None of those people in grandparent (penny arcade, etc) would be making ANY money without the banking institutions - that is, unles they could ifnd a way to convince people to shove their money in envelopes, stamp it and mail it. Oh, but then they'd still be at the mercy of the post office, so if they were offering something the ever increasingly fundamentalist world governments dislike they could be cut off in an instant and hauled in front of some kangaroo court on "mail fraud" charges - or something much worse.
Archiving is moot - the notion that a world of indiviiduals will be able to provide a more comprehensive archive is a fallacy; here's an example: I've bought at least two copies of grace jones' slave to teh rhythm, yet don't at present have one because the cassette and the cd both wore out. For months I have been jonesing for some of this out of print material and even amazon didn't have any used copies every time I looked. I checked p2p, torrents and usenet, and all that's there is her greatest hits and such. Finally it dawned on me I had installed real player for linux some time ago, so I hit up rhapsody... guess what? Not only is the CD I want there, but a halff dozen others as well. And Rhapsody gives me 25 "free full downloads" essentially every time I visit (I only allow session cookies) so... here's an example of DRM inciting the legit publishers to provide for me what no "commons archivist" have thus far been willing or able to do - high quality downloads (the sound actually is better than the last mp3 version I tried of the title track) that I can access from my desktop anytime, free.
There is room for both - this notion that drm is inherently evil is as moronic as any other bigotry. And when all those bad and nasty things happen and linux DOES get locked out of the mainstream media industry, you'll need only go as far as your nearest mirror to see who to blame.
a $350 dv camera will do what you need. the tape can easily be captured onto a hard drive, and from there you can produce as many copies as you need.
Why on earth are you still using vhs tapes? if these are legal documents i would think you'd want them to last, and vhs tapes... don't. DV isn't exactly know for long life either but its easy to operate in real time, then the tech folks can make a dvd archive, tape backup, or whatever (ie digital dv file on a dvd, not a dvd player dvd).
And with 30 billion on hand, they are in a lot better shape than most of those "conglomerates." The notion that a more efficient microsoft would be one that doesn't "waste" all that money on R&D for new products, doesn't employ all those programmers, and is in hock for, oh let's say half a fucking TRILLION dollars is simply insane. These are simply bankers and lawyers whining because they do not get their piece of the biggest pie ever baked.
Microsoft IS a bank. Imagine the next windows comes out - they've worked the bugs out of the media player DRM and applied that technology to a Microsoft wallet type program. Now they offer the incentive to every home user - FREE WINDOWS with your next system! Buy Vista Longhorn with the Megahard wallet program and get an instant rebate in the form of, say, $250 (the price of Vista Longhorn with the Megahard wallet program) pre-stuffed in that wallet which you can spend at virtually any online retailer. What's more, even if you don't have a bank account you can purchase more credits in your megahard wallet buy picking up cards at any of thousands of participating retailers in denominations of 25, 50, 100, 200 and 400 dollars for an additional fee of only $2.95.
They could do that with the cash they have on hand, now - no need to go into debt. And they would quickly own online commerce... say bye-bye, paypal.
apt-get install gqview and spend a few second setting the preferences, bang, irfanview is history.
Change to PASV mode in gftp on those sites that keep crashing you, and problem will be mostly solved.
The best part about ubuntu is it's so easy to install vmware server and run windows reasonably safely while still enjoying the power of a linux desktop. Compare that to the fun sounding prospect of install vmware server in disaster prone windows and running ubuntu inside it.
The only stumbling block I see here is development of meaningful APIs, like a standard built in mono/.NET file serving system that would allow me to install a "windows appliance" and have it automatically locate and connect to the shared hard drive space on the machine. Ubuntu tries, but still doesn't properly install samba in such a way one has "plug and play" function - they always seem to leave out one little detail that has to be fixed up by editing some not so obscure text file deep in/etc or/usr or something.
Oh, and a fucking cd burner that also burns dvds and doesn't just magically flake out on its own as if it had a personality. Twq years I've been using uubuntu, they still haven't got this right. If Shuttleworth would shuttle some of that money into 'encouraging" a replacement for the pain in the ass cdrecord package it would be a boon to... prety much everyone.
No way would I use a machine like that without a RAID5 setup. I've lost countless hours (and access to music I no longer have, since the CDs were lost in a move or just quit playing). Whatever you spend on discs, going from 4-5 only adds 20% in cost, which even at $400 is pretty damn cheap compared to the work a TB or two of storage represents.
Old machines with ATX type motherboards and such are far too cheap to justify shelling out $700 or more for a "dedicated" type solution. Get an old machine with a P2B-F motherboard and a decent PII cpu, throw away the old power supply and put in a shinty new $70 or so power supply, plug in a controller card if you wanna use SATA drives, and off you go - essentially for the price of the drives you want to put in it.
I don't know if this would be good viewing material for someone not familiar with the bigger picture. Stalman comes across at times as a complete dick in this video. His contributions have been great, but between his demeanor and his appearance, he completely sucks as an advocate.
How do you think those imaginary $100 laptops will get connected to the internet? I don't know of many third world countries with pervasive wifi presence.
Having a bunch of cheap PCs connected on a local WAN is valuable, but it still doesn't get the latest commodities prices to the impoverished farmer living 100 miles from the nearest internet cafe.
A lack of control is bad, any way you look at it.
Really? You don't seem to mind the notion of separating those who built the worldwide cellphone network from their control over it - oblivious to the fact it is that control that makes it robust, pervasive and relatively cheap. Ironically, one of the most expensive places for so called 3G service (where it is even available) is in the US, where those oligopolies have less control (due to massive regulation) than in those "underdeveloped" places where they are essentially given carte blanche, often in collusion with the state.
If the path to pervasive, cheap, relaiable service is "free" and "voluntary" then where is a working example? We have had more than a decade now to develop something like that, so far all we have are smattering of "hot spots" in the larger cities that all serve as a gateway to... a huge, privately owned, essentially proprietary collection of networks. Who owns the internet? The bells, the cable corporations, the telcom providers... we are but squatters - or, at best, renters - of our space in "the cloud."
they need money -= work, and a means of recoupment for that work. "Cellphone farmers" play the grain exchange and take their money home via the same cellphone network that allows them to keep up to date on commodity prices. This is enabled by "proprietariness" and encryption - "secrets." Without that "evil" DRM these would still be at the mercy of their own ignorance and the local commodity sharks who could afford the relatively expensive "internet connections" and such. The proprietariness of the worldwide cellphone network has allowed the companies behind it to expands service into corners and crevices "the internet" can only dream of occupying, all the while getting more affordable... enabling more and poorer people to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by modern telecommunications.
A dogmatic demand that "all technology is free" is every bit as "evil" as the demand it all be proprietary. Balance is what is needed, not a radical ideological monoculture.
Sorry, but every one of thos gnome developers is the elite. Every one of those gnome users is part of the elite. Less than 1 in 5 humans is "on the net" in any meaningful way, and a great many of those 1 in 5 are connected via things like cellphones and shared terminals.
The poor need money - they need jobs, they need health, they need hope. They don't give a shit whether the internet runs on oil or gas or whether it runs at all. Making the blanket assumption all DRM = evil is just one more extremist, unproven dogma.
what of the Indian peasant who, thanks to his cellphone, now has more up to date market information and, because of this, is better able to provide for his family? Should he be "liberated" from that technology because it is proprietary, non free, non gratis, owned by the evil corporate horde?
RMS says our goal should be to liberate everyone in cyberspace (whatever that is). I say our goal should be to liberate everyone on earth - from poverty and disease and whatever else needs fixin'. It may never happen, but in a world where only perhaps - at best - 20 percent of the population even has such connectivity, saying only that elite should be included in the revolution seems to me nothing more than a recipe for even greater division and oppression.
I have been using an encrypted RAID5 drive in my machine for months. I have had a few disc failures and recovery is easy enough - I just remove the disc from the raid, and the new one back, and it fixes itself. Encrypting everything is easier than encrypting only parts, because there's no granularity at present to ensure you don't accidentally copy or move "safe" data to "tainted" areas - ewncrypting everything ensures there's little chance for accidents.
Making the disks encrypted is even easier than making the RAID5 using mdadm. I've also had failures in my home partition (which is not on the RAID) and the standard reiserfs recovery tools had no problem fixing the corruption - just mount the encrypted partition and use the tools as normal.
What we have now is competition. Where do you live? I live in the VERY rural south where we JUST GOT DSL and have never had cable (and probably never will). And yet I am now free to choose between Bellsouth (which requires me to use windows or a mac and their special software) or I can choose dixie-net (whose name servers and routers "protect" their users from many sites the local christian groups don't like) or I can choose from the ISP I have now (which does none of that) or I can choose another local provider (who I liked for sometime, but whose service has gone downhill) - the list goes on. I suspect I have at least a dozen different ISPs I could choose from even here in the middle fo nowhere - all accessed via the same cheap dsl modem I purchased with my own money.
Making users pay for usage means users pay more - there's already plans like that: I like ahving a fasst pipe so I pay more for 3MBps service instead of the much cheaper 384k connection. But "net neutrality" removes incentive from one side of the equation: those who offer high bandwidth services and have large customer bases and lots of free cash. If Google doesn't want to pony up for Bellsouth's tarriffs they have plenty of mo9ney to spend on building THEIR OWN NETWORK to operate in parallel with the other major backbones and peer at local points - they can offer this peering to ANYONE (except Bellsouth and the others who would charge them if they could) and so have even more INCENTIVE TO COMPETE with those old school telecoms!
Why do you think teh fucking CHRISTIAN COALITION wants congress to get involved with routing the packets on the internet? It's another way for them to make sure THEIR BRAINWASHING MESSAGE gets through whilew providing an avenue for their lobbyists to shut down all that "bad stuff" they don't like!
All "net neutrality" does is open the door for congress to decide what gets routed where. There would inevitably be "special exceptions" in any such bill so ISPs could filter out spam and all that other "wasteful" or even potentially "offensive or dangerous" content, which means they would then have one more tool to use against sites like MYSPACE or amateur teen kingdom, or any other site "they don't like" - and of course they do it in the name of "proteecting the children" and "supporting community standards." Only with "net neutrality" there's LESS CHOICE in the world - because my local ISP who now DOESN'T filter my packets and "protect me" would have no choice - I'd have to live wiht the same NEUTERED and "safe" and "innoffensive" internet as all the other sheeple.
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater...
most of you seem blinded by the rhetoric in exactly the same way as everyone was about the war in iraq, global warming becoming "climate change," etc. When the governments want to TAKE AWAY FREEDOMS they don't do it by saying "we're taking away your freedom" - they do it by saying "we're going to free you."
That is exactly what is happening now. Right now I have a 70 dollar DSL modem, and with that modem I can choose whatever the hell ISP I want. If I don't want to run windows and play by Bellsouth's rules, I don't have to - I can go with the ISP I have chosen who DOESN'T filter my packets, censor my usenet access, and basically try to protect me from my own selfish interests.
"Network neutrality" is the first step to "network neutering." Once you have set the precedent - once the bills are passed that congress can set the rules for the internet, what is to stop them from taking the next step? They are free to attack anything the press can rally public support around - they can "protect the children" by making sure "public nuisance" sites like MYSPACE or the PORN sites or anything else they don't like get low priority, and they can do it through force of legislation.
Then I WON'T have the freedom to choose an ISP that ignores those QOS header strings and gives me whatever the hell I want - because they're bound BY LAW to restrict my access along with everyone else's.
"Network neutrality" isn't about freedom. What we have right now is freedom. Network "neutrality" means "we're going to legislate for you in the public's interest." You think they'll stop at defending the turf of the giant megacorps with plenty of money for lobbyists? Hell no... they won't stop until they've built the great new firewall of Amerikkka.
Sorry to barge in on your feminist rage, but that knife cuts both ways. I haven't seen any fat, bloated, pimply faced gamers being sponsored either - the ones that get sponsorship might have a few pimples, but they're also very photogenic. Sponsors aren't going to sponsor someone who looks like a middle age loser you might find hanging around the local playground.
It's not just men who are attracted to a pretty face, and all the feminist rage of all the embittered and abused women in the world isn't going to change that fact of life.
I can't believe kangarooski replied to you and didn't bust your chops over that comment. It is absolutely, positively NOT illegal to download or even share music simply because it is "copyrighted." In the US ALL creative works are AUTOMATICALLY copyrighted the instant they are created, and any creator of a work is free to share that work in any manner they see fit.
Linux is copyrighted and that copyright is what gives it is walking papers. Lessig's books are copyrighted and he encourages others to remix, reburn and republish them as they see fit so long as it is not for commercial gain. Magnatune's servers are chock full of copyrighted music it is perfectly legal to download and even to share with others - it's part of their publicity machine, in fact.
The RIAA likes to beat this into the heads of kids: "it's illegal to download COPYRIGHTED material" Of course they are not going to tell kids about those artists who rely on copyright to protect them from those same predatory labels that beat this simplistic, braindead ideal about "copyright" into their heads.
One shouldn't have to be a hermit to protect themselves or their children from the immorals of society.
And you don't have to be. The argument about porn popups is a red herring: as has already been pointed out a hojillion times the sites that respect this stuff already have front pages that emphatically warn people to stay away if they are offended, and they have links to all the "nanny" software anyone could stomach. The sites that do the popups are already in violation of the law and passing more laws that harm everybody isn't going to squash that behavior. and by the way, I use google at least a dozen times a day and I cannot remember the last time I saw a "porn popup" - I use a browser that disables this behavior by default AND I use a proxy server that filters out most of the scripting that leads to it, and that software (firefox and privoxy) is just as freely available to you as it is to me. If you're too fucking stupid to click and install that stuff by yourself, pay the neighbor kid twenty bucks to do it for you - I'm sure he could use the money to take your daughter on a date to mcdonald's.
if you have some "moral code" that inherently mandates restricting your children's access to certain forms of speech, it is your responsibility to your children to enforce it - not mine, and not Playboy's.
Even though some Republicans are against certain forms of birth control, and although they may find pictures of women in swimsuits offensive somehow, very few would be stupid enough to try grouping those sites with pornography sites. Doing so would alienate many of their voters.
Really? In a country where a broadcaster gets fined for suggesting the young adults in a scene where everyone is still clothed (however minimally) is actually a bunch of teenagers having sex, and such an action is met with seemingly popular support, where do they draw the line?
They're already doing everything they can to outlaw all images of children from the net that are not a product of some mainstream children's programming media giant, what happens next? they will say children (ie young adults) should not be engaging in sex and therefore information about sex has no "scientific or educational value" to them and, because the idea of kids having sex is already well proven to be "patently offensive" to a very vocal minority of wacked out religious zealots, all sites containing sexual content of any sort must be moved to the xxx domain...
Re:Watch favorite shows on the internet?
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How do you find shows like this? I wonder how these guys make any money??? They film a show, and then give it away on the web. I've watched the first three episodes, and it's pretty good.
I don't have an index of stuff... I just lookk around and find things. Maybe I need to start posting that stuff on a blog somewhere and then others can subscribe to the torrents via my css feed. Hmmmm... do I smell opportunity? Maybe if I was more ambitious - right now I got too much other stuff on my plate.
Anyway, I'm glad you liked the show. See how it works? I tell you about it in a post on slashdot, you've found the show and now a gazillion others might as well because there are so many people reading here and they see it's not just me raving about it, someone else things it's pretty good, too.
THAT is why they "give it away." I don't care if you're a wannabe rock star or just some joe wiht a digital camera who wants to make a living taking wedding photos, no one is going to give you work without seeing what kind of work you can do. This particular show is fantastically better in many respects than ANY Hollywood movie ever made about "the internet" and pirates and bootleggers and all that stuff... is it not? It's "better" because, for people like you and me who actually understand this shit, it's believable. So maybe these folks don't get a big deal hollywood contract to make "the scene:the movie" - but maybe they DO get writing contracts, or a technical consulting deals, or even the chance to sell the storyline to someone else who wants to make "the scene:the movie."
This is how art works, and you can already find more art on the internet than in all those satellite channels combined. TV is not art - it's where art goes to die.
Welcome to the scene...
Re:Watch favorite shows on the internet?
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Most people have DSL or Cable Modems, and they can get a good resolution video without the stream stopping to rebuffer.
Umm.. not exactly. A majority have access to broadband, but a third of the US still doesn't. And even among those who have broadband access, in most places reasonable broadband speeds are still so expensive most households don't have it. If you're on cable it's a boon, but a good portion of that tiny majority has access only via dsl. While BASIC dsl prices are not too bad (30 bucks around here) it's only 128kbs on oversold channels - streaming performance on such a connection is not exactly worthwhile. This is readily proven by surveys and statistical analysis that reveal less than 25% of all those internet users, broadband or no, actually use streaming services on a regular basis. And an equal percentage of that remainder say they rarely use it or have no plans at all to use it. My own experience with dsl was like this - my 80 buck a month 1.5mbit connection was peachy keen when I was one of the first in my neighborhood to bite that bullet, but within six months pacbell had so oversold their lines I couldn't even stream a 100kbps video without stuttering and interruptions - sometimes, they wouldn't even connect at all.
Maybe some shows are slightly less res than television because the provider wants to make money twice.
I really don't have a problem with this. In fact, that's kind of the point I was making: if I really want to watch Bsg an I don't have scifi channel I can just download it via torrents. The quality of this download, even the lower rez 180MB versions, is still going to be better than any "stream" I have ever seen. And if I really, really want to enjoy it in DVD rez then they still get the sale because it costs me nearly as much in time and bandwidth as it costs just to go to amazon and buy the damn things.
Would you pay five times for the same book?
I've bought the same book many times. I buy the book to have it when I want it, then end up giving it to a friend because I want them to have that ability as well. Then I end up buying it again. So? A paperback costs about an hour's pay even if you're on minimum wage.
I've also bought at least three copies of Sgt. Pepper's in my life. Two copies of the "red" album compilation, and probably two or three copies of pretty much every Alice Copper album (or cd0 printed before 1985.
There's also a lot of good stuff I don't have on cd because it still isn't offered. But that's a bit beside the point.
Then why pay five times for a film?
When I was a kid I saw Star Wars at least five times. By best friend saw it six times in a single month! We paid every single time because you could only see it at the theater.
It's easy to forget, when stuff is "free," how it used to be. I'm not defending the machine that cranks out an endless stream of bad action movies, but many of the points raised are really nothing new - what's new is our increasing ability to not have to pay every single time we want to see a popular hollywood movie (and more impoirtantly, to see it whenever the hell we want instead of waiting for it to "come around" again), and not have to replace records that have been damaged by dust or heat or cheap k-mart turntables that grind away the vinyl a little more each time we listen to a recording.
The best possible scenereo for end users is one large MPEG file in high res. MPEG can play on any machine, it does not buffer, it plays fast and well. Most people with DSL and Cable Modems can handle a 1.5 gig file no problem, and that should be good resolution for an hour long show.
Absolutely. I even do this on dialup with "small" files (Until they fill that worldwide "analog hole" there's no way this stuff is really going to compete.
This is going to sound so politically uncorrect. Who cars about the world? They care about the USA, Canada, UK, France, German
Watch favorite shows on the internet?
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Who has the bandwidth to watch crappy, jerky streams?
Until they fill that worldwide "analog hole" there's no way this stuff is really going to compete. Even if the US succumbs to pervasive DRM, are they going to stop marketing shows internationally? It seems most of the torrents come from abroad anyway. I once downloaded a "West Wing" episode before it had even appeared on TV in my east coast market.
Thanks to the indie film makers there's already better stuff freely available on the internet than on most of those 500 TV channels, anyway.
Export an avi to a folder full of pngs, attack it with imagemagick and a few batch scripts and you have a substantial amount of functionality. It's easy to advance single frame just by opening your favorite image viewer and clicking through the directory, and tweaking a single frame to perfection is as easy as saying "open in gimp."
Really? Try posting pictures of your toddler going wee-wee. Try posting instructions on cracking encrypted satellite broadcasts. Post some pictures of your young looking 18 year old girlfriend, claim she's 15, and see how quickly the MIB show up at your door...
Life aboard the US vessel is every bit as draconian - there's just a slightly different social dogma steering the ship.
It was under his administration that many bans came into place - the most relevant example being, in this case, child pornography. The thesis was banning child pornography was permissible, among other similar reasons, because such speech helped "normalize behavior" and that it could be use to coerce other children into similar behaviors. The fallacy is that ADULT pornography can (and sometimes will) be used to exactly those same ends regarding indoctrination. The other fallacy is that such regulations serve to limit "normalizing" such behavior - the fact there is children are naturally curious about their bodies and will often coerce one another, and even explore privately, these very same behaviors - in other words, it's already normal behavior. Additionally, the ban does not prevent anyone from making speech using NON children or images of children that addresses this very same goal - not to mention I can write all the dirty stories I want and even attempt to organize all the pedophiles of the nation in much the same way as any other "minority rights" organization. So banning certain forms of the speech does not, in fact, address these goals at all - all it does is make it illegal for me to take a picture of a child engaging in normal developmental behavior even if that child does so of his or her own volition.
MEANWHILE, that exact same non-logic is increasingly being applied to other forms of speech "in the name of the children." This legislation has legitimized a witch hunt wherein anyone even admiring a hot looking SIXTEEN year old is deemed a "pedophile" and a danger to society. This legislation has given social creed to narrow black and white views of an issue that leave almost no room for reason.
It's not a matter of drawing a line in the sand and arguing someone might move the line - in fact, the legislative line is drawn in the sand and the social winds will move it no matter what.
This is why we must always be careful to avoid drawing such lines entirely without first looking at the roads ahead. The ban on child pornography has led to a social climate wherein everyone essentially "thinks like a pedophile" because they are so incredibly fearful of being declared one themselves. That "line in the sand" is essentially causing a greater perversion of our society and an increasingly paternalistic climate of legislation which inevitably leads to yet more reactionary nonsense like this.
Maybe we should just ban all images of human beings in any creative expressions and be done with it. Seemed to work well for protecting "human rights" in many muslim cultures, didn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Your post has far more "truth" in it than the OP.
None of those people in grandparent (penny arcade, etc) would be making ANY money without the banking institutions - that is, unles they could ifnd a way to convince people to shove their money in envelopes, stamp it and mail it. Oh, but then they'd still be at the mercy of the post office, so if they were offering something the ever increasingly fundamentalist world governments dislike they could be cut off in an instant and hauled in front of some kangaroo court on "mail fraud" charges - or something much worse.
Archiving is moot - the notion that a world of indiviiduals will be able to provide a more comprehensive archive is a fallacy; here's an example: I've bought at least two copies of grace jones' slave to teh rhythm, yet don't at present have one because the cassette and the cd both wore out. For months I have been jonesing for some of this out of print material and even amazon didn't have any used copies every time I looked. I checked p2p, torrents and usenet, and all that's there is her greatest hits and such. Finally it dawned on me I had installed real player for linux some time ago, so I hit up rhapsody... guess what? Not only is the CD I want there, but a halff dozen others as well. And Rhapsody gives me 25 "free full downloads" essentially every time I visit (I only allow session cookies) so... here's an example of DRM inciting the legit publishers to provide for me what no "commons archivist" have thus far been willing or able to do - high quality downloads (the sound actually is better than the last mp3 version I tried of the title track) that I can access from my desktop anytime, free.
There is room for both - this notion that drm is inherently evil is as moronic as any other bigotry. And when all those bad and nasty things happen and linux DOES get locked out of the mainstream media industry, you'll need only go as far as your nearest mirror to see who to blame.
Balance is what is needed, not zealotry.
a $350 dv camera will do what you need. the tape can easily be captured onto a hard drive, and from there you can produce as many copies as you need.
Why on earth are you still using vhs tapes? if these are legal documents i would think you'd want them to last, and vhs tapes... don't. DV isn't exactly know for long life either but its easy to operate in real time, then the tech folks can make a dvd archive, tape backup, or whatever (ie digital dv file on a dvd, not a dvd player dvd).
And with 30 billion on hand, they are in a lot better shape than most of those "conglomerates." The notion that a more efficient microsoft would be one that doesn't "waste" all that money on R&D for new products, doesn't employ all those programmers, and is in hock for, oh let's say half a fucking TRILLION dollars is simply insane. These are simply bankers and lawyers whining because they do not get their piece of the biggest pie ever baked.
Microsoft IS a bank. Imagine the next windows comes out - they've worked the bugs out of the media player DRM and applied that technology to a Microsoft wallet type program. Now they offer the incentive to every home user - FREE WINDOWS with your next system! Buy Vista Longhorn with the Megahard wallet program and get an instant rebate in the form of, say, $250 (the price of Vista Longhorn with the Megahard wallet program) pre-stuffed in that wallet which you can spend at virtually any online retailer. What's more, even if you don't have a bank account you can purchase more credits in your megahard wallet buy picking up cards at any of thousands of participating retailers in denominations of 25, 50, 100, 200 and 400 dollars for an additional fee of only $2.95.
They could do that with the cash they have on hand, now - no need to go into debt. And they would quickly own online commerce... say bye-bye, paypal.
register and leave a pm for me at my vanity site poptones.f2o.org
apt-get install gqview and spend a few second setting the preferences, bang, irfanview is history.
/etc or /usr or something.
Change to PASV mode in gftp on those sites that keep crashing you, and problem will be mostly solved.
The best part about ubuntu is it's so easy to install vmware server and run windows reasonably safely while still enjoying the power of a linux desktop. Compare that to the fun sounding prospect of install vmware server in disaster prone windows and running ubuntu inside it.
The only stumbling block I see here is development of meaningful APIs, like a standard built in mono/.NET file serving system that would allow me to install a "windows appliance" and have it automatically locate and connect to the shared hard drive space on the machine. Ubuntu tries, but still doesn't properly install samba in such a way one has "plug and play" function - they always seem to leave out one little detail that has to be fixed up by editing some not so obscure text file deep in
Oh, and a fucking cd burner that also burns dvds and doesn't just magically flake out on its own as if it had a personality. Twq years I've been using uubuntu, they still haven't got this right. If Shuttleworth would shuttle some of that money into 'encouraging" a replacement for the pain in the ass cdrecord package it would be a boon to... prety much everyone.
No way would I use a machine like that without a RAID5 setup. I've lost countless hours (and access to music I no longer have, since the CDs were lost in a move or just quit playing). Whatever you spend on discs, going from 4-5 only adds 20% in cost, which even at $400 is pretty damn cheap compared to the work a TB or two of storage represents.
Old machines with ATX type motherboards and such are far too cheap to justify shelling out $700 or more for a "dedicated" type solution. Get an old machine with a P2B-F motherboard and a decent PII cpu, throw away the old power supply and put in a shinty new $70 or so power supply, plug in a controller card if you wanna use SATA drives, and off you go - essentially for the price of the drives you want to put in it.
I don't know if this would be good viewing material for someone not familiar with the bigger picture. Stalman comes across at times as a complete dick in this video. His contributions have been great, but between his demeanor and his appearance, he completely sucks as an advocate.
How do you think those imaginary $100 laptops will get connected to the internet? I don't know of many third world countries with pervasive wifi presence.
Having a bunch of cheap PCs connected on a local WAN is valuable, but it still doesn't get the latest commodities prices to the impoverished farmer living 100 miles from the nearest internet cafe.
A lack of control is bad, any way you look at it.
Really? You don't seem to mind the notion of separating those who built the worldwide cellphone network from their control over it - oblivious to the fact it is that control that makes it robust, pervasive and relatively cheap. Ironically, one of the most expensive places for so called 3G service (where it is even available) is in the US, where those oligopolies have less control (due to massive regulation) than in those "underdeveloped" places where they are essentially given carte blanche, often in collusion with the state.
If the path to pervasive, cheap, relaiable service is "free" and "voluntary" then where is a working example? We have had more than a decade now to develop something like that, so far all we have are smattering of "hot spots" in the larger cities that all serve as a gateway to... a huge, privately owned, essentially proprietary collection of networks. Who owns the internet? The bells, the cable corporations, the telcom providers... we are but squatters - or, at best, renters - of our space in "the cloud."
they need money -= work, and a means of recoupment for that work. "Cellphone farmers" play the grain exchange and take their money home via the same cellphone network that allows them to keep up to date on commodity prices. This is enabled by "proprietariness" and encryption - "secrets." Without that "evil" DRM these would still be at the mercy of their own ignorance and the local commodity sharks who could afford the relatively expensive "internet connections" and such. The proprietariness of the worldwide cellphone network has allowed the companies behind it to expands service into corners and crevices "the internet" can only dream of occupying, all the while getting more affordable... enabling more and poorer people to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by modern telecommunications.
t ml
http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0712-rhett_butler.h
A dogmatic demand that "all technology is free" is every bit as "evil" as the demand it all be proprietary. Balance is what is needed, not a radical ideological monoculture.
Sorry, but every one of thos gnome developers is the elite. Every one of those gnome users is part of the elite. Less than 1 in 5 humans is "on the net" in any meaningful way, and a great many of those 1 in 5 are connected via things like cellphones and shared terminals.
The poor need money - they need jobs, they need health, they need hope. They don't give a shit whether the internet runs on oil or gas or whether it runs at all. Making the blanket assumption all DRM = evil is just one more extremist, unproven dogma.
http://poptones.f2o.org/?q=node/8
what of the Indian peasant who, thanks to his cellphone, now has more up to date market information and, because of this, is better able to provide for his family? Should he be "liberated" from that technology because it is proprietary, non free, non gratis, owned by the evil corporate horde?
RMS says our goal should be to liberate everyone in cyberspace (whatever that is). I say our goal should be to liberate everyone on earth - from poverty and disease and whatever else needs fixin'. It may never happen, but in a world where only perhaps - at best - 20 percent of the population even has such connectivity, saying only that elite should be included in the revolution seems to me nothing more than a recipe for even greater division and oppression.
I have been using an encrypted RAID5 drive in my machine for months. I have had a few disc failures and recovery is easy enough - I just remove the disc from the raid, and the new one back, and it fixes itself. Encrypting everything is easier than encrypting only parts, because there's no granularity at present to ensure you don't accidentally copy or move "safe" data to "tainted" areas - ewncrypting everything ensures there's little chance for accidents.
Making the disks encrypted is even easier than making the RAID5 using mdadm. I've also had failures in my home partition (which is not on the RAID) and the standard reiserfs recovery tools had no problem fixing the corruption - just mount the encrypted partition and use the tools as normal.
What we have now is competition. Where do you live? I live in the VERY rural south where we JUST GOT DSL and have never had cable (and probably never will). And yet I am now free to choose between Bellsouth (which requires me to use windows or a mac and their special software) or I can choose dixie-net (whose name servers and routers "protect" their users from many sites the local christian groups don't like) or I can choose from the ISP I have now (which does none of that) or I can choose another local provider (who I liked for sometime, but whose service has gone downhill) - the list goes on. I suspect I have at least a dozen different ISPs I could choose from even here in the middle fo nowhere - all accessed via the same cheap dsl modem I purchased with my own money.
Making users pay for usage means users pay more - there's already plans like that: I like ahving a fasst pipe so I pay more for 3MBps service instead of the much cheaper 384k connection. But "net neutrality" removes incentive from one side of the equation: those who offer high bandwidth services and have large customer bases and lots of free cash. If Google doesn't want to pony up for Bellsouth's tarriffs they have plenty of mo9ney to spend on building THEIR OWN NETWORK to operate in parallel with the other major backbones and peer at local points - they can offer this peering to ANYONE (except Bellsouth and the others who would charge them if they could) and so have even more INCENTIVE TO COMPETE with those old school telecoms!
Why do you think teh fucking CHRISTIAN COALITION wants congress to get involved with routing the packets on the internet? It's another way for them to make sure THEIR BRAINWASHING MESSAGE gets through whilew providing an avenue for their lobbyists to shut down all that "bad stuff" they don't like!
All "net neutrality" does is open the door for congress to decide what gets routed where. There would inevitably be "special exceptions" in any such bill so ISPs could filter out spam and all that other "wasteful" or even potentially "offensive or dangerous" content, which means they would then have one more tool to use against sites like MYSPACE or amateur teen kingdom, or any other site "they don't like" - and of course they do it in the name of "proteecting the children" and "supporting community standards." Only with "net neutrality" there's LESS CHOICE in the world - because my local ISP who now DOESN'T filter my packets and "protect me" would have no choice - I'd have to live wiht the same NEUTERED and "safe" and "innoffensive" internet as all the other sheeple.
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater...
There are none so blind as those who cannot see...
Why do you think the christian Coalition supports this stuff?
most of you seem blinded by the rhetoric in exactly the same way as everyone was about the war in iraq, global warming becoming "climate change," etc. When the governments want to TAKE AWAY FREEDOMS they don't do it by saying "we're taking away your freedom" - they do it by saying "we're going to free you."
That is exactly what is happening now. Right now I have a 70 dollar DSL modem, and with that modem I can choose whatever the hell ISP I want. If I don't want to run windows and play by Bellsouth's rules, I don't have to - I can go with the ISP I have chosen who DOESN'T filter my packets, censor my usenet access, and basically try to protect me from my own selfish interests.
"Network neutrality" is the first step to "network neutering." Once you have set the precedent - once the bills are passed that congress can set the rules for the internet, what is to stop them from taking the next step? They are free to attack anything the press can rally public support around - they can "protect the children" by making sure "public nuisance" sites like MYSPACE or the PORN sites or anything else they don't like get low priority, and they can do it through force of legislation.
Then I WON'T have the freedom to choose an ISP that ignores those QOS header strings and gives me whatever the hell I want - because they're bound BY LAW to restrict my access along with everyone else's.
"Network neutrality" isn't about freedom. What we have right now is freedom. Network "neutrality" means "we're going to legislate for you in the public's interest." You think they'll stop at defending the turf of the giant megacorps with plenty of money for lobbyists? Hell no... they won't stop until they've built the great new firewall of Amerikkka.
Sorry to barge in on your feminist rage, but that knife cuts both ways. I haven't seen any fat, bloated, pimply faced gamers being sponsored either - the ones that get sponsorship might have a few pimples, but they're also very photogenic. Sponsors aren't going to sponsor someone who looks like a middle age loser you might find hanging around the local playground.
It's not just men who are attracted to a pretty face, and all the feminist rage of all the embittered and abused women in the world isn't going to change that fact of life.
I can't believe kangarooski replied to you and didn't bust your chops over that comment. It is absolutely, positively NOT illegal to download or even share music simply because it is "copyrighted." In the US ALL creative works are AUTOMATICALLY copyrighted the instant they are created, and any creator of a work is free to share that work in any manner they see fit.
Linux is copyrighted and that copyright is what gives it is walking papers. Lessig's books are copyrighted and he encourages others to remix, reburn and republish them as they see fit so long as it is not for commercial gain. Magnatune's servers are chock full of copyrighted music it is perfectly legal to download and even to share with others - it's part of their publicity machine, in fact.
The RIAA likes to beat this into the heads of kids: "it's illegal to download COPYRIGHTED material" Of course they are not going to tell kids about those artists who rely on copyright to protect them from those same predatory labels that beat this simplistic, braindead ideal about "copyright" into their heads.
One shouldn't have to be a hermit to protect themselves or their children from the immorals of society.
And you don't have to be. The argument about porn popups is a red herring: as has already been pointed out a hojillion times the sites that respect this stuff already have front pages that emphatically warn people to stay away if they are offended, and they have links to all the "nanny" software anyone could stomach. The sites that do the popups are already in violation of the law and passing more laws that harm everybody isn't going to squash that behavior. and by the way, I use google at least a dozen times a day and I cannot remember the last time I saw a "porn popup" - I use a browser that disables this behavior by default AND I use a proxy server that filters out most of the scripting that leads to it, and that software (firefox and privoxy) is just as freely available to you as it is to me. If you're too fucking stupid to click and install that stuff by yourself, pay the neighbor kid twenty bucks to do it for you - I'm sure he could use the money to take your daughter on a date to mcdonald's.
if you have some "moral code" that inherently mandates restricting your children's access to certain forms of speech, it is your responsibility to your children to enforce it - not mine, and not Playboy's.
Even though some Republicans are against certain forms of birth control, and although they may find pictures of women in swimsuits offensive somehow, very few would be stupid enough to try grouping those sites with pornography sites. Doing so would alienate many of their voters.
Really? In a country where a broadcaster gets fined for suggesting the young adults in a scene where everyone is still clothed (however minimally) is actually a bunch of teenagers having sex, and such an action is met with seemingly popular support, where do they draw the line?
They're already doing everything they can to outlaw all images of children from the net that are not a product of some mainstream children's programming media giant, what happens next? they will say children (ie young adults) should not be engaging in sex and therefore information about sex has no "scientific or educational value" to them and, because the idea of kids having sex is already well proven to be "patently offensive" to a very vocal minority of wacked out religious zealots, all sites containing sexual content of any sort must be moved to the xxx domain...
How do you find shows like this? I wonder how these guys make any money??? They film a show, and then give it away on the web. I've watched the first three episodes, and it's pretty good.
I don't have an index of stuff... I just lookk around and find things. Maybe I need to start posting that stuff on a blog somewhere and then others can subscribe to the torrents via my css feed. Hmmmm... do I smell opportunity? Maybe if I was more ambitious - right now I got too much other stuff on my plate.
Anyway, I'm glad you liked the show. See how it works? I tell you about it in a post on slashdot, you've found the show and now a gazillion others might as well because there are so many people reading here and they see it's not just me raving about it, someone else things it's pretty good, too.
THAT is why they "give it away." I don't care if you're a wannabe rock star or just some joe wiht a digital camera who wants to make a living taking wedding photos, no one is going to give you work without seeing what kind of work you can do. This particular show is fantastically better in many respects than ANY Hollywood movie ever made about "the internet" and pirates and bootleggers and all that stuff... is it not? It's "better" because, for people like you and me who actually understand this shit, it's believable. So maybe these folks don't get a big deal hollywood contract to make "the scene:the movie" - but maybe they DO get writing contracts, or a technical consulting deals, or even the chance to sell the storyline to someone else who wants to make "the scene:the movie."
This is how art works, and you can already find more art on the internet than in all those satellite channels combined. TV is not art - it's where art goes to die.
Welcome to the scene...
Most people have DSL or Cable Modems, and they can get a good resolution video without the stream stopping to rebuffer.
Umm.. not exactly. A majority have access to broadband, but a third of the US still doesn't. And even among those who have broadband access, in most places reasonable broadband speeds are still so expensive most households don't have it. If you're on cable it's a boon, but a good portion of that tiny majority has access only via dsl. While BASIC dsl prices are not too bad (30 bucks around here) it's only 128kbs on oversold channels - streaming performance on such a connection is not exactly worthwhile. This is readily proven by surveys and statistical analysis that reveal less than 25% of all those internet users, broadband or no, actually use streaming services on a regular basis. And an equal percentage of that remainder say they rarely use it or have no plans at all to use it. My own experience with dsl was like this - my 80 buck a month 1.5mbit connection was peachy keen when I was one of the first in my neighborhood to bite that bullet, but within six months pacbell had so oversold their lines I couldn't even stream a 100kbps video without stuttering and interruptions - sometimes, they wouldn't even connect at all.
Maybe some shows are slightly less res than television because the provider wants to make money twice.
I really don't have a problem with this. In fact, that's kind of the point I was making: if I really want to watch Bsg an I don't have scifi channel I can just download it via torrents. The quality of this download, even the lower rez 180MB versions, is still going to be better than any "stream" I have ever seen. And if I really, really want to enjoy it in DVD rez then they still get the sale because it costs me nearly as much in time and bandwidth as it costs just to go to amazon and buy the damn things.
Would you pay five times for the same book?
I've bought the same book many times. I buy the book to have it when I want it, then end up giving it to a friend because I want them to have that ability as well. Then I end up buying it again. So? A paperback costs about an hour's pay even if you're on minimum wage.
I've also bought at least three copies of Sgt. Pepper's in my life. Two copies of the "red" album compilation, and probably two or three copies of pretty much every Alice Copper album (or cd0 printed before 1985.
There's also a lot of good stuff I don't have on cd because it still isn't offered. But that's a bit beside the point.
Then why pay five times for a film?
When I was a kid I saw Star Wars at least five times. By best friend saw it six times in a single month! We paid every single time because you could only see it at the theater.
It's easy to forget, when stuff is "free," how it used to be. I'm not defending the machine that cranks out an endless stream of bad action movies, but many of the points raised are really nothing new - what's new is our increasing ability to not have to pay every single time we want to see a popular hollywood movie (and more impoirtantly, to see it whenever the hell we want instead of waiting for it to "come around" again), and not have to replace records that have been damaged by dust or heat or cheap k-mart turntables that grind away the vinyl a little more each time we listen to a recording.
The best possible scenereo for end users is one large MPEG file in high res. MPEG can play on any machine, it does not buffer, it plays fast and well. Most people with DSL and Cable Modems can handle a 1.5 gig file no problem, and that should be good resolution for an hour long show.
Absolutely. I even do this on dialup with "small" files (Until they fill that worldwide "analog hole" there's no way this stuff is really going to compete.
This is going to sound so politically uncorrect. Who cars about the world? They care about the USA, Canada, UK, France, German
Who has the bandwidth to watch crappy, jerky streams?
Until they fill that worldwide "analog hole" there's no way this stuff is really going to compete. Even if the US succumbs to pervasive DRM, are they going to stop marketing shows internationally? It seems most of the torrents come from abroad anyway. I once downloaded a "West Wing" episode before it had even appeared on TV in my east coast market.
Thanks to the indie film makers there's already better stuff freely available on the internet than on most of those 500 TV channels, anyway.
Export an avi to a folder full of pngs, attack it with imagemagick and a few batch scripts and you have a substantial amount of functionality. It's easy to advance single frame just by opening your favorite image viewer and clicking through the directory, and tweaking a single frame to perfection is as easy as saying "open in gimp."
Really? Try posting pictures of your toddler going wee-wee. Try posting instructions on cracking encrypted satellite broadcasts. Post some pictures of your young looking 18 year old girlfriend, claim she's 15, and see how quickly the MIB show up at your door...
Life aboard the US vessel is every bit as draconian - there's just a slightly different social dogma steering the ship.
It was under his administration that many bans came into place - the most relevant example being, in this case, child pornography. The thesis was banning child pornography was permissible, among other similar reasons, because such speech helped "normalize behavior" and that it could be use to coerce other children into similar behaviors. The fallacy is that ADULT pornography can (and sometimes will) be used to exactly those same ends regarding indoctrination. The other fallacy is that such regulations serve to limit "normalizing" such behavior - the fact there is children are naturally curious about their bodies and will often coerce one another, and even explore privately, these very same behaviors - in other words, it's already normal behavior. Additionally, the ban does not prevent anyone from making speech using NON children or images of children that addresses this very same goal - not to mention I can write all the dirty stories I want and even attempt to organize all the pedophiles of the nation in much the same way as any other "minority rights" organization. So banning certain forms of the speech does not, in fact, address these goals at all - all it does is make it illegal for me to take a picture of a child engaging in normal developmental behavior even if that child does so of his or her own volition.
MEANWHILE, that exact same non-logic is increasingly being applied to other forms of speech "in the name of the children." This legislation has legitimized a witch hunt wherein anyone even admiring a hot looking SIXTEEN year old is deemed a "pedophile" and a danger to society. This legislation has given social creed to narrow black and white views of an issue that leave almost no room for reason.
It's not a matter of drawing a line in the sand and arguing someone might move the line - in fact, the legislative line is drawn in the sand and the social winds will move it no matter what.
This is why we must always be careful to avoid drawing such lines entirely without first looking at the roads ahead. The ban on child pornography has led to a social climate wherein everyone essentially "thinks like a pedophile" because they are so incredibly fearful of being declared one themselves. That "line in the sand" is essentially causing a greater perversion of our society and an increasingly paternalistic climate of legislation which inevitably leads to yet more reactionary nonsense like this.
Maybe we should just ban all images of human beings in any creative expressions and be done with it. Seemed to work well for protecting "human rights" in many muslim cultures, didn't it?
Oh, wait...