derived from these files "automatically" are going to be completely pointless and will not help me locate anything.
Tagging is a nice concept... for something limited like Letters I wrote and Family Photos and the like. Go beyond just a few "thousands" of files, and the tagging itself is gonna consume more time than I'm willing to spend.
Well, for me the difference will always be that Commercial software usually has investors interest at heart (which is not quite the same as having the consumer's interest at heart, although close, otherwise consumers wouldn't buy it at all), while OSS software has the user's interest at heart (which is often the author of the software, which is again not quite the same as your common user).
The difference is subtle, but commercial software often is more annoying: more questions being asked of the user, more annoying splash screens, pop-ups, flashy stupid defaults nobody would use but looks nice for marketing, that kind of stuff. You're also unlikely to see features like ad-skipping in Media Center or ad-block in IE, or an easy way to rip CD's directly with Windows. There's lots of features frowned upon by investors that consumers would probably love.
That's why I personally like OSS software more. It tends to limit me less, and it adds features that at least please a small selection of users (the author(s)). It does mean it is often less polished, but I can live with that. It's not too big of a problem if the software just keeps running without a glitch once properly configured.
GIF anims stuck in side bars when TRYING to read an article are so annoying for me that I've got any form of animation turned off. I think I would notice if text started changing the whole time. Periferal vision is highly attuned to seeing changes/movement, although you can't tell exactly what until you focus on it again.
Sites that tell me which browser they're optimized/approved/suited for just scream to me: "A clueless newbie web designer built our site and thinks using the right browser is part of a holy crusade". I couldn't care less what a web site is optimized for, do they REALLY think I would switch browsers just for THEIR site?
As for Apple, just ignore them. If they had any sense at all they'd just support both standards (like Google) as it is 0 effort on their part to add OGG (as it is free and unencumbered). The fact that they don't want to just shows their true nature, not quite as evil as Oracle, but more evil than Microsoft.
I don't quite see how it would allow you to more fully utilize resources. This is usually the argument given by people that think paging somehow will increase your systems performance because it makes more optimal use of all the memory.
Unfortunately, this is only true if you have the perfect paging algorithm. It basically requires that you have a paging algorithm that is almost psychic in its ability to predict what future data may or may not be needed. Current paging algorithms, although no doubt complex, are however no where near that smart. So given a non-optimal algorithm, there's no guarantee that system performance will actually benefit.
For example, some pagers think that anything read from disk is worth caching, even if the data is being consumed at a rate SLOWER than the underlying media can supply it -- a video stream is a good example, why bother caching such a stream at all when it is consumed at speeds much lower than today's HD throughput? The same goes for unpredictable access patterns -- if the underlying data is much larger than your memory, any caching of such accesses is likely to result in no gains whatsoever. Another great example is a nightly scan of all files -- none of these files is likely to be touched twice in a row (it's a scan after all), but it results in huge amounts of data that may need to be cached.
However, all these examples of where caching actually gains you very little do result in pressures to swap out data that wasn't used for even longer periods of time (despite the fact that it is more likely to be needed again). This results in applications getting swapped out that are dormant. The amount of memory these applications take is nowadays often a tiny fraction of total memory, yet they get sacrificed so that the pager can devote even more memory for what can often be pointless caching -- it accomplishes NOTHING by doing this.
The end result is that after a night of sporadic and slow network activity, maybe some kind of backup or indexing activity, all your applications are swapped out and unresponsive.
Now I realize this is most likely more a discussion intended for server systems, but even those systems suffer from this -- workers arriving in the morning find that their log-in attempts take longer than usual, opening certain applications takes longer than usual, simply because the processes that handle these actions have been dormant too long and got swapped out overnight.
My problems with patents is that as more and more people work in a certain field, the change of independent discovery of an idea increases drastically (especially the so-called "ideas" one sees patented these days). In the software world, any reasonable competent programmer comes up with any number of ideas during the course of their work (sometimes also referred to as "reinventing the wheel", although perhaps on a smaller scale).
Programming software therefore is rapidly becoming a huge patent minefield, one which is not easily avoided since reinventing the wheel is pretty common in software development. Taking time to study patents to see if none were violated would make the cost of writing even the simplest software prohibitive. It would be like writing a message (like this one), except I'd have to check with the patent office if certain ways of expressing my thoughts (like one does in programming) aren't someone's exclusive property.
In my opinion, the entire of idea of patenting something is assuming that you or your company are so smart that it could not possibly have been discovered by the other 6 billion people on the planet (whether they already did it before you which is often the case, or discover it independently later).
Except on wikipedia, you do know where it's been, and you do know who edited it last.
Wikipedia is not 100% reliable, but I can atleast see if there's controversy, what the recent edits were and who did them. You can see the entire evolution of the article, including discussions taking place on the specific topic. It's a lot harder to find out who paid an "expert" witness, what edits were made (and by whom) in printed media or if there was any controversy behind the screens that may be important to your case.
Let's please also abolish stupid websites asking for my e-mail address twice (plainly visible in both cases) to "confirm" it. I absolutely donot see the point as all I end up doing is copy pasting the first version.
You must be forced to use it. Here in Europe we adopted the Euro in a lot of countries, in a very short period the old currency was phased out and the Euro introduced. At first I was converting values as well, but after 2 or 3 years I've switched thinking to Euro's and only ever do a currency conversion when thinking about very old purchases (house, car, previous salary, etc..)
I don't know if it would be similar, but in my opinion it should not be much harder as for example learning to work with say hexadecimal values, or knowing how to express temperature in celsius and fahrenheit.
You're right, of course, but Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation systems are quite good at enforcing groupthink. As long as the majority of people on this site just want free stuff, rational opinions will be marginalized, and the same tired old lines will get modded up over and over.
"Hollywood only makes crap, no one would pay for it even if they couldn't download it." "Piracy doesn't take a physical good from anyone, so it's OK." "They've over-extended terms/sued for too much/employed illegal tactics to harass filesharers, therefore I'm justified in stealing their stuff." "It's my right to free speech to copy that guy's free speech verbatim!" "Artists are just leeches trying to coast on a few minutes of work" blah blah blah...
Copyright is all about control. You only need to look at one little fact to see that that is the only reason for it to exist:
The fact that Copyright extensions are retro-active.
I mean, they extend copyright, but it does not only apply to new works (billed as an extra incentive of course), but it also applies to works already made??? Do you mean that those works would not have been created if 50 years in the future there wouldn't have been a retro-active extension? Of course not, those works were created and they knew full well what they were getting in to -- and now they want more. They're simply a tax on society, creating wealth out of thin air for older works by doing nothing other than lobbying for a retro-active copyright extension.
If they really were doing this all to benefit society with more an better creative works, there would no need for these extensions to be retro-active (after all, these works have been produced already). They could give us a well-thought out argument that by extending copyright so-and-so long would encourage more NEW works to be created. They haven't though, and that's where you can clearly see the corporate greed shining through.
I think you are right. Things have gotten so out of hand that even if we lobbied for a 1 year copyright, it would still be 50 years if we met in the middle, which is still ludicrously long.
Worst part is that if they agreed to meet you in the middle, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on anymore when you then claim that 50 years is still too long. Abolishing copyright law is probably the best thing that could ever happen to an economy, unless of course it is the American economy.
So instead of having an opinion on the matter by giving it some rational thought, you instead back draconian laws to spite the other camp.
But anyway, hate to break it to YOU, but eventually copyright will be abolished or atleast become completely toothless. You may think that you can control a digital work with some legislation, DRM or some other technological barrier, but in reality you can't and never will.
Even though this may seem evil, I think it has been a long time coming. Artists donot deserve special treatment. They donot deserve to earn more per hour than any other highly skilled professional. They certainly donot deserve to profit from their work in perpetuity just because the industry they belong to (yes, it's an industry) managed to lobby for special treatment of their workers. Let's not even get into the fact that these rights are usually in the hands of corporations making copyright nothing more than a tax on society to benefit some specific corporations.
Since in order to enforce copyright one will (eventually) have to require draconian monitoring of every action a citizen takes (which includes everything they do in the privacy of their own home), it will likely have indirect repercussions for free speech, simply because once such draconian monitoring is in place it will be used for other purposes as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The threat of passing a law... my god.
Situation 1: no law is passed, just a threat. Scapegoat: the ISP
Situation 2: law is passed. Scapegoat: the Government
Am I the only one who feels like threatening to pass a law is an abuse of power? Why are ISP's even stupid enough to fall for this, basically making themselves unpopular for something that (apparently) they are not obligated to enforce (yet)? Give them the finger, tell them to pass their stupid law, and when customers complain, clearly point the finger at the arses that passed it.
Yeah, it's not like records are kept on cellphone conversations or anything.
Perhaps. But one can also include error correction information in the image, allowing even partial or damaged images to reconstruct the torrent file. Assuming of course it is not damaged beyond recognition or cropped too much (but I doubt such image hosting sites would live long).
Insightful?
Even if it WAS an invalid PNG file, if IE crashed because of that then you have much bigger problems to worry about (hint: such "crashes" are exactly the thing hackers exploit to gain access to your machine). IE should not crash on any invalid data it is fed, that includes images, HTML, bad javascripting, and so on. If a bad image file crashes IE, then it is possible hackers could craft an image file that doesn't crash IE but may do something nasty instead.
It would defeat this scheme yes. However, it would not defeat a scheme where the data hidden is also partially redundant to facility automatic error correction. You could do the equivalent of storing PAR2 style blocks in the image, try to decode the image, and assuming the data had sufficient redundancy, the error correction algorithm would be able to recover the original file.
A well chosen way of hiding the data with enough redundancy could even survive being recompressed as JPEG, assuming your not using a ridiculously high compression level.
PNG is extensible. If they donot convert the image from PNG to something else, then you can just add another block of data. Every compliant decoder will skip the unknown data automatically.
If they DO convert it, then this technique seems pointless, unless these hidden torrents survive automatic conversion to for example JPEG. Somehow I doubt that though as it is simply not possible to hide that much random data (hash values) in a file that's lossy compressed to something that's likely smaller than the original torrent file :)
Yeah, cause you know, there's no collateral damage when doing a massive DDOS attack.
Sorry, not gonna work.
I've got literally hundreds of thousands of files. I cannot be bothered to tag these in any way. Any tags derived from these files "automatically" are going to be completely pointless and will not help me locate anything.
Tagging is a nice concept... for something limited like Letters I wrote and Family Photos and the like. Go beyond just a few "thousands" of files, and the tagging itself is gonna consume more time than I'm willing to spend.
If your idea of Cross Platform is API's designed for Windows with all other platforms being an afterthought...
Well, for me the difference will always be that Commercial software usually has investors interest at heart (which is not quite the same as having the consumer's interest at heart, although close, otherwise consumers wouldn't buy it at all), while OSS software has the user's interest at heart (which is often the author of the software, which is again not quite the same as your common user).
The difference is subtle, but commercial software often is more annoying: more questions being asked of the user, more annoying splash screens, pop-ups, flashy stupid defaults nobody would use but looks nice for marketing, that kind of stuff. You're also unlikely to see features like ad-skipping in Media Center or ad-block in IE, or an easy way to rip CD's directly with Windows. There's lots of features frowned upon by investors that consumers would probably love.
That's why I personally like OSS software more. It tends to limit me less, and it adds features that at least please a small selection of users (the author(s)). It does mean it is often less polished, but I can live with that. It's not too big of a problem if the software just keeps running without a glitch once properly configured.
GIF anims stuck in side bars when TRYING to read an article are so annoying for me that I've got any form of animation turned off. I think I would notice if text started changing the whole time. Periferal vision is highly attuned to seeing changes/movement, although you can't tell exactly what until you focus on it again.
So, tomorrow (when HTML5 is released) there won't be a problem anymore then?
Sites that tell me which browser they're optimized/approved/suited for just scream to me: "A clueless newbie web designer built our site and thinks using the right browser is part of a holy crusade". I couldn't care less what a web site is optimized for, do they REALLY think I would switch browsers just for THEIR site?
As for Apple, just ignore them. If they had any sense at all they'd just support both standards (like Google) as it is 0 effort on their part to add OGG (as it is free and unencumbered). The fact that they don't want to just shows their true nature, not quite as evil as Oracle, but more evil than Microsoft.
I see no problem. Apple doesn't want to support OGG, I couldn't care less. They'll come around eventually if it becomes popular.
I don't quite see how it would allow you to more fully utilize resources. This is usually the argument given by people that think paging somehow will increase your systems performance because it makes more optimal use of all the memory.
Unfortunately, this is only true if you have the perfect paging algorithm. It basically requires that you have a paging algorithm that is almost psychic in its ability to predict what future data may or may not be needed. Current paging algorithms, although no doubt complex, are however no where near that smart. So given a non-optimal algorithm, there's no guarantee that system performance will actually benefit.
For example, some pagers think that anything read from disk is worth caching, even if the data is being consumed at a rate SLOWER than the underlying media can supply it -- a video stream is a good example, why bother caching such a stream at all when it is consumed at speeds much lower than today's HD throughput? The same goes for unpredictable access patterns -- if the underlying data is much larger than your memory, any caching of such accesses is likely to result in no gains whatsoever. Another great example is a nightly scan of all files -- none of these files is likely to be touched twice in a row (it's a scan after all), but it results in huge amounts of data that may need to be cached.
However, all these examples of where caching actually gains you very little do result in pressures to swap out data that wasn't used for even longer periods of time (despite the fact that it is more likely to be needed again). This results in applications getting swapped out that are dormant. The amount of memory these applications take is nowadays often a tiny fraction of total memory, yet they get sacrificed so that the pager can devote even more memory for what can often be pointless caching -- it accomplishes NOTHING by doing this.
The end result is that after a night of sporadic and slow network activity, maybe some kind of backup or indexing activity, all your applications are swapped out and unresponsive.
Now I realize this is most likely more a discussion intended for server systems, but even those systems suffer from this -- workers arriving in the morning find that their log-in attempts take longer than usual, opening certain applications takes longer than usual, simply because the processes that handle these actions have been dormant too long and got swapped out overnight.
My problems with patents is that as more and more people work in a certain field, the change of independent discovery of an idea increases drastically (especially the so-called "ideas" one sees patented these days). In the software world, any reasonable competent programmer comes up with any number of ideas during the course of their work (sometimes also referred to as "reinventing the wheel", although perhaps on a smaller scale).
Programming software therefore is rapidly becoming a huge patent minefield, one which is not easily avoided since reinventing the wheel is pretty common in software development. Taking time to study patents to see if none were violated would make the cost of writing even the simplest software prohibitive. It would be like writing a message (like this one), except I'd have to check with the patent office if certain ways of expressing my thoughts (like one does in programming) aren't someone's exclusive property.
In my opinion, the entire of idea of patenting something is assuming that you or your company are so smart that it could not possibly have been discovered by the other 6 billion people on the planet (whether they already did it before you which is often the case, or discover it independently later).
Except on wikipedia, you do know where it's been, and you do know who edited it last.
Wikipedia is not 100% reliable, but I can atleast see if there's controversy, what the recent edits were and who did them. You can see the entire evolution of the article, including discussions taking place on the specific topic. It's a lot harder to find out who paid an "expert" witness, what edits were made (and by whom) in printed media or if there was any controversy behind the screens that may be important to your case.
Let's please also abolish stupid websites asking for my e-mail address twice (plainly visible in both cases) to "confirm" it. I absolutely donot see the point as all I end up doing is copy pasting the first version.
You must be forced to use it. Here in Europe we adopted the Euro in a lot of countries, in a very short period the old currency was phased out and the Euro introduced. At first I was converting values as well, but after 2 or 3 years I've switched thinking to Euro's and only ever do a currency conversion when thinking about very old purchases (house, car, previous salary, etc..)
I don't know if it would be similar, but in my opinion it should not be much harder as for example learning to work with say hexadecimal values, or knowing how to express temperature in celsius and fahrenheit.
My last upgrade was a few months ago, and I'm happy to say that it seems that I'm finally staying a bit "ahead" of the curve:
/raid1 /raid2
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/raid1 2.8T 933G 1.9T 34%
/dev/mapper/raid2 2.8T 2.4T 342G 88%
:-)
You're right, of course, but Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation systems are quite good at enforcing groupthink. As long as the majority of people on this site just want free stuff, rational opinions will be marginalized, and the same tired old lines will get modded up over and over.
"Hollywood only makes crap, no one would pay for it even if they couldn't download it."
"Piracy doesn't take a physical good from anyone, so it's OK."
"They've over-extended terms/sued for too much/employed illegal tactics to harass filesharers, therefore I'm justified in stealing their stuff."
"It's my right to free speech to copy that guy's free speech verbatim!"
"Artists are just leeches trying to coast on a few minutes of work"
blah blah blah...
--
Blatantly stolen by me.
Copyright is all about control. You only need to look at one little fact to see that that is the only reason for it to exist:
The fact that Copyright extensions are retro-active.
I mean, they extend copyright, but it does not only apply to new works (billed as an extra incentive of course), but it also applies to works already made??? Do you mean that those works would not have been created if 50 years in the future there wouldn't have been a retro-active extension? Of course not, those works were created and they knew full well what they were getting in to -- and now they want more. They're simply a tax on society, creating wealth out of thin air for older works by doing nothing other than lobbying for a retro-active copyright extension.
If they really were doing this all to benefit society with more an better creative works, there would no need for these extensions to be retro-active (after all, these works have been produced already). They could give us a well-thought out argument that by extending copyright so-and-so long would encourage more NEW works to be created. They haven't though, and that's where you can clearly see the corporate greed shining through.
I think you are right. Things have gotten so out of hand that even if we lobbied for a 1 year copyright, it would still be 50 years if we met in the middle, which is still ludicrously long.
Worst part is that if they agreed to meet you in the middle, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on anymore when you then claim that 50 years is still too long. Abolishing copyright law is probably the best thing that could ever happen to an economy, unless of course it is the American economy.
So instead of having an opinion on the matter by giving it some rational thought, you instead back draconian laws to spite the other camp.
But anyway, hate to break it to YOU, but eventually copyright will be abolished or atleast become completely toothless. You may think that you can control a digital work with some legislation, DRM or some other technological barrier, but in reality you can't and never will.
Even though this may seem evil, I think it has been a long time coming. Artists donot deserve special treatment. They donot deserve to earn more per hour than any other highly skilled professional. They certainly donot deserve to profit from their work in perpetuity just because the industry they belong to (yes, it's an industry) managed to lobby for special treatment of their workers. Let's not even get into the fact that these rights are usually in the hands of corporations making copyright nothing more than a tax on society to benefit some specific corporations.
Since in order to enforce copyright one will (eventually) have to require draconian monitoring of every action a citizen takes (which includes everything they do in the privacy of their own home), it will likely have indirect repercussions for free speech, simply because once such draconian monitoring is in place it will be used for other purposes as well.