Frankly, I think "truth" is overrated. If something is true, it's true whether you believe it or not. Only things that aren't true need to be believed. I say let it be a free for all and leave reality to sort it out. Keep the Scientologists in line with laws against things like kidnapping, murder, fraud, medical malpractice, etc.
The thing is, it just ain't gonna fix it. The very best they can hope for is to force all the teenagers to trade music & movies via sneakernet disk copying rather than internet P2P, which is not enough to shore up their sickly business model. As long as you can get hundreds of mp3 files on a DVD disk, the ease of which an entire music collection can be propagated even without internet use is significant, and will remain so. There are already laws and FBI agents out after large-scale commercial infringement, so this isn't needed for that, it's clearly targeted at small-time P2P & the like. "Forward those ISP logs right into our centralized government server here, thank you."
Just another "war on" bureaucracy to suck our tax dollars dry and excuse increased surveillance. War on Copyright Infringement? War on Piracy? War on IP Trading? There ought to be a cooler name for it to be found, at least.
And what's funny (or would be, if it wasn't so depressing) is the reason they're having so much trouble getting people to "respect copyright," is because of the invasions of privacy and unjust treatments that have become standard operating procedure of the government, legal, law-enforcement and commercial entities. Treat everyone like criminals, and you can soon expect them all to feel that they might as well act like them then. "If these entities can't respect our rights, there's not much reason to respect theirs."
Or are we working on another "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it" here?
And it seems to me that psychological terrorism could apply to an interesting range of things-- an al-Qaeda rant or an "evil empire" or veiled "all our options are on the table" rant from an American president for example.
BINGO-- this is exactly the problem with open source freeware. "It's free, so don't complain if it's shit." Like we should just accept the poo the monkeys fling at us just because it's free. No, you put the stuff out there, if it's crap you should expect to hear about it.
Some packages clearly need hostile takeovers to succeed. Gaim/Pidgin is a great example, as Gaim was a pretty good package at least from the outside (in fact, I'm still using it), but when they did the Pidgin rewrite they left out many features that were why I at least, selected it in the first place. Pidgin was a serious step backwards from the user perspective, IMHO. But the developers didn't give a shit and proceeded to totally ignore input from the user base they had built up with Gaim. If any package needs a hostile takeover into a new product fork Gaim/Pidgin is it.
Not if it causes you to avoid better treatments-- I would think that while at one time superstition may have been beneficial, I question if it still is today. The placebo effect may be useful for minor maladies, but for serious problems it may very well be insufficient. Then again, depending on the extent that serious problems don't develop until after parenting, the harmful effects of alternative medicines may not have sufficient effect on the gene pool...
A classic example of science journalists who don't have any idea what they're writing about! Ratios of 13C/12C in ocean sediments are used as a proxy of paleoproductivity and a weak proxy of past temperatures. Generally 18O/16O is a better temperature proxy, and is just as easy to obtain. No one really relies on carbon isotopes for anything, except sometimes methane hydrate release. Carbon dating, like figuring out how old something is, is done with 14C/12C, and it is a well known fact that carbon dating is only useful back to 50,000 years ago. Bad science journalism makes me sad inside.
Maybe they're just trying to bait some creationists, who will probably be citing this article for the next century or so.
Has RealNetworks finally figured out that lock-in protection schemes (such as the ones they were so fond of implementing in their RA products), are useless and instead are looking for some new way to make money at someone else's expense? Looks like a desperate move to keep themselves afloat...
No, I'm sorry, I don't think Larry David is enough to make Seinfeld funny. And I don't think his stand-up act is either. The only think I've ever found Seinfeld to be is utterly boring...
We're talking Jerry Seinfeld here. I've never understood what anyone sees in that guy-- I've tried to sit through his stuff now and then and I don't find it the least bit funny. Obviously he appeals to something in people that I just don't have. I've found it most peculiar because I usually find most comedians who make it to TV funny. He seems like someone's little brother trying to be funny but just isn't quite bad enough to be funny-corny, funny-awful or even funny-pathetic, he's just boring.
And the bass-guitar punctuation of the show I find unusually annoying as well. I can't sit through that for more than a few moments, and can't change the channel or pop in a DVD fast enough. I guess I just don't have the Seinfeld gene.
It seems to me that public registry is no different than when you want to use a business name, you're supposed to publish a DBA in the local paper (in California anyway, if not the entire US). If you're representing yourself on the web, it's important to be able to figure out just who you are. It's a little different than whistle-blower anonymity, I think we ought to have things like web-browsing anonymity (what sites we visit are nobodies business but our own, not our ISPs, the governments, the RIAAs, etc.). But if you're putting up a website, and especially in the.com domain, you're purporting to be "doing business" in some form and there are legitimate public interests in keeping track of just who is doing business where. ESPECIALLY if you are accepting payment in some form.
Now an alternative might be a browser that checks every website against the whois and if it's anonymous will automatically block or flag it in some way. The whois servers probably wouldn't like that too much at the moment, but they ought to give some thought to this-- possibly connected to certificates or something if that would help in implementing browser recognition of such "stealth" sites.
The privacy protection for WHOIS is a necessary evil. I am tired of getting letters from the "Domain Registry of America" telling me that I need to renew my domains, usually at triple of what I actually charge my own customers. With privacy protection in place, this kind of scam dies.
Oh cry me a river. I get those letters once a year and just toss 'em. Big F^'in deal. That's really the best argument you can muster?
I use the Windows taskbar as a push-down interruption stack while I'm working. I'll be in a browser window, then need to open up a Word doc, then another browser, and later I can just click down the list (or actually, up the list as I keep the taskbar vertically on the left hand side of my widescreen display where I have readily available screen real estate for it). Everything is thus kept in chronological order, browser pages nicely integrated with application pages. And a vertical taskbar, widened for tab-label readability on a widescreen display works nicely for this purpose. Pages tend to be taller than they are wide, so this maximizes the vertical space I have for individual pages.
Nice thing about using the OS tabs, is I can interleave Word doc tabs with Browser tabs with whatever apps I have. No can do with browser tabs. I can't integrate non-browser apps with in-browser tabs (and don't want to, so don't get any BIG IDEAS). Browsers that insist on putting everything in new tabs annoy the hell out of me as it screws up my workflow and eats up valuable vertical-space realestate. Unnacceptable-- software that won't adapt to *me* is subject to immediate defenestration. In addition, I'm used to looking on the left side of the screen for current pages and in-browser tabs don't show up there.
Browser tabs are less than USELESS to me. And while I can often right-click open-in-new-window instead of open-in-new tab, the problem is a lot of pages decide this for me by doing their own open-in-new-window which ends up being relegated to a tab in these new-fangled "tabbed" browsers. Firefox options in that regard help somewhat, but now and then a tab will sneak past for some reason. Not conditioned like a sheep to look at the in-browser tabs (not expecting or wanting any), I've found that often new tabs are opened and not brought to front so they start building up with who-knows-what crap that I don't notice until pages later, when I can no longer connect what page I visited that produced it in order to isolate the condition and proxyfilter it into submission.
The problem is though, is that there is a conflict-of-interest here. Many browser authors want to keep you in the browser as much as possible, and Google in particular. Just like in the early days where Yahoo search at one point would give you an *intermediate* search page with additional options before giving you the final links page-- and it was clear the reason was that it provided them another page where they could subject you to advertising. I'm not sure what happened with Yahoo after that, as I quickly moved to AltaVista at that point and never looked back (this was before Google became ubiquitous).
I don't want Google in control of my web "experience" any more than I want Microsoft or Steve Jobs to be (or Mozilla, for that matter). I suspect that they actually will trend towards integrating external apps into browser tabs, as it keeps them in control of your experience-- exactly where they want you.
Hey, face it-- for many people the computer just isn't very important. They can ignore what it does or what it "needs," just like they ignore TV commercials.
Nadertrading only makes sense if you think Obama is substantially different than McCain. But if you did, you probably wouldn't be wanting to vote for Nader in the first place. I'll be voting Nader and hoping it *will* throw the race to one or the other. Obama demonstrated their essential sameness clearly with his a) lack of push for impeachment, and b) voting for the FISA bill letting AT&T off the hook. Get real-- Obama is nothing more than McCain with a happy-face pasted on. So in protest, I'm throwing my vote away even if it means McCain gets elected and immediately starts bombing Iran and banning abortions. And don't blame me for what whoever wins does, I point to the masses of weak willed sheep who insist on keeping this two-party farce alive-- and a huge chunk of them don't vote at all, less than 50% of the voting-eligible populace voted in the last two elections.
Or more interestingly, Isochron dating. Carbon dating is only good for about 60K years and is calibrated against dendrochronology among other things, and while an increased error margin could be interesting, I would think such a margin would have more impact on things considered to be far older than 60K years.
I suspect they will end up trying to sneak throttling in by describing it a different way. By "exempting" certain services from the caps perhaps?
Years ago someone I know tried to get a DIY geodesic dome design approved for a building permit. Used triangular wooden forms and poured concrete. First try failed-- the concrete made them nervous. So he reworded the application, and called the technique "cast-in-place concrete bricks." And the response was essentially, "oh, bricks, we know what those are-- APPROVED."
Moral of the story: how you word it makes all the difference. Selective bandwidth caps are easier to sell if they aren't percieved as "throttling" or specifically targeting P2P, etc..
Seems to me this'll just inspire some strips illustrating the arguments on the other side, and probably by better artists. I'd say this is the first volley in a war they really don't want to start..
While I agree the guy's questions are a bit hard to get, there's one real good reason to avoid SFTP-- all readily available implementations are a hell of a lot slower than FTP. And the OpenSSH community doesn't seem to have much interest in addressing it. HP came up with a performance patch some time ago (HPN-SSH), but I don't think it's ever been folded into the main source tree-- certainly it's not easy to get an already built Windows version with the patch applied, so for the most part, only developers have it. Even then, the reports I've read about it don't measure up to FTP, so where performance is crucial it will be hard to move away from FTP.
If we're thinking about using a file for a password, how do I go about entering it as a login from a library's computer system that doesn't allow attachment of USB devices? Seems to me the biggest problem with file-based passwords is you don't always have it when you need it-- type-it-in-yourself passwords don't usually have that problem. And the idea of entering a URL to find the file just means that the URL becomes the type-in password at that point, not the file. I like the idea of increased security, but not at the expense of usability...
A lot of the problem comes from the fact that Blu-ray quality quite often sucks. This has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the mastering process. I have seen countless Blu-rays that hardly have enough detail to justify a DVD release, let alone anything in HD;....
This is an important point-- for me to go Blu-Ray and be happy with it, anything I buy on that format better damn well look better than what I can get on DVD. And as most of what I like to watch is mostly content that's either more than 30 years old, or is something made for SD TV like Anime. Even if there is an original somewhere with the quality required to look good on Blu-Ray, the chances that a publisher will want to devote the expense to producing it are pretty unlikely. I rather doubt that much of any of the content I like to watch will ever be available on Blu-Ray, or if it is will look at all better than the copy I probably already have of it on DVD (and paid
If the music industry is looking for something to blame for the rampant rise in illegal filesharing of music, this sort of thing ought to be a prime candidate. Just hearing of this sort of thing is probably enough to cause many people to choose not to waste their time with "legal" music sites...
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Frankly, I think "truth" is overrated. If something is true, it's true whether you believe it or not. Only things that aren't true need to be believed. I say let it be a free for all and leave reality to sort it out. Keep the Scientologists in line with laws against things like kidnapping, murder, fraud, medical malpractice, etc.
Seems like that would be a little more practical...
The thing is, it just ain't gonna fix it. The very best they can hope for is to force all the teenagers to trade music & movies via sneakernet disk copying rather than internet P2P, which is not enough to shore up their sickly business model. As long as you can get hundreds of mp3 files on a DVD disk, the ease of which an entire music collection can be propagated even without internet use is significant, and will remain so. There are already laws and FBI agents out after large-scale commercial infringement, so this isn't needed for that, it's clearly targeted at small-time P2P & the like. "Forward those ISP logs right into our centralized government server here, thank you."
Just another "war on" bureaucracy to suck our tax dollars dry and excuse increased surveillance. War on Copyright Infringement? War on Piracy? War on IP Trading? There ought to be a cooler name for it to be found, at least.
And what's funny (or would be, if it wasn't so depressing) is the reason they're having so much trouble getting people to "respect copyright," is because of the invasions of privacy and unjust treatments that have become standard operating procedure of the government, legal, law-enforcement and commercial entities. Treat everyone like criminals, and you can soon expect them all to feel that they might as well act like them then. "If these entities can't respect our rights, there's not much reason to respect theirs."
Or are we working on another "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it" here?
And it seems to me that psychological terrorism could apply to an interesting range of things-- an al-Qaeda rant or an "evil empire" or veiled "all our options are on the table" rant from an American president for example.
BINGO-- this is exactly the problem with open source freeware. "It's free, so don't complain if it's shit." Like we should just accept the poo the monkeys fling at us just because it's free. No, you put the stuff out there, if it's crap you should expect to hear about it.
Some packages clearly need hostile takeovers to succeed. Gaim/Pidgin is a great example, as Gaim was a pretty good package at least from the outside (in fact, I'm still using it), but when they did the Pidgin rewrite they left out many features that were why I at least, selected it in the first place. Pidgin was a serious step backwards from the user perspective, IMHO. But the developers didn't give a shit and proceeded to totally ignore input from the user base they had built up with Gaim. If any package needs a hostile takeover into a new product fork Gaim/Pidgin is it.
Not if it causes you to avoid better treatments-- I would think that while at one time superstition may have been beneficial, I question if it still is today. The placebo effect may be useful for minor maladies, but for serious problems it may very well be insufficient. Then again, depending on the extent that serious problems don't develop until after parenting, the harmful effects of alternative medicines may not have sufficient effect on the gene pool...
A classic example of science journalists who don't have any idea what they're writing about! Ratios of 13C/12C in ocean sediments are used as a proxy of paleoproductivity and a weak proxy of past temperatures. Generally 18O/16O is a better temperature proxy, and is just as easy to obtain. No one really relies on carbon isotopes for anything, except sometimes methane hydrate release. Carbon dating, like figuring out how old something is, is done with 14C/12C, and it is a well known fact that carbon dating is only useful back to 50,000 years ago. Bad science journalism makes me sad inside.
Maybe they're just trying to bait some creationists, who will probably be citing this article for the next century or so.
Has RealNetworks finally figured out that lock-in protection schemes (such as the ones they were so fond of implementing in their RA products), are useless and instead are looking for some new way to make money at someone else's expense? Looks like a desperate move to keep themselves afloat...
No, I'm sorry, I don't think Larry David is enough to make Seinfeld funny. And I don't think his stand-up act is either. The only think I've ever found Seinfeld to be is utterly boring...
We're talking Jerry Seinfeld here. I've never understood what anyone sees in that guy-- I've tried to sit through his stuff now and then and I don't find it the least bit funny. Obviously he appeals to something in people that I just don't have. I've found it most peculiar because I usually find most comedians who make it to TV funny. He seems like someone's little brother trying to be funny but just isn't quite bad enough to be funny-corny, funny-awful or even funny-pathetic, he's just boring.
And the bass-guitar punctuation of the show I find unusually annoying as well. I can't sit through that for more than a few moments, and can't change the channel or pop in a DVD fast enough. I guess I just don't have the Seinfeld gene.
It seems to me that public registry is no different than when you want to use a business name, you're supposed to publish a DBA in the local paper (in California anyway, if not the entire US). If you're representing yourself on the web, it's important to be able to figure out just who you are. It's a little different than whistle-blower anonymity, I think we ought to have things like web-browsing anonymity (what sites we visit are nobodies business but our own, not our ISPs, the governments, the RIAAs, etc.). But if you're putting up a website, and especially in the .com domain, you're purporting to be "doing business" in some form and there are legitimate public interests in keeping track of just who is doing business where. ESPECIALLY if you are accepting payment in some form.
Now an alternative might be a browser that checks every website against the whois and if it's anonymous will automatically block or flag it in some way. The whois servers probably wouldn't like that too much at the moment, but they ought to give some thought to this-- possibly connected to certificates or something if that would help in implementing browser recognition of such "stealth" sites.
The privacy protection for WHOIS is a necessary evil. I am tired of getting letters from the "Domain Registry of America" telling me that I need to renew my domains, usually at triple of what I actually charge my own customers. With privacy protection in place, this kind of scam dies.
Oh cry me a river. I get those letters once a year and just toss 'em. Big F^'in deal. That's really the best argument you can muster?
They probably figure that's about how long before their DRM becomes totally useless. Optimistic, aren't they?
I use the Windows taskbar as a push-down interruption stack while I'm working. I'll be in a browser window, then need to open up a Word doc, then another browser, and later I can just click down the list (or actually, up the list as I keep the taskbar vertically on the left hand side of my widescreen display where I have readily available screen real estate for it). Everything is thus kept in chronological order, browser pages nicely integrated with application pages. And a vertical taskbar, widened for tab-label readability on a widescreen display works nicely for this purpose. Pages tend to be taller than they are wide, so this maximizes the vertical space I have for individual pages.
Nice thing about using the OS tabs, is I can interleave Word doc tabs with Browser tabs with whatever apps I have. No can do with browser tabs. I can't integrate non-browser apps with in-browser tabs (and don't want to, so don't get any BIG IDEAS). Browsers that insist on putting everything in new tabs annoy the hell out of me as it screws up my workflow and eats up valuable vertical-space realestate. Unnacceptable-- software that won't adapt to *me* is subject to immediate defenestration. In addition, I'm used to looking on the left side of the screen for current pages and in-browser tabs don't show up there.
Browser tabs are less than USELESS to me. And while I can often right-click open-in-new-window instead of open-in-new tab, the problem is a lot of pages decide this for me by doing their own open-in-new-window which ends up being relegated to a tab in these new-fangled "tabbed" browsers. Firefox options in that regard help somewhat, but now and then a tab will sneak past for some reason. Not conditioned like a sheep to look at the in-browser tabs (not expecting or wanting any), I've found that often new tabs are opened and not brought to front so they start building up with who-knows-what crap that I don't notice until pages later, when I can no longer connect what page I visited that produced it in order to isolate the condition and proxyfilter it into submission.
The problem is though, is that there is a conflict-of-interest here. Many browser authors want to keep you in the browser as much as possible, and Google in particular. Just like in the early days where Yahoo search at one point would give you an *intermediate* search page with additional options before giving you the final links page-- and it was clear the reason was that it provided them another page where they could subject you to advertising. I'm not sure what happened with Yahoo after that, as I quickly moved to AltaVista at that point and never looked back (this was before Google became ubiquitous). I don't want Google in control of my web "experience" any more than I want Microsoft or Steve Jobs to be (or Mozilla, for that matter). I suspect that they actually will trend towards integrating external apps into browser tabs, as it keeps them in control of your experience-- exactly where they want you.
-- The "I hate browser tabs" curmudgeon.
Hey, face it-- for many people the computer just isn't very important. They can ignore what it does or what it "needs," just like they ignore TV commercials.
Nadertrading only makes sense if you think Obama is substantially different than McCain. But if you did, you probably wouldn't be wanting to vote for Nader in the first place. I'll be voting Nader and hoping it *will* throw the race to one or the other. Obama demonstrated their essential sameness clearly with his a) lack of push for impeachment, and b) voting for the FISA bill letting AT&T off the hook. Get real-- Obama is nothing more than McCain with a happy-face pasted on. So in protest, I'm throwing my vote away even if it means McCain gets elected and immediately starts bombing Iran and banning abortions. And don't blame me for what whoever wins does, I point to the masses of weak willed sheep who insist on keeping this two-party farce alive-- and a huge chunk of them don't vote at all, less than 50% of the voting-eligible populace voted in the last two elections.
Or more interestingly, Isochron dating. Carbon dating is only good for about 60K years and is calibrated against dendrochronology among other things, and while an increased error margin could be interesting, I would think such a margin would have more impact on things considered to be far older than 60K years.
I suspect they will end up trying to sneak throttling in by describing it a different way. By "exempting" certain services from the caps perhaps?
Years ago someone I know tried to get a DIY geodesic dome design approved for a building permit. Used triangular wooden forms and poured concrete. First try failed-- the concrete made them nervous. So he reworded the application, and called the technique "cast-in-place concrete bricks." And the response was essentially, "oh, bricks, we know what those are-- APPROVED."
Moral of the story: how you word it makes all the difference. Selective bandwidth caps are easier to sell if they aren't percieved as "throttling" or specifically targeting P2P, etc..
Was contracted out to Jack T. Chick, no doubt.
Seems to me this'll just inspire some strips illustrating the arguments on the other side, and probably by better artists. I'd say this is the first volley in a war they really don't want to start..
While I agree the guy's questions are a bit hard to get, there's one real good reason to avoid SFTP-- all readily available implementations are a hell of a lot slower than FTP. And the OpenSSH community doesn't seem to have much interest in addressing it. HP came up with a performance patch some time ago (HPN-SSH), but I don't think it's ever been folded into the main source tree-- certainly it's not easy to get an already built Windows version with the patch applied, so for the most part, only developers have it. Even then, the reports I've read about it don't measure up to FTP, so where performance is crucial it will be hard to move away from FTP.
If we're thinking about using a file for a password, how do I go about entering it as a login from a library's computer system that doesn't allow attachment of USB devices? Seems to me the biggest problem with file-based passwords is you don't always have it when you need it-- type-it-in-yourself passwords don't usually have that problem. And the idea of entering a URL to find the file just means that the URL becomes the type-in password at that point, not the file. I like the idea of increased security, but not at the expense of usability...
I remember the people bleating about how they'd never put XP on their machines. How they were sticking with 98se forever.
I'm still using w98se you insensitive clod!
A lot of the problem comes from the fact that Blu-ray quality quite often sucks. This has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the mastering process. I have seen countless Blu-rays that hardly have enough detail to justify a DVD release, let alone anything in HD;....
This is an important point-- for me to go Blu-Ray and be happy with it, anything I buy on that format better damn well look better than what I can get on DVD. And as most of what I like to watch is mostly content that's either more than 30 years old, or is something made for SD TV like Anime. Even if there is an original somewhere with the quality required to look good on Blu-Ray, the chances that a publisher will want to devote the expense to producing it are pretty unlikely. I rather doubt that much of any of the content I like to watch will ever be available on Blu-Ray, or if it is will look at all better than the copy I probably already have of it on DVD (and paid
So now XP's $399. And you get a free computer with it. Considering how much Vista costs, that sounds like a pretty good deal...
If the music industry is looking for something to blame for the rampant rise in illegal filesharing of music, this sort of thing ought to be a prime candidate. Just hearing of this sort of thing is probably enough to cause many people to choose not to waste their time with "legal" music sites...