As we've seen this past month, viruses/worms pose major threats to everyone, apparently even those who don't download 20KB.exe files thanks to XP's "features." So when you have a hundred thousand people with pirated copies of XP and anti-virus ware, and the companies decide to block service to the stolen copies, they are turning their back on a chance to secure a larger percentage of malignantly infected computers spewing their payloads to as many random IPs they can generate. And while the paying customer may be secured from remote vulnerabilities to the virus, they are not secured from floods of all flavors of packets.
I can understand my CoolEdit software deleting itself if it finds out I pirated it as in doing so, it does not leave others at risk. But people who legitly run anti-virus software tend to have paid for it out of FUD, or passively possess it from it having been included with their PC (I'm talking about non-savvy Joe GUI), and the Kazaa'ers out there pirating this kind of software must be a pretty miniscule percentage of their customer base.
Basically what I'm saying is they're probably not going to save much money from a move like this, and their doing is comes at the expense of the safety of all users (pirates and honest people alike). It's their right, but it makes me a sad panda.
Not really sure what you're talking about or why it's flamebait, but since you mentioned "Wormwood" I thought I'd footnote that the wormwood root, which is found in true Absinthe, contains alpha-thujone which is the active ingredient in the widely-banned Anise flavored liquor. It is chemically similiar to THC and is believed to induce some trippy psychosis (which blends nicely with the 120+ proof aperatif).
Again, big deal. What interest does AOL have in developing Mozilla when they're already in bed with MSFT for their browser? While you may love blocking pop-ups with Phoenix/Firebird, it's not in the interests of AOL Time Warner shareholders to foot the bill to continue developing software that competes with an apparently more important partner of theirs (MS).
I'm sorry they didn't go and stick with Mozilla* from the beginning, but for whatever set of reasons, IE is the way they're going. AOL/TW is a business, not a nerd charity. So the grandparent should not be modded down, if that's okay with you.
Re:That would be a natural ceiling
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 0
The speed of sound through what? Depending on the density of the matter that you are sending soundwaves through, sound travels at a different rate. Mach 1 is much faster at 500 feet than it is at 50K feet, so that should be kept in mind when comparing the two. Light's speed is constant, but its path can be bent.
Slightly OT, but I'm keeping my eye on OGG because any future acceptance into the masses it earns will illustrate a perfect example (even though they are license-free), of how a superior product will climb above the rest in this country and the power of advertising will succumb to superiority.
It might take a while, but that's the ideal fruit of capitalism and OGG will highlight it as the efforts behind its creation were focused exclusively and successfully on designing a superior product and not at all on money, advertising, business models, marketing, and so on. With a little help from consumer "watchdogs" (like slashdot in this instance), consumers will ultimately find and use the best product and no amount advertising will stop them.
Eventually, of course....
Go OGG!
Film motion picture cameras for bootleggers?
on
Foiling Cinema Pirates
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If this becomes a problem for the bootlegging market, I see some demand emerging for motion picture film cameras (if they can find one on eBay that's quiet and small enough) as they would not be effected by FPS rates or sneaky scrambling techniques. They film the thing in the theater, maybe at a really late night showing on a Monday night when it's not too crowded, leave, get the thing developed, and capture the pirate-able motion picture onto their computer one way or another.
They could possibly accomplish that by projecting it onto their own screen and videoing it, then capturing that video into their computer, or maybe some sort of a negative scanner that can scan a couple hundred thousand negatives automatically in a reasonable period of time. What do you think? Genius?
I don't like this. The more we steer toward developing software that is intended to run exclusively on a specific Linux package like Debian, the less general compatability and more partitions in what the world is now beginning to know as "Linux" will be created and perpetuated, and that will hurt the pursuit of larger marketshare and acceptance to the masses.
For example, it really pisses me off that Windows XP dropped support for new software running on old Windows versions, and even worse, vice versa with not-so-older Windows version software not working on XP! Sleazy. That, if I were not already a devoted Linux user (which I am), or a Kazaa pirater (which I'd only be if I were on a Windows box), would keep me from upgrading to the newest version.
The best thing about RPM to me is that you don't have to spend twenty hours downloading a zillion dependencies. It has improved my quality of life significantly. While Debian's better support that already exists for their own package system is pretty appealing to me, if a popular new SourceForge-like site which is exclusive to Debian picks up steam and people start programming new stuff under that format, we are just going to get a more complicated Linux world that will only hurt us in gaining marketshare. Maybe you don't care about marketshare, but as a Linux advocate, I do.
So you Debian boss men, cool it on the exclusivity, and keep up with the spirit of your "by the people for the people" essence which contrasts with the corporate goals of larger public Linux companies.
Do we really want to put ourselves further in a position in which we have to intramurially port to other Linux packages in addition to porting to other OSes? If I got the whole idea of what's going on here factually, I apologize.
Completely OT (like the thread...), but anyone remember Godwin's Law?
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
When I read that years ago, it really got me thinking. Here's something that was born on Usenet but indeed it does seem to hold true to real life as a natural law. Though this particular discussion is not a Usenet example, it is a discussion. Anyone notice consistant examples of this being demonstrated IRL?
There's a stunning portion of us (~17%) that have some type of abnormal psych disorder. Some, not all, of these disorders compell people to detach from the rest of the outside world, either out of complete ahedonic lack of interest in other people or anxiety-stemmed social phobia. My theory is that these people, the folks with the negative (not manic) symptoms, have a lot more time to kill because they're simply not doing stuff out of depression and thus have nothing much to do but watch TV or sit in front of a computer. The other group that have subdued social phobia symptoms obviously find it easier to use chatrooms and other Internet forums for socializing. These aren't necessary the ones that are the culprit disorders in my hypothesis, but FYI some of these personality disorders include paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal (those are NOT schizophrenia), borderline, antisocial, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, etc.
Also, there are higher rates of association of sociopathological disorders with major psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia and manic depression, and to throw one stat at you, roughly one in 33 of us are bipolar. Most of the bipolars have the type (bipolar type 2) that puts the person in the depressed phase longer and hardly ever in the manic phase that it's almost not worth distinguishing them from unipolars. The Internet provides a safer outlet to break the law (credit card fraud, phreaking, dos attacks) as it is less likely to get caught doing that than it is to shoot up schools. Not all people with these disorders have these antisocial disorders (not all dogs are poodles), but we're generalizing here. The Internet also provides very easy access to all sorts of pornography, and paraphilia is also correlated with these disorders at substantially higher rates than the healthy folks. Just take a look at what's flying through your Gnutella monitor. And if you got Windows, check out some of those member-created AOL chatrooms. Paraphilia's all over the place.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there is virtually no association of lower intelligence with these disorders (often the opposite, in fact), so that could also be why the people who are a little too good at computers are, let's face it, pretty weird.
Don't mean to offend anyone, there should be no more shame with suffering from any of these psychological diseases than there is with suffering from diabetes. They're often just as treatable, by the way. And there are lots (most) of the computer whizzes without any thought disorder whatsoever. But I think I'm onto something when I say that various abnormal psych disorders are conducive to both relatively heavier computer use and odd social ineptitude of all sorts, and maybe some of you agree. I'm anticipating a flamebait mod, but this is what I think.
"...confirmed by the independent investigation team"
There are a whole lot of incentives for a company to announce disturbing news that they know to be completely false in an attempt to attract publicity (EG the alien-loving human cloners).
Now I am not exactly sure what this article means by independent, but I'm thinking they have nothing to do with the government and whatever penalties they could incur for a stunt like the one I'm suggesting could be completely outweighed by some kind of profit incentive. Even a non-profit company -- don't be fooled by the term.
Bandwidth's expensive. If we could at least come up with a system for users to have to actively opt to share each file after they have played them and can verify its quality -- instead of downloading bad files, not deleting, and thus sharing them -- that would slow the spreading of these files. Opting-in would, of course, slow down the general proliferation of good and bad files and would make it more difficult to find any files as fewer would share users, but I think it's a good trade-off.
That would leave the record industry cops with a lot more uploading to do. 700+MB is a lot of bits to move, and they have to do it every single time a user initiates a transfer. Are the odds that that user (assuming he only shares it if it's good and does not spread bad files) would go out and buy the movie/CD instead of either continuing to try to find a valid file, or simply giving up altogether? I highly doubt it.
I think you're absolutely right. If P2P apps could ban ISPs who force users not to upload, but still let them download, that would preserve the network and not let ISPs get away with a sneaky trick like this. If you don't want your users P2Ping, don't let them do it in either direction.
While Kazaa (and hopefully kazaa lite) is at it, why can't they also throw in some method for users' daemons to hop around to different random ports, and then their P2P app could include what port their daemon's on when they respond to requests saying they have the file? And can they take advantage of using port 80 somehow as many institutions dethrottle every port except port 80? Some kind of huge proxy server?
I have no idea, but I'd imagine it is quite easy to get your hands on the original source code of any Microsoft product, or that of any other company. Maybe it's already floating around Kazaa. If not, how hard would it be to offer a MS employee who has access to the code, say, $500k to give up the code?
If what I said is indeed true, I see no reason to take whether or not the software is open source into consideration, rather, the much higher skilled and larger community who immediately discovers bugs and repairs (automatically with some distros) holes. *NIX folks are certainly better at this. Am I right? Maybe I'm not..
I always loved Google because of their advertising methods, as well as their prioritizing pages that has the most pages that link to it.
But lately I'm seeing more and more commercial sites pop up at the first page of links, obviously because they're buying the listing from Google, and I have to dig way down deep for the pages that have the content I am really looking for.
Yes, it's great that they are keeping their layout simple, but I think this type of advertising, perversion of links, is a worse form than banners or pop ups.
On the other hand, it could possibly be the only way for sites to make everyone see their ads. If they can successfully inbed ads in their content, sort of like Maxim magazine, without ruining the content, then more power to them.
Slashdot Mirror
As we've seen this past month, viruses/worms pose major threats to everyone, apparently even those who don't download 20KB .exe files thanks to XP's "features." So when you have a hundred thousand people with pirated copies of XP and anti-virus ware, and the companies decide to block service to the stolen copies, they are turning their back on a chance to secure a larger percentage of malignantly infected computers spewing their payloads to as many random IPs they can generate. And while the paying customer may be secured from remote vulnerabilities to the virus, they are not secured from floods of all flavors of packets.
I can understand my CoolEdit software deleting itself if it finds out I pirated it as in doing so, it does not leave others at risk. But people who legitly run anti-virus software tend to have paid for it out of FUD, or passively possess it from it having been included with their PC (I'm talking about non-savvy Joe GUI), and the Kazaa'ers out there pirating this kind of software must be a pretty miniscule percentage of their customer base.
Basically what I'm saying is they're probably not going to save much money from a move like this, and their doing is comes at the expense of the safety of all users (pirates and honest people alike). It's their right, but it makes me a sad panda.
Not really sure what you're talking about or why it's flamebait, but since you mentioned "Wormwood" I thought I'd footnote that the wormwood root, which is found in true Absinthe, contains alpha-thujone which is the active ingredient in the widely-banned Anise flavored liquor. It is chemically similiar to THC and is believed to induce some trippy psychosis (which blends nicely with the 120+ proof aperatif).
I'm in Firebird too, and the article's just fine. Perhaps you are not using the latest build?
Again, big deal. What interest does AOL have in developing Mozilla when they're already in bed with MSFT for their browser? While you may love blocking pop-ups with Phoenix/Firebird, it's not in the interests of AOL Time Warner shareholders to foot the bill to continue developing software that competes with an apparently more important partner of theirs (MS).
I'm sorry they didn't go and stick with Mozilla* from the beginning, but for whatever set of reasons, IE is the way they're going. AOL/TW is a business, not a nerd charity. So the grandparent should not be modded down, if that's okay with you.
The speed of sound through what? Depending on the density of the matter that you are sending soundwaves through, sound travels at a different rate. Mach 1 is much faster at 500 feet than it is at 50K feet, so that should be kept in mind when comparing the two. Light's speed is constant, but its path can be bent.
Little OT but the thread's getting interesting...
Slightly OT, but I'm keeping my eye on OGG because any future acceptance into the masses it earns will illustrate a perfect example (even though they are license-free), of how a superior product will climb above the rest in this country and the power of advertising will succumb to superiority.
It might take a while, but that's the ideal fruit of capitalism and OGG will highlight it as the efforts behind its creation were focused exclusively and successfully on designing a superior product and not at all on money, advertising, business models, marketing, and so on. With a little help from consumer "watchdogs" (like slashdot in this instance), consumers will ultimately find and use the best product and no amount advertising will stop them.
Eventually, of course....
Go OGG!
If this becomes a problem for the bootlegging market, I see some demand emerging for motion picture film cameras (if they can find one on eBay that's quiet and small enough) as they would not be effected by FPS rates or sneaky scrambling techniques. They film the thing in the theater, maybe at a really late night showing on a Monday night when it's not too crowded, leave, get the thing developed, and capture the pirate-able motion picture onto their computer one way or another.
They could possibly accomplish that by projecting it onto their own screen and videoing it, then capturing that video into their computer, or maybe some sort of a negative scanner that can scan a couple hundred thousand negatives automatically in a reasonable period of time. What do you think? Genius?
I don't like this. The more we steer toward developing software that is intended to run exclusively on a specific Linux package like Debian, the less general compatability and more partitions in what the world is now beginning to know as "Linux" will be created and perpetuated, and that will hurt the pursuit of larger marketshare and acceptance to the masses.
For example, it really pisses me off that Windows XP dropped support for new software running on old Windows versions, and even worse, vice versa with not-so-older Windows version software not working on XP! Sleazy. That, if I were not already a devoted Linux user (which I am), or a Kazaa pirater (which I'd only be if I were on a Windows box), would keep me from upgrading to the newest version.
The best thing about RPM to me is that you don't have to spend twenty hours downloading a zillion dependencies. It has improved my quality of life significantly. While Debian's better support that already exists for their own package system is pretty appealing to me, if a popular new SourceForge-like site which is exclusive to Debian picks up steam and people start programming new stuff under that format, we are just going to get a more complicated Linux world that will only hurt us in gaining marketshare. Maybe you don't care about marketshare, but as a Linux advocate, I do.
So you Debian boss men, cool it on the exclusivity, and keep up with the spirit of your "by the people for the people" essence which contrasts with the corporate goals of larger public Linux companies.
Do we really want to put ourselves further in a position in which we have to intramurially port to other Linux packages in addition to porting to other OSes? If I got the whole idea of what's going on here factually, I apologize.
Completely OT (like the thread...), but anyone remember Godwin's Law?
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
When I read that years ago, it really got me thinking. Here's something that was born on Usenet but indeed it does seem to hold true to real life as a natural law. Though this particular discussion is not a Usenet example, it is a discussion. Anyone notice consistant examples of this being demonstrated IRL?
Fascinating.
There's a stunning portion of us (~17%) that have some type of abnormal psych disorder. Some, not all, of these disorders compell people to detach from the rest of the outside world, either out of complete ahedonic lack of interest in other people or anxiety-stemmed social phobia. My theory is that these people, the folks with the negative (not manic) symptoms, have a lot more time to kill because they're simply not doing stuff out of depression and thus have nothing much to do but watch TV or sit in front of a computer. The other group that have subdued social phobia symptoms obviously find it easier to use chatrooms and other Internet forums for socializing. These aren't necessary the ones that are the culprit disorders in my hypothesis, but FYI some of these personality disorders include paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal (those are NOT schizophrenia), borderline, antisocial, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, etc.
Also, there are higher rates of association of sociopathological disorders with major psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia and manic depression, and to throw one stat at you, roughly one in 33 of us are bipolar. Most of the bipolars have the type (bipolar type 2) that puts the person in the depressed phase longer and hardly ever in the manic phase that it's almost not worth distinguishing them from unipolars. The Internet provides a safer outlet to break the law (credit card fraud, phreaking, dos attacks) as it is less likely to get caught doing that than it is to shoot up schools. Not all people with these disorders have these antisocial disorders (not all dogs are poodles), but we're generalizing here. The Internet also provides very easy access to all sorts of pornography, and paraphilia is also correlated with these disorders at substantially higher rates than the healthy folks. Just take a look at what's flying through your Gnutella monitor. And if you got Windows, check out some of those member-created AOL chatrooms. Paraphilia's all over the place.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there is virtually no association of lower intelligence with these disorders (often the opposite, in fact), so that could also be why the people who are a little too good at computers are, let's face it, pretty weird.
Don't mean to offend anyone, there should be no more shame with suffering from any of these psychological diseases than there is with suffering from diabetes. They're often just as treatable, by the way. And there are lots (most) of the computer whizzes without any thought disorder whatsoever. But I think I'm onto something when I say that various abnormal psych disorders are conducive to both relatively heavier computer use and odd social ineptitude of all sorts, and maybe some of you agree. I'm anticipating a flamebait mod, but this is what I think.
"...confirmed by the independent investigation team"
There are a whole lot of incentives for a company to announce disturbing news that they know to be completely false in an attempt to attract publicity (EG the alien-loving human cloners).
Now I am not exactly sure what this article means by independent, but I'm thinking they have nothing to do with the government and whatever penalties they could incur for a stunt like the one I'm suggesting could be completely outweighed by some kind of profit incentive. Even a non-profit company -- don't be fooled by the term.
That said, take this with a pile of salt.
Bandwidth's expensive. If we could at least come up with a system for users to have to actively opt to share each file after they have played them and can verify its quality -- instead of downloading bad files, not deleting, and thus sharing them -- that would slow the spreading of these files. Opting-in would, of course, slow down the general proliferation of good and bad files and would make it more difficult to find any files as fewer would share users, but I think it's a good trade-off.
That would leave the record industry cops with a lot more uploading to do. 700+MB is a lot of bits to move, and they have to do it every single time a user initiates a transfer. Are the odds that that user (assuming he only shares it if it's good and does not spread bad files) would go out and buy the movie/CD instead of either continuing to try to find a valid file, or simply giving up altogether? I highly doubt it.
I think you're absolutely right. If P2P apps could ban ISPs who force users not to upload, but still let them download, that would preserve the network and not let ISPs get away with a sneaky trick like this. If you don't want your users P2Ping, don't let them do it in either direction.
While Kazaa (and hopefully kazaa lite) is at it, why can't they also throw in some method for users' daemons to hop around to different random ports, and then their P2P app could include what port their daemon's on when they respond to requests saying they have the file? And can they take advantage of using port 80 somehow as many institutions dethrottle every port except port 80? Some kind of huge proxy server?
I have no idea, but I'd imagine it is quite easy to get your hands on the original source code of any Microsoft product, or that of any other company. Maybe it's already floating around Kazaa. If not, how hard would it be to offer a MS employee who has access to the code, say, $500k to give up the code?
If what I said is indeed true, I see no reason to take whether or not the software is open source into consideration, rather, the much higher skilled and larger community who immediately discovers bugs and repairs (automatically with some distros) holes. *NIX folks are certainly better at this. Am I right? Maybe I'm not..
I always loved Google because of their advertising methods, as well as their prioritizing pages that has the most pages that link to it. But lately I'm seeing more and more commercial sites pop up at the first page of links, obviously because they're buying the listing from Google, and I have to dig way down deep for the pages that have the content I am really looking for. Yes, it's great that they are keeping their layout simple, but I think this type of advertising, perversion of links, is a worse form than banners or pop ups. On the other hand, it could possibly be the only way for sites to make everyone see their ads. If they can successfully inbed ads in their content, sort of like Maxim magazine, without ruining the content, then more power to them.