First of all, you have to meet your bosses realizing that there are pretty good odds that you will walk out of that door without a job. After all, if you don't want to lose your job then you are in no position to demand a better deal and let's face it, if they are firing people left and right of you then they surely don't intend to keep you for long.
Knowing that, the scenario you painted leads to believe that your bosses rely on you to pretty much do everything remotely related to a computer. That, along with the fact that they have fired pretty much everyone capable of doing what you do, indicates that you do have a decent bargaining power. After all, if they fire you then they will be left with no one to man the ship and good luck finding another poor bastard that is willing to do all that work while being down on the corporate totem pole and while being paid your salary.
Based on that, just be straight forward with your demands. Inform your boss that, based on your new responsibilities and roles, you would like to get a raise and a promotion. Expect your boss to shovel a hefty load of crap when he turns down your offer. If he doesn't budge then just tell him that you quit and therefore let him a) reconsider your demands or b) start looking for yet another poor bastard to dump your work on, which will never manage to do as he will be even more overloaded than you, or b) see his pet project grind to a halt at least for the next 2 to 3 weeks, while he desperately tries to find someone who is willing to be paid peanuts while shouldering all that work.
NATO doesn't care about dictators, look at how many right-wing military coups we've supported.
You don't need to go that far. Just look at NATO's founding nations, where you will find Portugal in the mix which at the time was ruled by the Estado Novo, a fascist and authoritarian regime.
Exactly. The fact that the demand increases when the price drops is widely known for ages as price elasticity of demand. It's a fundamental economics concept, which is a part of every basic introduction to economics course. It amazes me how the idiots who compile this crap masquerading as studies have the audacity to spit on the face of everyone, let alone every economist in the world, by pretending that this doesn't exist.
Above that, they are presenting a so called study whose authors, who are either blatantly incompetent at economics or intentionally deceiving, clearly failed to account for fundamental economic mechanisms such as price elasticity. No one who has the most basic grasp on economics will have the nerve to suggest that someone who accesses a free copy of some product is also willing to spend the market price to access that same good.
The standard in pro gaming groups is for people to live together 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no traveling to or from work
These sort of living conditions only make it "professional" in the sense that, at best, those poor factory workers from the inception of the industrial revolution were professionals or, at worse, slavery is a legitimate job.
Now they're flat-out targeting people who actively infringe copyrights. These people are BREAKING THE LAW, and more importantly, doing something immoral: they are taking someone else's work and not merely using it without due compensation, but helping others to do the same.
By your account, libraries are immoral because they take someone else's work and not merely use it without due compensation and help others to do the same.
Meanwhile, in the civilized world, it has been thoroughly understood by society that the authors deserve due compensation for their work but the people also have the right to access any copyrighted work without any explicit authorization from the copyright holders if a) they do it exclusively for private use and b) their distribution doesn't have a meaningful impact on the author's income from that work.
You see, civilized people have recognized for ages that culture and education are universal rights which should not be dependant on income and social standing. People have arrived at that conclusion after experiencing the dreaded consequences of living in a society where cultural and educational works were held hostage by institutions. It isn't pretty and it's effects are terrible. Yet, nowadays we see the US pushing this sort of society cancer onto itself and the world. You see "thieves" in the people who may or may had not downloaded a video but what I see is corporations using the state's repressive power to gain a totalitarian stranglehold on the country's culture and education.
But don't let that move you. Just keep doing your corporate master's bidding and keep repeating the absurd mantra of "OMG people who copy cultural works are criminals!". While on that, just nevermind a hand full of irrelevant fact such as that students are forced to pay over 200 dollars for a n-th edition text book which never received any meaningful change in the years, if not decades, that it has been released, under the penalty of being forced to flunk a course that costs them and their families tens of thousands of dollars. Nevermind also that your corporate masters made it a crime to draw a silly depiction of a mouse that is nearly 100 years old. Nevermind the fact that you consider to be a criminal someone who wishes to sing a certain song to a loved one or relative. You claim that they are criminals? I say that the real criminals, the real immoral sociopaths, are those who got your corrupt government to use the state's repressive power to feed their greed and impose a totalitarian stranglehold on what you may or may not learn, sing, draw, watch, listen, read or simply access.
I'm sorry, I'm out of excuses; I'm out of pity. We won the important war. BitTorrent thrives as a legitimate tool, and merely linking to something bad is usually not itself cause for litigation. My moral outrage stops at those caught red-handed, hands thoroughly lodged in the cookie jar (and no, "someone else could have being using their personal IP or broke into their house and used their computer" is a flimsy argument at best.)
BitTorrent is and always was a legitimate tool, no matter what has been distributed. It's the same with floppy disks, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, flash memory, HDs and also photocopiers, plotters, fax machines, photo cameras, VCRs, camcorders and even pen and paper. Those are all legitimate tools, no matter what content you wish to access and distribute. And as long as you do it exclusively for personal use, it also should not matter if the authors gave you explicit permission. That's what culture is and it's vital that it should be freely accessible without any totalitarian barriers being lifted.
And while we are at it, let's not forget that the people that rightfully deserve to be compensated by the work's distribution are the artists themselves. Yet, where is your moral outrage when the only ones who benefit from this totalitarian stranglehold on cultural and educational works are the countless facel
blasphemy/blæsfmi/ Show Spelled[blas-fuh-mee] Show IPA –noun,plural-mies. 1.impious utterance or action concerning god or sacred things. 2.Judaism. a.an act of cursing or reviling God. b.pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton (YHVH) in the original, now forbidden manner instead of using a substitute pronunciation such as Adonai. 3.Theology. the crime of assuming to oneself the rights or qualities of God. 4.irreverent behavior toward anything held sacred, priceless, etc.: He uttered blasphemies against life itself.
So, you don't need to be a member of a specific religion to be guilty of blasphemy against that religion. You only need to conduct "irreverent behaviour toward anything held sacred" by that religion. And that's very possible.
And yes, this is a terribly silly concept which translates even more poorly into law.
I'm not sure it's so much "burying usenet" as it is about prioritizing their search for websites. So a crappy mirror on a WEBsite will get listed far above the real thing.
I see what you mean and you have a point. Nonetheless, these results are generated from a Google Groups search, which is supposed to be a search engine which is fine-tuned to comb through usenet newsgroups (i.e., Deja's successor) along with other groups such as Google's and other web forums. With this in mind, it's still appalling that Google's search completely and recurrently ignores Usenet in favor of mediocre mirror sites.
Tho I do think the Googleborg has gotten way out of hand, as demonstrated by recent changes that clearly do not give a shit about what users want (you know, the ones who made Google's marketshare so large in the first place), and are mainly geared toward sucking profit out of corporate partners.
What bothers me is that they can pretty much still generate profits if they produce decent search results. Moreover, if they produced Usenet hits then the user would never stray outside Google's site, which means that Google would keep all the ad revenue for themselves by not having to pay the mirror site's operators for the adsense hits.
Well, for how long will you people blame Lincoln for successfully leading the US of A through it's civil war? I mean, presidential actions leave a profound mark in a country's (and also world's) history. You don't just get to swipe under the rug something like invading Iraq or your country's deficit just because the one responsible left office a few months ago.
Advocate group publishes report that promotes/detracts from whatever the group promotes/detracts from.
Are we seeing a pattern here?
Yes, the pattern of labeling those who have the audacity to think for themselves and point out the dangers and flaws of something as a radical group along with something profoundly negative such as kooks, fundamentalists and religious freaks. From there, you use those negative labels you just added to them as some sort of basis to downplay and ignore each and every point they make, without ever doing anything to disprove the points they make, in effect preserving the status quo at the expense of personal attacks and mudslinging.
That's a pattern alright. And meanwhile, if those flaws do exist they stay untouched and will never be fixed. I hope you do feel safer by this. Nonetheless, it's a shame that perceived security doesn't imply real, tangible security.
You sadly don't know what you are talking about and you don't even try to disprove anything that I've said. For example, you replied to my comment regarding how Google is a disgrace at filtering spam with an idiotic statement that:
I don't see any difference between DejaNews and Googlegroups. It's still the same interface that I've been using since the 90s.
Either you failed to read what I've written or you tried to pull a red herring to divert the attention from Google's appallingly bad track record at tackling both spam and spammers to this absurd comment regarding user interfaces. My point was about Google's terrible anti-spam and anti-spammer track record, not UI design. So, where exactly did you get the idea this was about UI?
Then your next statement is this silly thing:
Google search results DO link to Usenet groups.
Once again you've failed to understand what has been said. No one said that Google stopped presenting usenet results. What has been said was that Google groups search is so bad that it even places on their top hits (i.e., what Google considers the best match) hits from websites that do nothing more than mirror usenet to try to pass off discussions from newsgroups as their own forums. As a quick and dirty demonstration, I've browsed comp.lang.c and then searched Google groups for "How to use maloc with strcut", a discussion which has been started quite recently and whose subject is somewhat unique. So, after searching for the subject through Google groups, you will notice that the first twohits are from websites mirroring comp.lang.c. Granted, in this test (which was quick and dirty) a link to Google's site on comp.lang.c appears in 3rd place but this, unfortunately, isn't the norm. It is, quite unfortunately, an isolated incident. For example, if you search for "malloc array" on google groups then all your hits will be from sites that either mirror usenet or provide rudimentary forums, with the first usenet hits appearing on the 3rd page and being from groups such as mailing.freebsd.stable and comp.unix.questions, the last one being a hit from 1991. In fact, the first hit that pops up from Google's usenet archive that comes from a C-related newsgroup comes in the form of this post from comp.lang.c.moderated that appears at the bottom of the 5th search results page and is from 2003.
So, care to explain where exactly do you not see a burying of usenet's search results and an erosion of the usenet's archive?
You may play the role of one of Google's tireless PR drones by either slapping red herrings around in the attempt to conceal Google's problems such as the abysmal spam problem and it's usenet results' burying in it's Google groups search. You may even try to go into personal attacks such as claiming that Google's problems amount to nothing more than user dumbness. Yet, that doesn't stop people from looking stuff for themselves and, as a consequence, realize that your accusations are either baseless or patently false.
That is a completely absurd thing to say. Please take the time to compare how many sites dedicated to unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works exist and compare it with Usenet's traffic. Then please explain why "the pirates" (whatever that is) haven't killed HTTP although they have a bigger presence in the WWW than in Usenet. Obvously you will not be able to explain that, simply due to the fact that you are trying to pass off a red herring and, in the process, vilify "the pirates", whatever that is.
No, that isn't a stretch. Google bought out dejanews to kill it off. Nowadays google groups doesn't work at all, with them not even bothering with spam (i.e., they don't do anything about the countless complaints regarding Google spammers and spam in google groups) along with them burying any search result that involves Usenet from their groups search. This has become so bad that Google's top search hits on programming topics frequently consists of sites that shamelessly mirror Usenet content to try to pass it off as their own forums, while it completely ignores any hit from the very same newsgroup.
If that wasn't enough, Google's newsgroup archive has since been eroding, which is a major blow to one of Usenet's most valuable use, humanity's best and most successfull attempt at an expert system.
So it isn't a stretch to claim that Google is the one responsible for killing newsgroups. The company eliminated the established service for newsgroup search, it has gradually destroyed the service and has been actively hiding Usenet from the public.
You are not only wrong but you are also making baseless assumptions. Case in point, I present you the law in place in the jurisdiction that affects me directly, portuguese legislation on copyright law. Take a look at Lei n 16 2008, de 1 de Abril (the literal translation is more or less "Law 16/2008, published April 1st"), which is a re-publication of Portugal's updated "Código do Direito de Autor e dos Direitos Conexos" (loosely translated to "Author's rights code and connected rights". This constitutes the Portuguese law regarding the author's rights. In it, I direct your attention to Artigo 81, entitled "other uses". It says the following:
Outras utilizações É consentida a reprodução: a) Em exemplar único, para fins de interesse exclusivamente científico ou humanitário, de obras ainda não disponíveis no comércio ou de obtenção impossível, pelo tempo necessário à sua utilização; b) Para uso exclusivamente privado, desde que não atinja a exploração normal da obra e não cause prejuízo injustificado dos interesses legítimos do autor, não podendo ser utilizada para quaisquer fins de comunicação pública ou comercialização.
The bold bit loosely translates to (and forgive my translation from portuguese legalese to english) "the reproduction and distribution without the copyright owner's express authorization is authorized if it's strictly for personal use, if it doesn't have a meaningful impact in the normal commercialization of the copyrighted work and it doesn't cause unjustified loss of the author's legitimate interests", adding that "it can't be used for public reproduction or commercialization". That's portuguese law, black in white. And Portugal did nothing more than adopting the french copyright tradition, which is the basis of pretty much all copyright law of all civilized country in the world.
So yes, there are a lot of misconceptions but it isn't regarding the rights to distribute any copyrighted work, as long as it's for personal use. Ignoring your unfortunate attempt at a personal attack, where you tried to label anyone who knows the law as one of those filthy "pirates" (are you paid to vilify everyone who downloads stuff?), people do have rights, including the right to education and culture independently of social and economic status, as long as the author is the only one profiting from their work.
And it's no wonder people like you try to pass off FUD regarding the rights to freely distribute copyrighted works for personal use, as media companies are trying to put pressure on the entire world, from government to the public, in order to see granted a totalitarian stranglehold on the access to cultural and educational works. You've certainly got a glimpse on that pathetic marketing campaign vilifying and FUDing the access copyrighted works for personal use without the copyrighted owner's explicit authorization. You've certainly saw it either way, whether in some form or another. Yet, that doesn't make it right, let alone remotely compatible with the copyright law and people's rights, does it?
That isn't exactly true. It may be considered illegal to distribute copyrighted material withouth the copyright owner's explicit authorization if and only if you don't do it for personal use alone and you enjoy a financial profit from it. In some jurisdictions (i.e., practically the entire world) it's very legal to download copyrighted works if you do it in a non-commercial, completely personal way and those responsible for the distribution don't make a dime out of it. That's the french copyright tradition for you, which the entire world emulated for a good reason. After all, if you impose a totalitarian gatekeeper on educational and cultural goods then your education and culture will be controlled by a totalitarian elite, which will lead to granting only access to culture and education to a small elite who can afford it.
You, sadly, don't know what you are talking about. The air on areas which are adjacent to the ocean has a high concentration of chlorides which, if not designed with this in mind, can get reinforced concrete structures to completely corrode and crumble in a span of 3 to 5 years. The high concentration of chlorides in the air vary according to multiple parameters, including the topology and some papers have been written that show that high chloride concentrations can be found in areas which are up to 10m above sea level, which means that in some flat areas such as river deltas and flood plains you can find concentrations of chloride a couple of km inland which are practically as high as right in the beach.
But never mind that. Just stick your tongue out, lick the funny rain and let the truthyness of that guide your reasoning. After all, who the hell needs those idiot scientists who have proven multiple times the exact opposite of what you claim?
That's exactly what got my attention. In the article, the CTO of hardcore computer is quoted as saying that "Our Core Coolant is 1,350 times better than air, by volume.". I don't know how that works out in energy spending when compared with air but if it has a linear relationship with the energy cost of cooling, I really doubt if the hypothetical energy savings can bring a net positive when considering the additional cost associated with meddling with the hardware, whether by maintenance or by hardware upgrades. After all, this slashvertisement is oh so keen in lauding the qualitative and subjective advantages of this toy but it doesn't even come near presenting the costs associated with forcing your company to be profoundly dependent (if not held hostage) of hardcore computer for support, maintenance of both hardware and cooling rig and upgrades.
That's odd. My 4yo AMD system still works like a champ. I guess my anecdotal evidence kind of cancels yours, doesn't it? Well, except that I'm at this moment typing in it while you have absolutely no way to provide a shred of evidence to back up your statement.
And if you rely on the make utility to build your project then you can take advantage of how many cores you wish by passing the --jobs flag, which is quite able to use all available cores quite nicely.
Why is it so obvious that it isn't being done to fight spam? Virtually all of the newsgroups out there, outside of the moderated ones, have been completely overrun with spam. There is no really effective spam-control device for Usenet other than moderated groups, and it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum.
First of all, your allegation that "virtually all of the newsgroups out there", except the moderated ones, "have been completely overrun with spam" is as true as claiming that all email has been completely overrun with spam. You only happen to see spam hitting a newsgroup if you happen to rely on a usenet service provider which, quite blatantly, doesn't employ the most rudimentary spam filter available. There are quite a fair share of usenet service providers, including free ones such as aioe that do a good job filtering spam to an extent that in practice you will never come across spam.
Then your allegation that it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum doesn't hold water. After all, all web forums are moderated in some form or another, including slashdot, and that never stopped people from participating. In some extreme cases you may get a bit of lag getting your post to appear available but that doesn't happen in practice. For example, Trolltech's newsgroup server requires a registration and I believe is moderated but still my posts are made available faster than they appear in "regular" usenet groups such as comp.lang.c, which is open to all.
Moreover, Microsoft's case is one of providing technical help regarding their products. Good conversational flow doesn't quite apply there, does it?
Usenet was great in its time, but its fatal flaw turned out to be an inability to keep out spam. We fought it for years, but the fact is the spammers have won, and it's time to move on to technologies that are better able to control it, like web forums. Yes, Usenet was much nicer back in the old days before the Internet exploded, but a lot of things online were nicer then. NNTP was developed for a world where common courtesy and community policing were sufficient to correct bad behavior, but those days are gone now as the overall population of the 'net has increased exponentially and the technology of spammers has improved so that a few of them can easily drown out the many who are willing to abide by basic netiquette rules.
I can't possibly see how the "spam has won" if I never come across a spam post on the dozens newsgroups I subscribe to. If your problem is spam then you solve it by blocking it. Or did you stopped using email altogether due to spam?
And more to the point, I find email spam, which is similar to NNTP spam, to be less intrusive than some of the animated banners that some sites shove in our screen, which means that being forced to suffer through banner ads is also an inconvenience. You can always rely on plugins such as adblock but yet, you never see anyone claiming that "the web's suffers from a fatal flaw: the inability to keep out ads".
The world changed. You can either adapt to it or sit back and complain about how things were so much better then, and how kids have no respect for people's lawns anymore. Web forums may have a long way to go before they can match the feature set on Usenet 15 years ago, but they beat the hell out of today's Usenet in terms of signal to noise ratio, and for many of us that's the more important thing.
That may be true in a couple of years from now but I have to tell you that you don't quite know what you are talking about. It's true there are already some technically-oriented sites which are boasted as being such great sources of technical insight but in practice they all suck and are still way behind what some newsgroups continually provide. For example, stack overflow
They are trying to achieve a reduction in spam. Didn't you even read the title of the article?
But it's impossible to get a reduction in spam by cutting Usenet. Web forums clean up their spam by relying on moderation and on registered accounts. You have usenet newsgroups which have been moderated and accessible under registration way before the dotcom bubble burst. In fact, some ISPs restricted the access to their usenet servers exactly the same way as they restricted access to their email servers.
So, to put it short: no, you don't get a reduction in spam by cutting Usenet. And it's idiotic that someone suggests that as a reasonable means to fight spam.
Complaining that NNTP should be shut down because you see east european kiddie porn spam in some newsgroups is exactly like complaining that HTTP should be shut down because you see european kiddie porn in some sites: it doesn't make any sense and you only succeed in coming out as an ignorant fool.
And here's a tip: if you don't want to see east european kiddie porn then don't follow newsgroups/sites that post that sort of crap.
As a former very avid Usenet user, I really can't blame them. The medium is falling out of favor precisely because most of the groups are filled with junk.
That doesn't make any sense. The perceived problem with usenet spam is exactly the same as the email spam, as it's a problem which grossly depends on the service provider. For example, if your ISP fails to filter yout the spam so that you get 10 spams a day then does that make email a "medium which is falling out of favour"? Obviously it doesn't.
As Google does a decent job fighting spam on Google Mail, some usenet providers such as my ISP and even AIOE do a good job filtering the crap out of newsgroups. Moreover, usenet spam is even less of a problem than email spam. Besides being able to employ spam filters (possibly even the same ones which are applied to email) it is also possible to moderate newsgroups, exactly the same way that any web forum is moderates. In fact, its even easier to moderate a usenet group. Adding to that, you can also offer usenet access only to registered accounts, something which can't be done with email.
So, summing things up, if spam doesn't make email suck then why should it make usenet, a medium which is harder to attack, suffer more from it? It doesn't.
Newsgroups can be moderated and have been moderated for ages and if you really want to you can just as easily put up a usenet server that requires the users to register an account. It has been done in the past and it is still being done up to this minute. As usenet is nothing but an interface to access discussion data, obviously it doesn't offer any disadvantage. In fact, web forums have been continuously failing to provide the very basic functionality any usenet client has been providing for ages and every little feature that is implemented in a web forum ends up being terribly bloated (i.e., relying on tons of scripts whose code must be downloaded each time someone accesses the site) and terribly underwhelming.
So, if usenet doesn't bring any disadvantage in that oblivious fight against spam, it has been superior to web forums since it's inception and doesn't take any control out of the provider then what can possibly be driving this measure?
Moreover, a migration from usenet to web forums is made at the cost of increased bloat, complexity and a degradation of the user experience. I mean, in order for a web forum to provide the simplest features available in any usenet client for decades it has to force the user to download tons of javascript/silverlight scripts each time it refreshes a page. Meanwhile, with NNTP you only download an extremely small text-only message which regularly doesn't even go near 1kB and with that web 2.0 shit you are forced to download more than that in any HTML header, let alone the entire page. Moreover, there is yet to be developed a way to organize a discussion in tree form in a web forum that is remotely decent, let alone capable of competing with what usenet clients have been providing for more than a decade.
So, what exactly are they trying to achieve? Obviously this isn't being done to fight spam. Why does Microsoft hate it's customers?
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, you have to meet your bosses realizing that there are pretty good odds that you will walk out of that door without a job. After all, if you don't want to lose your job then you are in no position to demand a better deal and let's face it, if they are firing people left and right of you then they surely don't intend to keep you for long.
Knowing that, the scenario you painted leads to believe that your bosses rely on you to pretty much do everything remotely related to a computer. That, along with the fact that they have fired pretty much everyone capable of doing what you do, indicates that you do have a decent bargaining power. After all, if they fire you then they will be left with no one to man the ship and good luck finding another poor bastard that is willing to do all that work while being down on the corporate totem pole and while being paid your salary.
Based on that, just be straight forward with your demands. Inform your boss that, based on your new responsibilities and roles, you would like to get a raise and a promotion. Expect your boss to shovel a hefty load of crap when he turns down your offer. If he doesn't budge then just tell him that you quit and therefore let him a) reconsider your demands or b) start looking for yet another poor bastard to dump your work on, which will never manage to do as he will be even more overloaded than you, or b) see his pet project grind to a halt at least for the next 2 to 3 weeks, while he desperately tries to find someone who is willing to be paid peanuts while shouldering all that work.
You don't need to go that far. Just look at NATO's founding nations, where you will find Portugal in the mix which at the time was ruled by the Estado Novo, a fascist and authoritarian regime.
Exactly. The fact that the demand increases when the price drops is widely known for ages as price elasticity of demand. It's a fundamental economics concept, which is a part of every basic introduction to economics course. It amazes me how the idiots who compile this crap masquerading as studies have the audacity to spit on the face of everyone, let alone every economist in the world, by pretending that this doesn't exist.
Above that, they are presenting a so called study whose authors, who are either blatantly incompetent at economics or intentionally deceiving, clearly failed to account for fundamental economic mechanisms such as price elasticity. No one who has the most basic grasp on economics will have the nerve to suggest that someone who accesses a free copy of some product is also willing to spend the market price to access that same good.
From TFA:
The standard in pro gaming groups is for people to live together 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no traveling to or from work
These sort of living conditions only make it "professional" in the sense that, at best, those poor factory workers from the inception of the industrial revolution were professionals or, at worse, slavery is a legitimate job.
Now they're flat-out targeting people who actively infringe copyrights. These people are BREAKING THE LAW, and more importantly, doing something immoral: they are taking someone else's work and not merely using it without due compensation, but helping others to do the same.
By your account, libraries are immoral because they take someone else's work and not merely use it without due compensation and help others to do the same.
Meanwhile, in the civilized world, it has been thoroughly understood by society that the authors deserve due compensation for their work but the people also have the right to access any copyrighted work without any explicit authorization from the copyright holders if a) they do it exclusively for private use and b) their distribution doesn't have a meaningful impact on the author's income from that work.
You see, civilized people have recognized for ages that culture and education are universal rights which should not be dependant on income and social standing. People have arrived at that conclusion after experiencing the dreaded consequences of living in a society where cultural and educational works were held hostage by institutions. It isn't pretty and it's effects are terrible. Yet, nowadays we see the US pushing this sort of society cancer onto itself and the world. You see "thieves" in the people who may or may had not downloaded a video but what I see is corporations using the state's repressive power to gain a totalitarian stranglehold on the country's culture and education.
But don't let that move you. Just keep doing your corporate master's bidding and keep repeating the absurd mantra of "OMG people who copy cultural works are criminals!". While on that, just nevermind a hand full of irrelevant fact such as that students are forced to pay over 200 dollars for a n-th edition text book which never received any meaningful change in the years, if not decades, that it has been released, under the penalty of being forced to flunk a course that costs them and their families tens of thousands of dollars. Nevermind also that your corporate masters made it a crime to draw a silly depiction of a mouse that is nearly 100 years old. Nevermind the fact that you consider to be a criminal someone who wishes to sing a certain song to a loved one or relative. You claim that they are criminals? I say that the real criminals, the real immoral sociopaths, are those who got your corrupt government to use the state's repressive power to feed their greed and impose a totalitarian stranglehold on what you may or may not learn, sing, draw, watch, listen, read or simply access.
I'm sorry, I'm out of excuses; I'm out of pity. We won the important war. BitTorrent thrives as a legitimate tool, and merely linking to something bad is usually not itself cause for litigation. My moral outrage stops at those caught red-handed, hands thoroughly lodged in the cookie jar (and no, "someone else could have being using their personal IP or broke into their house and used their computer" is a flimsy argument at best.)
BitTorrent is and always was a legitimate tool, no matter what has been distributed. It's the same with floppy disks, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, flash memory, HDs and also photocopiers, plotters, fax machines, photo cameras, VCRs, camcorders and even pen and paper. Those are all legitimate tools, no matter what content you wish to access and distribute. And as long as you do it exclusively for personal use, it also should not matter if the authors gave you explicit permission. That's what culture is and it's vital that it should be freely accessible without any totalitarian barriers being lifted.
And while we are at it, let's not forget that the people that rightfully deserve to be compensated by the work's distribution are the artists themselves. Yet, where is your moral outrage when the only ones who benefit from this totalitarian stranglehold on cultural and educational works are the countless facel
How anybody who isn't a member of a religion could be committing blasphemy within the framework of that religion is beyond me.
Let's take a look at the definition of blasphemy :
So, you don't need to be a member of a specific religion to be guilty of blasphemy against that religion. You only need to conduct "irreverent behaviour toward anything held sacred" by that religion. And that's very possible.
And yes, this is a terribly silly concept which translates even more poorly into law.
I'm not sure it's so much "burying usenet" as it is about prioritizing their search for websites. So a crappy mirror on a WEBsite will get listed far above the real thing.
I see what you mean and you have a point. Nonetheless, these results are generated from a Google Groups search, which is supposed to be a search engine which is fine-tuned to comb through usenet newsgroups (i.e., Deja's successor) along with other groups such as Google's and other web forums. With this in mind, it's still appalling that Google's search completely and recurrently ignores Usenet in favor of mediocre mirror sites.
Tho I do think the Googleborg has gotten way out of hand, as demonstrated by recent changes that clearly do not give a shit about what users want (you know, the ones who made Google's marketshare so large in the first place), and are mainly geared toward sucking profit out of corporate partners.
What bothers me is that they can pretty much still generate profits if they produce decent search results. Moreover, if they produced Usenet hits then the user would never stray outside Google's site, which means that Google would keep all the ad revenue for themselves by not having to pay the mirror site's operators for the adsense hits.
Well, for how long will you people blame Lincoln for successfully leading the US of A through it's civil war? I mean, presidential actions leave a profound mark in a country's (and also world's) history. You don't just get to swipe under the rug something like invading Iraq or your country's deficit just because the one responsible left office a few months ago.
Advocate group publishes report that promotes/detracts from whatever the group promotes/detracts from.
Are we seeing a pattern here?
Yes, the pattern of labeling those who have the audacity to think for themselves and point out the dangers and flaws of something as a radical group along with something profoundly negative such as kooks, fundamentalists and religious freaks. From there, you use those negative labels you just added to them as some sort of basis to downplay and ignore each and every point they make, without ever doing anything to disprove the points they make, in effect preserving the status quo at the expense of personal attacks and mudslinging.
That's a pattern alright. And meanwhile, if those flaws do exist they stay untouched and will never be fixed. I hope you do feel safer by this. Nonetheless, it's a shame that perceived security doesn't imply real, tangible security.
You sadly don't know what you are talking about and you don't even try to disprove anything that I've said. For example, you replied to my comment regarding how Google is a disgrace at filtering spam with an idiotic statement that:
Either you failed to read what I've written or you tried to pull a red herring to divert the attention from Google's appallingly bad track record at tackling both spam and spammers to this absurd comment regarding user interfaces. My point was about Google's terrible anti-spam and anti-spammer track record, not UI design. So, where exactly did you get the idea this was about UI?
Then your next statement is this silly thing:
Once again you've failed to understand what has been said. No one said that Google stopped presenting usenet results. What has been said was that Google groups search is so bad that it even places on their top hits (i.e., what Google considers the best match) hits from websites that do nothing more than mirror usenet to try to pass off discussions from newsgroups as their own forums. As a quick and dirty demonstration, I've browsed comp.lang.c and then searched Google groups for "How to use maloc with strcut", a discussion which has been started quite recently and whose subject is somewhat unique. So, after searching for the subject through Google groups, you will notice that the first two hits are from websites mirroring comp.lang.c. Granted, in this test (which was quick and dirty) a link to Google's site on comp.lang.c appears in 3rd place but this, unfortunately, isn't the norm. It is, quite unfortunately, an isolated incident. For example, if you search for "malloc array" on google groups then all your hits will be from sites that either mirror usenet or provide rudimentary forums, with the first usenet hits appearing on the 3rd page and being from groups such as mailing.freebsd.stable and comp.unix.questions, the last one being a hit from 1991. In fact, the first hit that pops up from Google's usenet archive that comes from a C-related newsgroup comes in the form of this post from comp.lang.c.moderated that appears at the bottom of the 5th search results page and is from 2003.
So, care to explain where exactly do you not see a burying of usenet's search results and an erosion of the usenet's archive?
You may play the role of one of Google's tireless PR drones by either slapping red herrings around in the attempt to conceal Google's problems such as the abysmal spam problem and it's usenet results' burying in it's Google groups search. You may even try to go into personal attacks such as claiming that Google's problems amount to nothing more than user dumbness. Yet, that doesn't stop people from looking stuff for themselves and, as a consequence, realize that your accusations are either baseless or patently false.
That is a completely absurd thing to say. Please take the time to compare how many sites dedicated to unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works exist and compare it with Usenet's traffic. Then please explain why "the pirates" (whatever that is) haven't killed HTTP although they have a bigger presence in the WWW than in Usenet. Obvously you will not be able to explain that, simply due to the fact that you are trying to pass off a red herring and, in the process, vilify "the pirates", whatever that is.
No, that isn't a stretch. Google bought out dejanews to kill it off. Nowadays google groups doesn't work at all, with them not even bothering with spam (i.e., they don't do anything about the countless complaints regarding Google spammers and spam in google groups) along with them burying any search result that involves Usenet from their groups search. This has become so bad that Google's top search hits on programming topics frequently consists of sites that shamelessly mirror Usenet content to try to pass it off as their own forums, while it completely ignores any hit from the very same newsgroup.
Then there's Google's inability to find even popular newsgroups such as comp.lang.c++ when you even when you explicitly search for the group
If that wasn't enough, Google's newsgroup archive has since been eroding, which is a major blow to one of Usenet's most valuable use, humanity's best and most successfull attempt at an expert system.
So it isn't a stretch to claim that Google is the one responsible for killing newsgroups. The company eliminated the established service for newsgroup search, it has gradually destroyed the service and has been actively hiding Usenet from the public.
You are not only wrong but you are also making baseless assumptions. Case in point, I present you the law in place in the jurisdiction that affects me directly, portuguese legislation on copyright law. Take a look at Lei n 16 2008, de 1 de Abril (the literal translation is more or less "Law 16/2008, published April 1st"), which is a re-publication of Portugal's updated "Código do Direito de Autor e dos Direitos Conexos" (loosely translated to "Author's rights code and connected rights". This constitutes the Portuguese law regarding the author's rights. In it, I direct your attention to Artigo 81, entitled "other uses". It says the following:
The bold bit loosely translates to (and forgive my translation from portuguese legalese to english) "the reproduction and distribution without the copyright owner's express authorization is authorized if it's strictly for personal use, if it doesn't have a meaningful impact in the normal commercialization of the copyrighted work and it doesn't cause unjustified loss of the author's legitimate interests", adding that "it can't be used for public reproduction or commercialization". That's portuguese law, black in white. And Portugal did nothing more than adopting the french copyright tradition, which is the basis of pretty much all copyright law of all civilized country in the world.
So yes, there are a lot of misconceptions but it isn't regarding the rights to distribute any copyrighted work, as long as it's for personal use. Ignoring your unfortunate attempt at a personal attack, where you tried to label anyone who knows the law as one of those filthy "pirates" (are you paid to vilify everyone who downloads stuff?), people do have rights, including the right to education and culture independently of social and economic status, as long as the author is the only one profiting from their work.
And it's no wonder people like you try to pass off FUD regarding the rights to freely distribute copyrighted works for personal use, as media companies are trying to put pressure on the entire world, from government to the public, in order to see granted a totalitarian stranglehold on the access to cultural and educational works. You've certainly got a glimpse on that pathetic marketing campaign vilifying and FUDing the access copyrighted works for personal use without the copyrighted owner's explicit authorization. You've certainly saw it either way, whether in some form or another. Yet, that doesn't make it right, let alone remotely compatible with the copyright law and people's rights, does it?
That isn't exactly true. It may be considered illegal to distribute copyrighted material withouth the copyright owner's explicit authorization if and only if you don't do it for personal use alone and you enjoy a financial profit from it. In some jurisdictions (i.e., practically the entire world) it's very legal to download copyrighted works if you do it in a non-commercial, completely personal way and those responsible for the distribution don't make a dime out of it. That's the french copyright tradition for you, which the entire world emulated for a good reason. After all, if you impose a totalitarian gatekeeper on educational and cultural goods then your education and culture will be controlled by a totalitarian elite, which will lead to granting only access to culture and education to a small elite who can afford it.
The french revolution happen for a reason.
You, sadly, don't know what you are talking about. The air on areas which are adjacent to the ocean has a high concentration of chlorides which, if not designed with this in mind, can get reinforced concrete structures to completely corrode and crumble in a span of 3 to 5 years. The high concentration of chlorides in the air vary according to multiple parameters, including the topology and some papers have been written that show that high chloride concentrations can be found in areas which are up to 10m above sea level, which means that in some flat areas such as river deltas and flood plains you can find concentrations of chloride a couple of km inland which are practically as high as right in the beach.
But never mind that. Just stick your tongue out, lick the funny rain and let the truthyness of that guide your reasoning. After all, who the hell needs those idiot scientists who have proven multiple times the exact opposite of what you claim?
That's exactly what got my attention. In the article, the CTO of hardcore computer is quoted as saying that "Our Core Coolant is 1,350 times better than air, by volume.". I don't know how that works out in energy spending when compared with air but if it has a linear relationship with the energy cost of cooling, I really doubt if the hypothetical energy savings can bring a net positive when considering the additional cost associated with meddling with the hardware, whether by maintenance or by hardware upgrades. After all, this slashvertisement is oh so keen in lauding the qualitative and subjective advantages of this toy but it doesn't even come near presenting the costs associated with forcing your company to be profoundly dependent (if not held hostage) of hardcore computer for support, maintenance of both hardware and cooling rig and upgrades.
That's odd. My 4yo AMD system still works like a champ. I guess my anecdotal evidence kind of cancels yours, doesn't it? Well, except that I'm at this moment typing in it while you have absolutely no way to provide a shred of evidence to back up your statement.
And if you rely on the make utility to build your project then you can take advantage of how many cores you wish by passing the --jobs flag, which is quite able to use all available cores quite nicely.
Why is it so obvious that it isn't being done to fight spam? Virtually all of the newsgroups out there, outside of the moderated ones, have been completely overrun with spam. There is no really effective spam-control device for Usenet other than moderated groups, and it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum.
First of all, your allegation that "virtually all of the newsgroups out there", except the moderated ones, "have been completely overrun with spam" is as true as claiming that all email has been completely overrun with spam. You only happen to see spam hitting a newsgroup if you happen to rely on a usenet service provider which, quite blatantly, doesn't employ the most rudimentary spam filter available. There are quite a fair share of usenet service providers, including free ones such as aioe that do a good job filtering spam to an extent that in practice you will never come across spam.
Then your allegation that it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum doesn't hold water. After all, all web forums are moderated in some form or another, including slashdot, and that never stopped people from participating. In some extreme cases you may get a bit of lag getting your post to appear available but that doesn't happen in practice. For example, Trolltech's newsgroup server requires a registration and I believe is moderated but still my posts are made available faster than they appear in "regular" usenet groups such as comp.lang.c, which is open to all.
Moreover, Microsoft's case is one of providing technical help regarding their products. Good conversational flow doesn't quite apply there, does it?
Usenet was great in its time, but its fatal flaw turned out to be an inability to keep out spam. We fought it for years, but the fact is the spammers have won, and it's time to move on to technologies that are better able to control it, like web forums. Yes, Usenet was much nicer back in the old days before the Internet exploded, but a lot of things online were nicer then. NNTP was developed for a world where common courtesy and community policing were sufficient to correct bad behavior, but those days are gone now as the overall population of the 'net has increased exponentially and the technology of spammers has improved so that a few of them can easily drown out the many who are willing to abide by basic netiquette rules.
I can't possibly see how the "spam has won" if I never come across a spam post on the dozens newsgroups I subscribe to. If your problem is spam then you solve it by blocking it. Or did you stopped using email altogether due to spam?
And more to the point, I find email spam, which is similar to NNTP spam, to be less intrusive than some of the animated banners that some sites shove in our screen, which means that being forced to suffer through banner ads is also an inconvenience. You can always rely on plugins such as adblock but yet, you never see anyone claiming that "the web's suffers from a fatal flaw: the inability to keep out ads".
The world changed. You can either adapt to it or sit back and complain about how things were so much better then, and how kids have no respect for people's lawns anymore. Web forums may have a long way to go before they can match the feature set on Usenet 15 years ago, but they beat the hell out of today's Usenet in terms of signal to noise ratio, and for many of us that's the more important thing.
That may be true in a couple of years from now but I have to tell you that you don't quite know what you are talking about. It's true there are already some technically-oriented sites which are boasted as being such great sources of technical insight but in practice they all suck and are still way behind what some newsgroups continually provide. For example, stack overflow
So, what exactly are they trying to achieve?
They are trying to achieve a reduction in spam. Didn't you even read the title of the article?
But it's impossible to get a reduction in spam by cutting Usenet. Web forums clean up their spam by relying on moderation and on registered accounts. You have usenet newsgroups which have been moderated and accessible under registration way before the dotcom bubble burst. In fact, some ISPs restricted the access to their usenet servers exactly the same way as they restricted access to their email servers.
So, to put it short: no, you don't get a reduction in spam by cutting Usenet. And it's idiotic that someone suggests that as a reasonable means to fight spam.
Complaining that NNTP should be shut down because you see east european kiddie porn spam in some newsgroups is exactly like complaining that HTTP should be shut down because you see european kiddie porn in some sites: it doesn't make any sense and you only succeed in coming out as an ignorant fool.
And here's a tip: if you don't want to see east european kiddie porn then don't follow newsgroups/sites that post that sort of crap.
As a former very avid Usenet user, I really can't blame them. The medium is falling out of favor precisely because most of the groups are filled with junk.
That doesn't make any sense. The perceived problem with usenet spam is exactly the same as the email spam, as it's a problem which grossly depends on the service provider. For example, if your ISP fails to filter yout the spam so that you get 10 spams a day then does that make email a "medium which is falling out of favour"? Obviously it doesn't.
As Google does a decent job fighting spam on Google Mail, some usenet providers such as my ISP and even AIOE do a good job filtering the crap out of newsgroups. Moreover, usenet spam is even less of a problem than email spam. Besides being able to employ spam filters (possibly even the same ones which are applied to email) it is also possible to moderate newsgroups, exactly the same way that any web forum is moderates. In fact, its even easier to moderate a usenet group. Adding to that, you can also offer usenet access only to registered accounts, something which can't be done with email.
So, summing things up, if spam doesn't make email suck then why should it make usenet, a medium which is harder to attack, suffer more from it? It doesn't.
Newsgroups can be moderated and have been moderated for ages and if you really want to you can just as easily put up a usenet server that requires the users to register an account. It has been done in the past and it is still being done up to this minute. As usenet is nothing but an interface to access discussion data, obviously it doesn't offer any disadvantage. In fact, web forums have been continuously failing to provide the very basic functionality any usenet client has been providing for ages and every little feature that is implemented in a web forum ends up being terribly bloated (i.e., relying on tons of scripts whose code must be downloaded each time someone accesses the site) and terribly underwhelming.
So, if usenet doesn't bring any disadvantage in that oblivious fight against spam, it has been superior to web forums since it's inception and doesn't take any control out of the provider then what can possibly be driving this measure?
Exactly.
Moreover, a migration from usenet to web forums is made at the cost of increased bloat, complexity and a degradation of the user experience. I mean, in order for a web forum to provide the simplest features available in any usenet client for decades it has to force the user to download tons of javascript/silverlight scripts each time it refreshes a page. Meanwhile, with NNTP you only download an extremely small text-only message which regularly doesn't even go near 1kB and with that web 2.0 shit you are forced to download more than that in any HTML header, let alone the entire page. Moreover, there is yet to be developed a way to organize a discussion in tree form in a web forum that is remotely decent, let alone capable of competing with what usenet clients have been providing for more than a decade.
So, what exactly are they trying to achieve? Obviously this isn't being done to fight spam. Why does Microsoft hate it's customers?