when you NEED to access the machine locally to help identify the rootkit (some crackers delete their work upon reboot to cover their tracks,
If you think a box has a rootkit, you should neither reboot it, nor investigate it while still running. Do an emergency power-off, and transplate the drive to another system (as neither writable nor executable) and investigate it there.
If you are serious about forensics on a compromised system, halting all execution of hostile code should be your first priority. So long as the code is still running, it might trigger to clean up its tracks at any time.
That's still NOT THEFT. Or do you think that prostitution and cocaine dealing are "theft"? By your logic, all crimes, including speed-limit violations, are theft.
Evil =
Once again, you use different words. Whether or not something is "evil" is irrelevant to it being "theft". Theft can sometimes be good (if the victim is herself sufficiently evil).
I eventually came up with the dissembling cognitive dissonance-resolver that I'd be happy if Microsoft were to take off as a games company and give up on Windows and all that other stuff that I find so threatening.
Microsoft's games projects still run Windows, and it has the potential to make Windows vastly more threatening than it already is.
Look at in-depth Xbox360 reviews and see how frequently, users are more impressed with the "dashboard" and Live services than the actually full-on games.
The Xbox project is an attempt to get hardware with PC-like functionality into homes, but minus the PC's ability to execute arbitrary programs from developers with no specific authorization. Microsoft will try to converge mainstream PC features into an "Xbox 720" device, and reduce the existing desktop PC market to a "prosumer" niche.
All of that, of course, will deprive Linux of 95% of it's platforms, and make MS's monopoly powers that much stronger.
Nonsense. Halo 2 is still quite playable with a normal controller.
Because it wasn't balanced for a mouse. Halo with mouse is pathetically easy. The accuracy of a mouse + the auto-aim required for thumbpad aiming makes the game seem childishly simple to an experienced PC FPS player.
with a SmartJoy FRAG, you can play the game as well as anyone as long as you set it up right.
No. According to Lik-Sang, your play will be different from normal users: "using a keyboard and a mouse, completely changes the way the game is played. Use of the mouse takes away the need to concentrate on aiming and leaves you free to concentrate on pure tactics."
The only reason the smartjoy-frag doesn't totally dominate high-level play is that it's rather flakey, and the game sometimes gets stuck for a second or two (in situations where the approved controller could effortlessly proceed)
Actually it has more than 5,000 exceptions. Just look at any of the homonyms with 3+ separate meanings and renderings. In a language which relies on non-alphabetic symbols to represent individual words, each of those symbols is technically an "exception".
If you pretended Japanese was spoken-only, then you could say it has few exceptions... but to be fair, the written version must be considered too. (If a person can speak+read Spanish and then learns to speak English, she can automatically read English too. But if she had learned to speak Japanese, then her Spanish-reading skills won't transfer over at all)
So if you burn down a housing project with the hope that the investor will fear building
Fear is not terror.
If I stay home from my bus-driving job so that commuters will fear having to drive in Manhattan and approve my pay raise, you say that makes me a terrorist?
Terrorism attacks targets that are *not* associated with the cause in order to spread the "terror" that no-one is safe.
No. By that definition, it is impossible to commit terrorism against random adult USA-citizens. Most of them are able to vote, and thus are technically in-charge of the country. Therefore they're all associated... but in reality, targetting them is still terrorism.
2) Trade files on a 1:1 basis with people you've met in real-life, using encrypted direct protocols
3) Use normal P2p, but only collect files not in the mainstream of MPAA and RIAA properties. That way, you won't be amoung the first defendants targeted in their lawsuits, and will have a warning to clean up your act (and purge your hard drive)
Can you cite an example where someone lost a lawsuit
See also the mp3.com lawsuit.
Generally the infringing party is the one offing up the copyrighted work for downloading, not the downloader.
In the USA, both are guilty, except that the uploader is easier to collect evidence against, and is likely to have infringed more times than a randomly-selected downloader. It has been said that Canada takes the opposite viewpoint (but not many people live there).
Even if downloading copies of media that you outright own is illegal, and I can see why the RIAA/MPAA would wish it to be illegal, why should it be illegal?
The question was specifically about "is illegal", not "should be illegal".
It makes no sense under any moral system I am familiar with.
The copyright system is intended to reward authors of popular content by allowing them (or their publishers) to collect money from people who want to view it.
Disallowing you from downloading content you already own in another media increases the probability you'll pay for it a second time, which financially rewards the author. And that gives him additional incentive to have created the work, which was the whole point.
Restricting copies of already-owned work is not morally different from copyright in general: in both cases, people are prohibited from doing something they could, to force them to buy permission from another.
Frankly, because it wouldn't be on demand if the bitrate was higher
I never said anything about "on demand". You brought it up, but it's a red herring.
Tivo is successful, but it's certainly not on-demand. Internet content delivery doesn't mean it will be on-demand; instead, it means viewing will be like Tivo, but with millions of "channels"- effectively, one per program per episode. It will be closer to on-demand than Tivo, because to record one specific episode you don't have to wait until some unspecified date in the future: virtually any content will be ready the day after you request it.
Similar genre with a similar palette and cinematography, BSG looks good full screen on an iBook and SD television
Exhibit a) TiVO. The resolution used by TivO leads to a data rate of 1 gigabyte/"hour", or about 380 kbps. Itunes video is 128 kbps, or 1/3rd as big. If 128 were good enough for typical TV viewers, then Tivo would use it, and achieve triple the storage time on the same hardware.
I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'.
There's no reason for everyone to assume internet video delivery must be on-demand.
Exhibit b) Netflix. Delays of at least 48 hours. Exhibit c) tv torrents. Delays of at least 4 hours, sometimes much more.
I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'.
Exhibit d) RCN Megamodem. I have seen them achieve download speeds adequate to stream two Tivo-quality videos simultaneously.
There are already consumers out there who can get big videos fast. If, as you claim, viewers would really need the shows to arrive in real-time, then they'd have the option to demand services like that.
I wouldn't download an hour of programming if it took more than an hour to download it... I'd just Tivo it instead.
You can't "TIVO" it, because it's not on TV. We're talking about programs that have already been canceled from the airwaves.
But from the constumer's viewpoint, TIVO and non-realtime downloading are the same. In both cases, you program the machine ahead of time for what shows you'd like, and then check it every evening to see what episodes it has collected by now.
Notably it seemed to get a lot better in season 3, when it seemed to move from being Bart-centric to Homer-centric.
That's when they decided to make it a comedy, instead of a tradegy. And I mean "comedy" in the original sense: "story with a happy ending". In the first 2 seasons, the Simpson family was unhappy, and it was their own fault. Afterwards, they were changed to flawed-but-good-natured, and lovable in spite of their failures.
The original Simpsons was somewhat like The Office (now on USA TV), in that it was supposed to be painful to watch such distressingly wrong characters.
You really think 320x240 video would do it justice? It's rather sad to see so many people pinning the hopes for internet TV delivery on iTunes video, when the 320x240 rez puts it so far below tvtorrents.net in quality.
You'd need a very well armed small country, only one appears to be a possibility...
For the near term, use Iran. True, the USA military is right nearby in Iraq, but they are too scared of enraging the border fighting there to make any deep strikes.
The key advantage of Iran is that you don't need any special arrangements with the government, because international copyrights do not apply there. File-sharing is fully legal in Iran, because USA copyrights have no authority there.
Who's to decide if I'm illegally downloading, or if I already own that CD and just couldn't be bothered ripping it myself?
Yes and yes. Just because you own a CD and could legally make an MP3 doesn't make it legal for you to download an equivalent MP3. People have been sued (and lost) on those exact grounds.
No. They don't scan your computer- you connect to their computer.
The RIAA's detectives join a P2p network just like any other random person, share a few files just like any other user, and keep a log of which addresses send data to them or request things from them. In just a few hours they can accumulate hundreds of IP addresses of people downloading a hot song. Then, paste them all into a form letter to the ISP providing that address, demanding the subscriber names using each one, and take them all to court.
As long as you connect to virtually-public P2p sites run by unknown and untrustworthy strangers, you have no assurance that they aren't recording each transaction you make with them. It's like asking how to tell that your drug dealer isn't informing on you.
Think about it this way: if you could wave a magic wand, and make copyright infringement disappear, would that make the average user more or less likely to pay for home Internet access?
Much, much, much more likely.
If copyright violations were magically annihilated, then it would be only a few weeks before all major movies, songs, and books used online-distribution and credit-card payment as the default avenue for publication. If not for fears of unpaided copies, the entertainment-content industries would've transitioned to almost 100% digital distribution years ago.
Surely its the ISP's fault for trying to provide a service it is incapable of delivering?
That's not a simple problem you can blame on any single entity. The only true solution will be to complicate ISP pricing schemes with the option for higher-priority, more expensive packets.
If someone is running typical P2p (or other large file transfer), per-packet latency can easily exceed 5-10 seconds without causing a problem. But VoIP needs at worse sub-second latency. There's no way the same network can be optimally designed for both those applications, unless either (a) users have the ability to flag some packets as requiring faster service or (b) the whole thing is made 10x more expensive, so that all packets are very-fast, even those that don't need it.
Don't be afraid of premium-IP-packets as exclusionary or elitist: instead, view them as a way for the rich to subsize bulk access for the poor.
Both of them are unquantifiable and decentralized enough to make inclusion in a list pointless, if it were possible.
If it's impossible to include the biggest samples in a list, then that list ITSELF is pointless. This is like listing the highest buildings in town, but excluding those with roofs too high to reach.
Any major ISP can give you a statistical break down of the port numbers they transmit, which will show that bittorrent moves more data than all other P2p protocols combined.
PS. Oddly, some journalists have pointed to that same presentation and used it to wrongly claim that edonkey is bigger than bittorrent. (Prehaps they extrapolated too far from a minor trend?)
I feel like typing a quicky introduction to Duverger's Law.
The one thing I don't understand is if you don't agree with a bunch of the policies of a party, why the heck are you in it
Have you asked yourself why there are only 2 real parties in the USA to begin with? After all, it can't be that everybody's opinions on a bunch of topics just randomly happen to fall into only 2 separate groups.
If people joined parties solely because of agreement on the issues, then there'd be 5+ parties, some of them in almost total agreement with each other except in a few issues.
But then, how would such parties fare in elections? The USA has a winner-takes-all system, where 51% votes means total victory, and 49% has lost exactly as strongly as 1%. Two roughly-similar parties will split the vote on issues that they agree on, meaning they will lose to a solo party, even if their position had more total voters!
To avoid splitting their vote in the future, those parties must combine. It's the only way to win on their points of agreement, although it means accepting a truce on the issues where they differ.
The natural process of struggling to win elections automatically leads to all 3rd-place and lesser parties to join one of the top two. Over time, the political scene will collapse into just two effective groups.
The only way to prevent that kind of optimization is to use a non-winner-take-all election style, such as a government formed proportionately from vote totals.
The Republican "Contract with America" was enormously popular and caused the largest shift in the congress ever
That's analogous to a contract-employee claiming success on a project just because he got paid, without looking at whether or not the job was actually finished
The Republican "Contract with America" was enormously popular and caused the largest shift in the congress ever
Oh, it succeeded at getting a punch of Republicans elected- but hasn't even made a dent in the actual goals. The largest element of the CwA was the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which would have mandated a balanced budget- and yet, President Bush is now out there creating the least balanced budgets in any recorded history.
(Cynically, if they HAD achieved the goals, then the problems would be solved, and the Republican candidates would have fewer platforms to run on today)
Slashdot Mirror
when you NEED to access the machine locally to help identify the rootkit (some crackers delete their work upon reboot to cover their tracks,
If you think a box has a rootkit, you should neither reboot it, nor investigate it while still running. Do an emergency power-off, and transplate the drive to another system (as neither writable nor executable) and investigate it there.
If you are serious about forensics on a compromised system, halting all execution of hostile code should be your first priority. So long as the code is still running, it might trigger to clean up its tracks at any time.
It's profiting from illegal acts.
That's still NOT THEFT. Or do you think that prostitution and cocaine dealing are "theft"? By your logic, all crimes, including speed-limit violations, are theft.
Evil =
Once again, you use different words. Whether or not something is "evil" is irrelevant to it being "theft". Theft can sometimes be good (if the victim is herself sufficiently evil).
I eventually came up with the dissembling cognitive dissonance-resolver that I'd be happy if Microsoft were to take off as a games company and give up on Windows and all that other stuff that I find so threatening.
Microsoft's games projects still run Windows, and it has the potential to make Windows vastly more threatening than it already is.
Look at in-depth Xbox360 reviews and see how frequently, users are more impressed with the "dashboard" and Live services than the actually full-on games.
The Xbox project is an attempt to get hardware with PC-like functionality into homes, but minus the PC's ability to execute arbitrary programs from developers with no specific authorization. Microsoft will try to converge mainstream PC features into an "Xbox 720" device, and reduce the existing desktop PC market to a "prosumer" niche.
All of that, of course, will deprive Linux of 95% of it's platforms, and make MS's monopoly powers that much stronger.
Search engines are not the answer to everything.
Ok, so explain to me what a search "engine" is? I need to know what you meant in that context!
Nonsense. Halo 2 is still quite playable with a normal controller.
Because it wasn't balanced for a mouse. Halo with mouse is pathetically easy. The accuracy of a mouse + the auto-aim required for thumbpad aiming makes the game seem childishly simple to an experienced PC FPS player.
with a SmartJoy FRAG, you can play the game as well as anyone as long as you set it up right.
No. According to Lik-Sang, your play will be different from normal users: "using a keyboard and a mouse, completely changes the way the game is played. Use of the mouse takes away the need to concentrate on aiming and leaves you free to concentrate on pure tactics."
The only reason the smartjoy-frag doesn't totally dominate high-level play is that it's rather flakey, and the game sometimes gets stuck for a second or two (in situations where the approved controller could effortlessly proceed)
Japanese has nearly no exceptions
Actually it has more than 5,000 exceptions. Just look at any of the homonyms with 3+ separate meanings and renderings. In a language which relies on non-alphabetic symbols to represent individual words, each of those symbols is technically an "exception".
If you pretended Japanese was spoken-only, then you could say it has few exceptions... but to be fair, the written version must be considered too. (If a person can speak+read Spanish and then learns to speak English, she can automatically read English too. But if she had learned to speak Japanese, then her Spanish-reading skills won't transfer over at all)
So if you burn down a housing project with the hope that the investor will fear building
Fear is not terror.
If I stay home from my bus-driving job so that commuters will fear having to drive in Manhattan and approve my pay raise, you say that makes me a terrorist?
Terrorism attacks targets that are *not* associated with the cause in order to spread the "terror" that no-one is safe.
No. By that definition, it is impossible to commit terrorism against random adult USA-citizens. Most of them are able to vote, and thus are technically in-charge of the country. Therefore they're all associated... but in reality, targetting them is still terrorism.
So what is the correct thing to do then?
Either
1) Obey your national copyright laws.
2) Trade files on a 1:1 basis with people you've met in
real-life, using encrypted direct protocols
3) Use normal P2p, but only collect files not in the mainstream of MPAA and RIAA properties. That way, you won't be amoung the first defendants targeted in their lawsuits, and will have a warning to clean up your act (and purge your hard drive)
Can you cite an example where someone lost a lawsuit
See also the mp3.com lawsuit.
Generally the infringing party is the one offing up the copyrighted work for downloading, not the downloader.
In the USA, both are guilty, except that the uploader is easier to collect evidence against, and is likely to have infringed more times than a randomly-selected downloader. It has been said that Canada takes the opposite viewpoint (but not many people live there).
Even if downloading copies of media that you outright own is illegal, and I can see why the RIAA/MPAA would wish it to be illegal, why should it be illegal?
The question was specifically about "is illegal", not "should be illegal".
It makes no sense under any moral system I am familiar with.
The copyright system is intended to reward authors of popular content by allowing them (or their publishers) to collect money from people who want to view it.
Disallowing you from downloading content you already own in another media increases the probability you'll pay for it a second time, which financially rewards the author. And that gives him additional incentive to have created the work, which was the whole point.
Restricting copies of already-owned work is not morally different from copyright in general: in both cases, people are prohibited from doing something they could, to force them to buy permission from another.
Frankly, because it wouldn't be on demand if the bitrate was higher
I never said anything about "on demand". You brought it up, but it's a red herring.
Tivo is successful, but it's certainly not on-demand. Internet content delivery doesn't mean it will be on-demand; instead, it means viewing will be like Tivo, but with millions of "channels"- effectively, one per program per episode. It will be closer to on-demand than Tivo, because to record one specific episode you don't have to wait until some unspecified date in the future: virtually any content will be ready the day after you request it.
Similar genre with a similar palette and cinematography, BSG looks good full screen on an iBook and SD television
Exhibit a) TiVO. The resolution used by TivO leads to a data rate of 1 gigabyte/"hour", or about 380 kbps. Itunes video is 128 kbps, or 1/3rd as big. If 128 were good enough for typical TV viewers, then Tivo would use it, and achieve triple the storage time on the same hardware.
I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'.
There's no reason for everyone to assume internet video delivery must be on-demand.
Exhibit b) Netflix. Delays of at least 48 hours.
Exhibit c) tv torrents. Delays of at least 4 hours, sometimes much more.
I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'.
Exhibit d) RCN Megamodem. I have seen them achieve download speeds adequate to stream two Tivo-quality videos simultaneously.
There are already consumers out there who can get big videos fast. If, as you claim, viewers would really need the shows to arrive in real-time, then they'd have the option to demand services like that.
I wouldn't download an hour of programming if it took more than an hour to download it... I'd just Tivo it instead.
You can't "TIVO" it, because it's not on TV. We're talking about programs that have already been canceled from the airwaves.
But from the constumer's viewpoint, TIVO and non-realtime downloading are the same. In both cases, you program the machine ahead of time for what shows you'd like, and then check it every evening to see what episodes it has collected by now.
Notably it seemed to get a lot better in season 3, when it seemed to move from being Bart-centric to Homer-centric.
That's when they decided to make it a comedy, instead of a tradegy. And I mean "comedy" in the original sense: "story with a happy ending". In the first 2 seasons, the Simpson family was unhappy, and it was their own fault. Afterwards, they were changed to flawed-but-good-natured, and lovable in spite of their failures.
The original Simpsons was somewhat like The Office (now on USA TV), in that it was supposed to be painful to watch such distressingly wrong characters.
iTunes would be great for shows like Firefly
You really think 320x240 video would do it justice? It's rather sad to see so many people pinning the hopes for internet TV delivery on iTunes video, when the 320x240 rez puts it so far below tvtorrents.net in quality.
I would suggest that there are a TON more then 150,000
150000 people + 1 ton of people = 150013 people.
Although, non-USA people would fit more in a ton, as they weigh less. But still, 1 ton of customers isn't much, economically speaking.
You'd need a very well armed small country, only one appears to be a possibility...
For the near term, use Iran. True, the USA military is right nearby in Iraq, but they are too scared of enraging the border fighting there to make any deep strikes.
The key advantage of Iran is that you don't need any special arrangements with the government, because international copyrights do not apply there. File-sharing is fully legal in Iran, because USA copyrights have no authority there.
Who's to decide if I'm illegally downloading, or if I already own that CD and just couldn't be bothered ripping it myself?
Yes and yes. Just because you own a CD and could legally make an MP3 doesn't make it legal for you to download an equivalent MP3. People have been sued (and lost) on those exact grounds.
You incorectly assume that US movies were the only thing traded on that site.
So, what percentage of Supernova's files were by Slovenian publishers? Please tell us, it should be really interesting!
A movie/music company scans a user's computer,
No. They don't scan your computer- you connect to their computer.
The RIAA's detectives join a P2p network just like any other random person, share a few files just like any other user, and keep a log of which addresses send data to them or request things from them. In just a few hours they can accumulate hundreds of IP addresses of people downloading a hot song. Then, paste them all into a form letter to the ISP providing that address, demanding the subscriber names using each one, and take them all to court.
As long as you connect to virtually-public P2p sites run by unknown and untrustworthy strangers, you have no assurance that they aren't recording each transaction you make with them. It's like asking how to tell that your drug dealer isn't informing on you.
Think about it this way: if you could wave a magic wand, and make copyright infringement disappear, would that make the average user more or less likely to pay for home Internet access?
Much, much, much more likely.
If copyright violations were magically annihilated, then it would be only a few weeks before all major movies, songs, and books used online-distribution and credit-card payment as the default avenue for publication. If not for fears of unpaided copies, the entertainment-content industries would've transitioned to almost 100% digital distribution years ago.
Surely its the ISP's fault for trying to provide a service it is incapable of delivering?
That's not a simple problem you can blame on any single entity. The only true solution will be to complicate ISP pricing schemes with the option for higher-priority, more expensive packets.
If someone is running typical P2p (or other large file transfer), per-packet latency can easily exceed 5-10 seconds without causing a problem. But VoIP needs at worse sub-second latency. There's no way the same network can be optimally designed for both those applications, unless either (a) users have the ability to flag some packets as requiring faster service or (b) the whole thing is made 10x more expensive, so that all packets are very-fast, even those that don't need it.
Don't be afraid of premium-IP-packets as exclusionary or elitist: instead, view them as a way for the rich to subsize bulk access for the poor.
Both of them are unquantifiable and decentralized enough to make inclusion in a list pointless, if it were possible.
If it's impossible to include the biggest samples in a list, then that list ITSELF is pointless. This is like listing the highest buildings in town, but excluding those with roofs too high to reach.
Any major ISP can give you a statistical break down of the port numbers they transmit, which will show that bittorrent moves more data than all other P2p protocols combined.
PS. Oddly, some journalists have pointed to that same presentation and used it to wrongly claim that edonkey is bigger than bittorrent. (Prehaps they extrapolated too far from a minor trend?)
waiting to release the story until just before a vote on extending the Patriot Act to have the maximum political effect?
The "maximum political effect" would've been to release 48 hours before the vote on electing G.W.Bush. Anything else is trivial.
If this news had come out election week last year, Bush WOULD have lost 2 battleground states due to angered libertarian-sympathizers.
If waiting a year to publish the news is to be viewed as politically manipulative, it can only from a PRO-Bush angle.
Kosovo was NOT a unilateral UN move.
You might want to study the distinction between the words "unilateral" and "unanimous", so you don't keep saying the opposite of what you mean.
I feel like typing a quicky introduction to Duverger's Law.
The one thing I don't understand is if you don't agree with a bunch of the policies of a party, why the heck are you in it
Have you asked yourself why there are only 2 real parties in the USA to begin with? After all, it can't be that everybody's opinions on a bunch of topics just randomly happen to fall into only 2 separate groups.
If people joined parties solely because of agreement on the issues, then there'd be 5+ parties, some of them in almost total agreement with each other except in a few issues.
But then, how would such parties fare in elections? The USA has a winner-takes-all system, where 51% votes means total victory, and 49% has lost exactly as strongly as 1%. Two roughly-similar parties will split the vote on issues that they agree on, meaning they will lose to a solo party, even if their position had more total voters!
To avoid splitting their vote in the future, those parties must combine. It's the only way to win on their points of agreement, although it means accepting a truce on the issues where they differ.
The natural process of struggling to win elections automatically leads to all 3rd-place and lesser parties to join one of the top two. Over time, the political scene will collapse into just two effective groups.
The only way to prevent that kind of optimization is to use a non-winner-take-all election style, such as a government formed proportionately from vote totals.
The Republican "Contract with America" was enormously popular and caused the largest shift in the congress ever
That's analogous to a contract-employee claiming success on a project just because he got paid, without looking at whether or not the job was actually finished
The Republican "Contract with America" was enormously popular and caused the largest shift in the congress ever
Oh, it succeeded at getting a punch of Republicans elected- but hasn't even made a dent in the actual goals. The largest element of the CwA was the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which would have mandated a balanced budget- and yet, President Bush is now out there creating the least balanced budgets in any recorded history.
(Cynically, if they HAD achieved the goals, then the problems would be solved, and the Republican candidates would have fewer platforms to run on today)