Everyone has an obligation to improve the lot of the rest of society. That comes with being human. If you don't like the idea that you are here to help other people, then renounce your humanity. A business should be responsible first and foremost to the people who pay its wages -- its customers, and the law needs changing to reflect that before customer-exploitation reaches new depths.
Your argument that "nobody is forced to buy their products" is misleading, as there is no Nationalised computer component supplier {which would have to provide full disclosure}. If every manufacturer chose to exploit their customers by failure to disclose information that their customers have a right to know then what would happen? There needs to be some sort of protection against wholesale denial-of-rights by corporations.
When copyrights and patents expire, the ideas they originally protected pass into the public domain for the benefit of everyone - that is the condition on which they are granted. Without the time-limited protection of a patent, certain information might otherwise pass into the public domain by "independent" channels. Maybe it is time for The People to stand up and take hardline direct action.....
I still stand by my statement. If anything, it adds more weight to my argument. Manufacturers should not be allowed to keep secrets from their customers at all. Nobody ever benefits by having things hidden from them. Mandatory Full Disclosure is the only way to deal with the issue. There are already approvals procedures in place for products offered for sale to the public, to protect users against the danger of electric shock, damage to equipment, electromagnetic intereference &c., so it would be simple to add a requirement for full disclosure. No full specifications == no approval sticker == no sale. And just the same for those {phantom?} work-stealing competitors.
There already exist systems whereby innovators can profit from other people's use of their work, in return for that work eventually entering the Public Domain. For manufacturers to attempt to circumvent the obligation to enrich the Public Domain by the use of secrecy is tantamount to vigilantism. We cannot allow anybody to take the law into their own hands.
Right..... I should have said I try as hard as possible not to fall victim to corporate secrecy.
And there isn't a lot of point in keeping something like a chemical formula secret anyway. <OVERSIMPLIFICATION>Set fire to it, shine the light through a prism and you know exactly what was in it.</OVERSIMPLIFICATION>
I genuinely believe that as the rightful owner of something {anything} then I have an implied right to know any secret it may contain. Now if only this were enshrined in law.....
Why is competition such a good thing anyway? Why do I need to be able to choose between 50 kinds of fags if all of them will give me cancer? How does the ability to choose between different brands of sports shoe benefit me if I can still get beaten up by a gang for wearing the "wrong" ones? Once there might have been an argument that the government saves money by getting third parties to research, develop and manufacture goods, but nowadays, that is beginning to sound more than a little hollow.
To focus back on the narrower picture, why not instead form a Nationalised computer supplier, with the intention of delivering hardware designed to last forever and complying with published standards? Maybe even a Nationalised software supplier, producing software with its full source code in a Protected Public Domain where it would be a criminal offence to attempt to use it in a copyrighted work. Even stopping short of full nationalisation - not that it's at all a bad idea, it worked very well until Maggie Thatcher got greedy - there are plenty of things that could be done to improve matters for the consumer. Mandatory full disclosure of hardware specs, and outright prohibition of any attempt to prevent interoperability would be a step in the right direction. Allowing manufacturers to determine their own prices for finished goods is unfair -- it leads to existing players using their accumulated cash reserves to subsidise products sold below cost, thereby unfairly disadvantaging challengers.
DVD Jon has done nothing wrong. Now it's official that he has done nothing illegal either. Fair play to him and his supporters, and sorry it's taken so long.
I think British copyright law, EUCD notwithstanding, explicitly allows what Jon did, but the wording is a bit convoluted and non-obvious and would need testing in court.
Still, it reaffirms the common-sense position that it is not a crime to use goods you own for their intended purpose, even if in the course of so doing you are required by circumstances to invent a tool.
1. Not if there is an alternative available. I drink tea, mostly. Tea is a plant product and its recipe is well and truly in the public domain.
2. No. Strictly unscented soap {preferably homemade, but it depends on the quality of fire ash available}. Homemade perfume isn't hard, but the sexiest scent in nature is fresh perspiration from honest hard graft.
3. I don't own a car. I do have some gasoline-fired stuff {lawnmower, generator, strimmer} but I'm confident that I could arrange for some alternative fuel derived from alcohol and vegetable oil, if the need arose. Also, fuels and lubricants have to be made to conform to published standards. The end is not a secret, even if the means might be.
4. See 3. The "engine management systems" of my power tools consist of a carburettor for mixing the fuel with air, and a large ceramic magnet and two coils of wire on laminated steel cores for producing the spark. If and when I buy a car, a mechanical fuel pump and the ability to run on a range of fuels will be among my priorities.
5. Yes, with homemade toothpaste.
I do think very hard about what products I buy, precisely because I don't want to be beholden to corporations.
Does not the thought that someone is selling you something outright, yet refusing to provide you with the full information about how it works, claiming that it is "a secret" {yes, a secret from its OWNER for crying out loud} -- and is not only ALLOWED BY LAW TO DO THIS, but under the same law YOU can actually be punished for trying to make discoveries for yourself about YOUR OWN PROPERTY -- just piss you off to the point where your head almost explodes?
What does it matter about advanced texture mapping, pixel shading and so forth when people are beholden to rich entities to a greater extent than was ever seen under slavery? Without full disclosure, these are just so many tawdry baubles; decoration that diverts the attention of a simple mind away from the real issue, which is this:
THIS PIECE OF HARDWARE IS MINE; AND I HAVE THE RIGHT, BY VIRTUE OF THE FACT THAT I OWN IT, TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT IT.
Open standards don't harm anybody. For crying out loud, imagine if the electricity companies had decided back in the days not to standardise on voltage and frequency..... and then tried to railroad through an Electric Millennium Copyright Act that outlawed transformers, motor/generator sets &c.! Open your eyes and look at the world, people. This is not about graphics cards: it's about the erosion of individual liberties for the whims and caprices of corrupt corporations. I would rather go without a computer altogether than use non-Free software. A user of non-Free software is really in no better a position than a heroin addict: convinced that they have become dependent upon a dealer over whom they have no control for a part of their day-to-day survival requirements.
You may scoff, but today it's your computer, tomorrow it could be your clothing, your food, your car, or your house that is locked away from your tampering. If someone decides that they could sell more sliced loaves if it weren't for those pesky electric bread makers, you'd better believe they would be banned. If someone decides they could sell more canned beverages if nobody drank tea, watch your kettle. To an extent, it's already happening. We in Europe have some of the best quality tap water in the world {and if it isn't clean enough for drinking, then it isn't clean enough for washing in} yet manufacturers spend a fortune urging us to buy bottled water, water filters and prepackaged beverages. {To be fair, each district has a particular strain of E. Coli living in its water supply, so when you travel from one place to another you will get the trots for a day or two, while your immune system learns a new enemy's moves. E. Coli was here before us.}
To quote the Manic Street Preachers: "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next".
Re:I WOULD LIKE TO SHIT IN YOUR HAT
on
The Return of S3
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've seen POST failures with an AGP card not pushed all the way in, but never with no card at all. Remember, the 8-but MDA / MDPA card was actually undetectable to the BIOS selftest routine {remember, even on your spankiest new 80686-class processor, all the BIOS stuff has to run in "traditional" 8086 emulation mode}, or at least indistinguible from a more powerful card. As long as there is a faint glimmer of a possibility that someone could actually wire up some old 16-bit slots to a motherboard and plug in one of these old cards, then motherboards will have to pass POST with the graphics card missing presumed MDA.
As a consumer, I will not buy any product that contains any secret from me. I demand full disclosure or no dice. NVidia should never have stood for -- and the law of the land was crazy to allow -- such a restrictive licence in the first place.
1: Advanced.
2: > 2 years.
3: yes
10: everyone
15: Availability of the entire source code to all current and obsolete Microsoft products; either under a Copyleft licence {such as the GNU GPL or the Creative Commons Attribution / ShareAlike licence} or by placing it in the Public Domain.
16: Hardware vendors need to adhere more closely to published standards, or else provide full disclosure to enable the creation of open-source drivers; and to label products as compatible with Linux {and for that matter, the BSD family}.
I'm not sure the survey isn't a fake, but on the other hand I'm not ashamed of what I think. I honestly believe that the closed-source model, by the way it keeps victims beholden to a single entity, is tantamount to slavery. And I don't think Linux needs to change so much as other people's attitudes need to change. I'm -- to put it extremely mildly -- annoyed at the fact that almost every piece of hardware I pick up trumpets its compatibility with the latest Windows and MacOS, yet fails to mention Linux and the BSDs. Even things like keyboards, mice, network switches and USB hubs -- which are to all intents and purposes OS-independent. That sort of thing is exactly why Linux et al are considered to be "alternative" OSes.
In the meantime, what we -- as a community which values honesty and mutual assistance -- can and should do is twofold. Firstly, if we are ever forced to purchase an unwanted Microsoft product, we should exercise our right to explicitly decline the EULA, and make sure Microsoft knows; that way, we will not be counted as Windows users to inflate Microsoft's statistics. Secondly, we should let hardware manufacturers know that Linux/BSD users use their products, and post reviews of hardware we have used so that other Linux/BSD users -- and would-be converts -- can see that hardware they might like to buy is compatible with such systems. We must lead by example a little -- we can't expect anyone to help us if we aren't willing to help ourselves.
Once more hardware is seen to be compatible with Linux and the BSD family -- thereby answering a common, if not entirely undeserved, critisism often levelled at such operating systems -- then it will be feasible for non-specialist retailers to offer family-friendly, matched packages of PC, video-in, printer, camera and scanner, with a GNU/Linux or BSD operating system and appropriate drivers already installed. Bye-bye to the criticism of difficult initial installations. Supply a recovery CD which allows you to boot up, login as root and set up user accounts {in case someone forgets their root password}.
To answer the criticism of software dependencies, I propose for someone to distribute a series of CDs which contain the source code for an application and, crucially, all the libraries it requires, so dependencies can be met from a single place. {IMLE.tar.gz is still the most reliable package format, as it works equally well - when it works, which is whenever you can satisfy the dependencies - on all distributions and well-made installs from scratch}.
Steady on there, tiger. I never mentioned "social engineeering". For what it's worth, I agree with your observations. Persuading someone to hand over a password &c. is just a straightforward confidence trick - manipulation by deception. What you're talking about is propaganda - the means to manipulate a large audience through deliberate distorted messages. It goes on, too - and the subtler, the scarier.
You are asked for your gender. Why do you suppose this is so, if they are not proposing marriage? Put simply, they use this information to show women adverts for shoes and men adverts for video games. If someone is listening to your inbound traffic and sees you are receiving advertisements for shoes, they can infer that you are a woman, and therefore a suitable potential rape victim.
That's why giving away unnecessary information is dangerous.
Yes, but my concern is that it is far quicker to memorise a four-digit number than to learn to forge a signature. And the machine can't pick up on as many subtle clues as an experienced human being. Awkward pen holding angles, facial expressions, hesitation, that sort of thing. If the thief has to spend an hour perfecting an imitation of a signature and the associated body language, then you have an hour in which to discover and report the card stolen. In an urban area, there are more security personnel available; in a rural area, people are naturally suspicious of strangers. {Now hold on there a minute, bawy. I knows you ain't ol' Jed Baxter, 'cause the Jed Baxter done gotten him a wooden leg, an' your two legs there, see, they don't look to me like they's a-made o' woood..... <sound of shotgun being loaded>}
It would perhaps be more secure if the hologram on the card was of the cardholder. Then the thief would at least have to look like the victim as well as be able to remember four digits. Surely this is possible nowadays? Actually, even if it isn't used for bank cards, a 3D digital camera would be a bloody nice toy:-)
It seems to me that the problem is a social one, not a technological one, and therefore we should be looking for solutions in the social domain.
Somebody who knows me is better qualified to say "That is the real ajs318" {or not} than some piece of machinery ever will be. A human being can check subtle things like signatures far more reliably than a machine. But the corporate mentality seems to be far too trusting of machines and far too distrustful of human beings. It's well known that humans make mistakes, but who designed and built the machines?
In Britain, we have a National Insurance Number as a unique per-person identifier, but it is only used for taxation purposes. Also, your employer is responsible for stopping your tax right out of your wages before you ever see them, making it physically impossible for the working classes to commit tax fraud.
With no national identity card, anyone requiring ID has to seek it from multiple sources..... usually official letters such as gas / electricity statements and bank statements for your address, and a passport or driving licence for your signature and photo. If you join a video club, for example, you might have to produce two bills and a signature, and you'll get a card which is only good for renting videos; there is no information on the video card that links it back to the papers you submitted. Of course you could mug someone on their way to or from joining a video club and get their papers that way, but if you already knew what they were about to do you probably already know enough about them.
Now, your name and address are published in the telephone directory. So places insist on official letters. Of course these could be forged..... but it's recognised that the name and address aren't enough, so other documents are also usually required. {And if, say, my electric bill shows I paid 10 last Saturday, they might want to see my payment card and make sure the account number matches.} Most places also require a signature, and you may even be required to sign the form in front of them. It does take skill to forge signatures with an audience..... I could do a very convincing one of my last-but-one boss's, but nowhere near as quickly as he could.
It seems the problem in the USA is that the social security number {which uniquely identifies a person} is treated as though it were a secret, unknown to any entity beyond the person it identifies. That clearly is not the case. Look at how PGP works..... there is a published part known to everybody, a secret part known only to one individual and a mathematical relationship that makes it difficult to determine the secret part from the published part. If I just send you ajs318's public key, that doesn't prove I am ajs318. If I sign something with ajs318's secret key, and you can recover it with ajs318's public key, then that at least proves I know ajs318's secret key, and there's a better chance that I might actually be ajs318. It seems to me that the SSN {which identifies without authentiation} is being misused.
The other thing is, when you go into somewhere like a newsagent's shop, you are recognised by the regular staff there. {Kids in my old village used to shoplift from the local newsagents' once at most. The items they took got added onto their parents' slate.} The point is, the main identity used in that situation is the person themself, which is hard to forge. In a large impersonal supermarket, there is less potential for recognition, so if you pay by payment card or credit card then they require a signature {though trials are underway where the shopper will merely have to enter a 4-digit PIN, thus relieving the cashier of the responsibility to check a signature and not at all paving the way for brand new opportunities in crime}; on the Internet, none at all.
If you want security, stick with old fashioned pound notes, because they can only steal as many of those as you actually have. And, until they get RFID in money, it's untraceable. You can't look at a 20 note and see it was won in a poker game, for instance.
In Britain, your "letter box" is just a slot in your front door, far enough from the locking mecchanism that you can't put your hand in and open the door. Stuff can be pushed in, but not taken out. It works quite well.
What you forget about China is that the VCRs, stereos, laptops, cellphones and other goodies they make are only for Western consumers. Chinese people are lucky if they get a mono MW radio, powered by leaky Zn-C batteries that last a few hours, and worse-built than the stuff we get.
The working conditions in China and other countries would be totally unacceptable in this country or the USA, for example, and I for one would like to know why anyone is allowed to import goods where the conditions of manufacture do not conform to the prevailing laws in the destination country.
In fact, I think I will be contacting my MEP about this issue next year.
But what about DNA in other life forms? I have a piebald gerbil, who everyone thinks is the prettiest of the lot. Whose is her DNA? Have I the right to breed from her and sell the offspring? Probably not if you believe the animal rights extremists {BTW, if you're one of them: organic fertiliser is made from animals} but what's a gerbil going to do by way of revenge? {Apart from escape from her cage and chew through my CAT5 in several places, but that's too horrible a thought to contemplate}. However, once I have sold any of my fancy-coloured gerbils, I lose all claim to them. I can't prevent them breeding {actually it is physically possible to sterilise a gerbil, but the anaesthetic is the sticking point; too little and it dies of pain, too much and it never comes around. You could dilute the dope to measure it [easier to measure whole grammes at 0.1% than milligrammes at full strength], but you'd need to re-purify it before administering it.} Anyway. The point is that if I breed an animal or a plant, its DNA does not belong to me.
Or, suppose I had bred a certain Medicinal Herb that had particularly fine qualities, with the intention of selling it in ten-pound wraps. If I really wanted to make sure nobody else could grow my wonder Weed, then I should be responsible for making sure it has no viable seeds in it -- and if I fail, and someone else starts selling the same product cheaper, well, that's my tough titty. {Don't try this at home, kids; the offspring from first generation hybrids may bear little resemblance to the parent stock. Draw some mendel diagrams if you want to prove it to yourself.} DNA is in the Public Domain. We just haven't quite finished recovering the source from the munged binaries we were given.
At any rate, we need to push for an INTERNATIONAL law that there is NO "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY" IN LIVING THINGS, and impose sanctions on countries whose laws do not recognise this concept. This may upset a few rich people, but so did the abolition of slavery. Ultimately it would ensure that science would benefit society {e.g. disease-resistant crops to feed the world} rather than harming it {e.g. high-maintenance crops upon which biotechnology and associated companies, and precious few others, get fat}.
Perhaps it's time for a last-ditch attempt to get a law on the statute books that would effectively ban DRM. Make it so that when any product is sold to a consumer, then nothing about that product is a secret from its rightful owner. In other words, the owner of a DVD should have a legitimate right to view the content recorded on it by virtue of owning the disc. {Of course this has wider implications beyond DVDs.....} Then, consumers would be protected from manufacturers' excesses of authority, as they could not legally lock you out of playing a disc you own.
If this isn't already law, we should be campaigning to get someone to try to make it law. No secrets from lawful owners of property -- it sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It would effectively make the worst kinds of DRM unenforceable. Could we even get one of ourselves elected?
I cannot, however, in all honesty see how anyone can expect these encumbrances to work. It takes only one copy to be made by analogue transfer, and then it is possible to make an indefinite number of digital copies no worse than the original. And there are people who would go to the lengths to crack anything they can try. As long as there are fences, there will be someone with the urge to climb over them.
That was my idea, almost. Stick a bunch of DRAMs as wide as your bus, with self-refreshing circuits on a board, with a counter on the address lines. Set it up to write every data word sent to the address which matches the port address of a real sound card to a successive memory location. You don't need to emulate the card's responses if you have an actual example of the same card in the machine, all you need is to be able to make sense of the data. This you do with the aid of the sound card programmer's manual, of course; so be sure to choose a well-documented sound card to work with.
Once they twig onto this and hide the digital signals from somewhere as exposed as the PCI bus, then it will need cunning. You will have to deploy your own analogue-to-digital converters, of course, as fewer and fewer manufacturers are including line-in jacks on their boards {but some still have an analogue audio input for the CD-ROM sound, that could be used in an emergency}.
Beyond that, we will have to wait for someone to invent a device that transforms sound waves into electrical impulses. Oh, wait..... they already have, haven't they. Ah, well. The media companies will just have to find a way to get your brain to finally unscramble the signal.
Yeah, it is overkill..... I've just realised, all you have to do is make sure there is <650MB of free space on the hard disk, so there won't be enough room to fit a disc image. D'oh!
I'm related to somebody who used to work for the BBC. And all the between-programme adverts for real stuff as opposed to other programmes are for the BBC's own stuff - books, videos, and of course the Radio Times. If you watch closely, you'll see Eastenders &c. blur out real product brand names or create fictitious ones.
Assuming nobody makes a write-only CD burner, you would have to do something like this:
Install only enough software - and hack and recompile the sources, if necessary - for the machine to be able to record from an existing datafile/TOCfile pair on the HDD.
Don't have a "proper" shell, just a simple menu which gives you a choice of CDs.
Password-protect the BIOS, so the machine can't simply be rebooted from a CD.
Assume that a librarian will be able to spot anyone up to no good and deal with them before they do any real damage.
It might even be possible to hack the ide-scsi module so as to make a CD-RW drive emulate a write-only device.
There are no adverts at all on the BBC, except for other programmes on the BBC. Product placement is frowned upon even on ITV and Channel Four {though Five and the Sky channels are just cheap whores}. The BBC has been known to edit out scenes which are blatant product placement. Even brand names are removed.
I can see that not all of the code in a TiVo is covered by the GPL, but surely the non-GPL portions are the ones that deal with the TiVo specific hardware? In which case, they won't work anyway without a rather expensive hardware dongle {a TiVo motherboard} so they're still useless to anyone except a TiVo owner. And if you own a TiVo, then you have a right to the code anyway.
It sounds to me like someone has spat their dummy out.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone has an obligation to improve the lot of the rest of society. That comes with being human. If you don't like the idea that you are here to help other people, then renounce your humanity. A business should be responsible first and foremost to the people who pay its wages -- its customers, and the law needs changing to reflect that before customer-exploitation reaches new depths.
.....
Your argument that "nobody is forced to buy their products" is misleading, as there is no Nationalised computer component supplier {which would have to provide full disclosure}. If every manufacturer chose to exploit their customers by failure to disclose information that their customers have a right to know then what would happen? There needs to be some sort of protection against wholesale denial-of-rights by corporations.
When copyrights and patents expire, the ideas they originally protected pass into the public domain for the benefit of everyone - that is the condition on which they are granted. Without the time-limited protection of a patent, certain information might otherwise pass into the public domain by "independent" channels. Maybe it is time for The People to stand up and take hardline direct action
What do I play 'em in? I've tried Kaboodle, VLC and Xine - no success {OK, sound in Xine, but no picture}.
Meanwhile I'm off to search for updated versions of my favourite media players.
I still stand by my statement. If anything, it adds more weight to my argument. Manufacturers should not be allowed to keep secrets from their customers at all. Nobody ever benefits by having things hidden from them. Mandatory Full Disclosure is the only way to deal with the issue. There are already approvals procedures in place for products offered for sale to the public, to protect users against the danger of electric shock, damage to equipment, electromagnetic intereference &c., so it would be simple to add a requirement for full disclosure. No full specifications == no approval sticker == no sale. And just the same for those {phantom?} work-stealing competitors.
There already exist systems whereby innovators can profit from other people's use of their work, in return for that work eventually entering the Public Domain. For manufacturers to attempt to circumvent the obligation to enrich the Public Domain by the use of secrecy is tantamount to vigilantism. We cannot allow anybody to take the law into their own hands.
Right ..... I should have said I try as hard as possible not to fall victim to corporate secrecy.
.....
And there isn't a lot of point in keeping something like a chemical formula secret anyway. <OVERSIMPLIFICATION>Set fire to it, shine the light through a prism and you know exactly what was in it.</OVERSIMPLIFICATION>
I genuinely believe that as the rightful owner of something {anything} then I have an implied right to know any secret it may contain. Now if only this were enshrined in law
Why is competition such a good thing anyway? Why do I need to be able to choose between 50 kinds of fags if all of them will give me cancer? How does the ability to choose between different brands of sports shoe benefit me if I can still get beaten up by a gang for wearing the "wrong" ones? Once there might have been an argument that the government saves money by getting third parties to research, develop and manufacture goods, but nowadays, that is beginning to sound more than a little hollow.
To focus back on the narrower picture, why not instead form a Nationalised computer supplier, with the intention of delivering hardware designed to last forever and complying with published standards? Maybe even a Nationalised software supplier, producing software with its full source code in a Protected Public Domain where it would be a criminal offence to attempt to use it in a copyrighted work. Even stopping short of full nationalisation - not that it's at all a bad idea, it worked very well until Maggie Thatcher got greedy - there are plenty of things that could be done to improve matters for the consumer. Mandatory full disclosure of hardware specs, and outright prohibition of any attempt to prevent interoperability would be a step in the right direction. Allowing manufacturers to determine their own prices for finished goods is unfair -- it leads to existing players using their accumulated cash reserves to subsidise products sold below cost, thereby unfairly disadvantaging challengers.
DVD Jon has done nothing wrong. Now it's official that he has done nothing illegal either. Fair play to him and his supporters, and sorry it's taken so long.
I think British copyright law, EUCD notwithstanding, explicitly allows what Jon did, but the wording is a bit convoluted and non-obvious and would need testing in court.
Still, it reaffirms the common-sense position that it is not a crime to use goods you own for their intended purpose, even if in the course of so doing you are required by circumstances to invent a tool.
1. Not if there is an alternative available. I drink tea, mostly. Tea is a plant product and its recipe is well and truly in the public domain.
2. No. Strictly unscented soap {preferably homemade, but it depends on the quality of fire ash available}. Homemade perfume isn't hard, but the sexiest scent in nature is fresh perspiration from honest hard graft.
3. I don't own a car. I do have some gasoline-fired stuff {lawnmower, generator, strimmer} but I'm confident that I could arrange for some alternative fuel derived from alcohol and vegetable oil, if the need arose. Also, fuels and lubricants have to be made to conform to published standards. The end is not a secret, even if the means might be.
4. See 3. The "engine management systems" of my power tools consist of a carburettor for mixing the fuel with air, and a large ceramic magnet and two coils of wire on laminated steel cores for producing the spark. If and when I buy a car, a mechanical fuel pump and the ability to run on a range of fuels will be among my priorities.
5. Yes, with homemade toothpaste.
I do think very hard about what products I buy, precisely because I don't want to be beholden to corporations.
Does not the thought that someone is selling you something outright, yet refusing to provide you with the full information about how it works, claiming that it is "a secret" {yes, a secret from its OWNER for crying out loud} -- and is not only ALLOWED BY LAW TO DO THIS, but under the same law YOU can actually be punished for trying to make discoveries for yourself about YOUR OWN PROPERTY -- just piss you off to the point where your head almost explodes?
..... and then tried to railroad through an Electric Millennium Copyright Act that outlawed transformers, motor/generator sets &c.! Open your eyes and look at the world, people. This is not about graphics cards: it's about the erosion of individual liberties for the whims and caprices of corrupt corporations. I would rather go without a computer altogether than use non-Free software. A user of non-Free software is really in no better a position than a heroin addict: convinced that they have become dependent upon a dealer over whom they have no control for a part of their day-to-day survival requirements.
What does it matter about advanced texture mapping, pixel shading and so forth when people are beholden to rich entities to a greater extent than was ever seen under slavery? Without full disclosure, these are just so many tawdry baubles; decoration that diverts the attention of a simple mind away from the real issue, which is this:
THIS PIECE OF HARDWARE IS MINE; AND I HAVE THE RIGHT, BY VIRTUE OF THE FACT THAT I OWN IT, TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT IT.
Open standards don't harm anybody. For crying out loud, imagine if the electricity companies had decided back in the days not to standardise on voltage and frequency
You may scoff, but today it's your computer, tomorrow it could be your clothing, your food, your car, or your house that is locked away from your tampering. If someone decides that they could sell more sliced loaves if it weren't for those pesky electric bread makers, you'd better believe they would be banned. If someone decides they could sell more canned beverages if nobody drank tea, watch your kettle. To an extent, it's already happening. We in Europe have some of the best quality tap water in the world {and if it isn't clean enough for drinking, then it isn't clean enough for washing in} yet manufacturers spend a fortune urging us to buy bottled water, water filters and prepackaged beverages. {To be fair, each district has a particular strain of E. Coli living in its water supply, so when you travel from one place to another you will get the trots for a day or two, while your immune system learns a new enemy's moves. E. Coli was here before us.}
To quote the Manic Street Preachers: "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next".
I've seen POST failures with an AGP card not pushed all the way in, but never with no card at all. Remember, the 8-but MDA / MDPA card was actually undetectable to the BIOS selftest routine {remember, even on your spankiest new 80686-class processor, all the BIOS stuff has to run in "traditional" 8086 emulation mode}, or at least indistinguible from a more powerful card. As long as there is a faint glimmer of a possibility that someone could actually wire up some old 16-bit slots to a motherboard and plug in one of these old cards, then motherboards will have to pass POST with the graphics card missing presumed MDA.
As a consumer, I will not buy any product that contains any secret from me. I demand full disclosure or no dice. NVidia should never have stood for -- and the law of the land was crazy to allow -- such a restrictive licence in the first place.
1: Advanced.
.tar.gz is still the most reliable package format, as it works equally well - when it works, which is whenever you can satisfy the dependencies - on all distributions and well-made installs from scratch}.
2: > 2 years.
3: yes
10: everyone
15: Availability of the entire source code to all current and obsolete Microsoft products; either under a Copyleft licence {such as the GNU GPL or the Creative Commons Attribution / ShareAlike licence} or by placing it in the Public Domain.
16: Hardware vendors need to adhere more closely to published standards, or else provide full disclosure to enable the creation of open-source drivers; and to label products as compatible with Linux {and for that matter, the BSD family}.
I'm not sure the survey isn't a fake, but on the other hand I'm not ashamed of what I think. I honestly believe that the closed-source model, by the way it keeps victims beholden to a single entity, is tantamount to slavery. And I don't think Linux needs to change so much as other people's attitudes need to change. I'm -- to put it extremely mildly -- annoyed at the fact that almost every piece of hardware I pick up trumpets its compatibility with the latest Windows and MacOS, yet fails to mention Linux and the BSDs. Even things like keyboards, mice, network switches and USB hubs -- which are to all intents and purposes OS-independent. That sort of thing is exactly why Linux et al are considered to be "alternative" OSes.
In the meantime, what we -- as a community which values honesty and mutual assistance -- can and should do is twofold. Firstly, if we are ever forced to purchase an unwanted Microsoft product, we should exercise our right to explicitly decline the EULA, and make sure Microsoft knows; that way, we will not be counted as Windows users to inflate Microsoft's statistics. Secondly, we should let hardware manufacturers know that Linux/BSD users use their products, and post reviews of hardware we have used so that other Linux/BSD users -- and would-be converts -- can see that hardware they might like to buy is compatible with such systems. We must lead by example a little -- we can't expect anyone to help us if we aren't willing to help ourselves.
Once more hardware is seen to be compatible with Linux and the BSD family -- thereby answering a common, if not entirely undeserved, critisism often levelled at such operating systems -- then it will be feasible for non-specialist retailers to offer family-friendly, matched packages of PC, video-in, printer, camera and scanner, with a GNU/Linux or BSD operating system and appropriate drivers already installed. Bye-bye to the criticism of difficult initial installations. Supply a recovery CD which allows you to boot up, login as root and set up user accounts {in case someone forgets their root password}.
To answer the criticism of software dependencies, I propose for someone to distribute a series of CDs which contain the source code for an application and, crucially, all the libraries it requires, so dependencies can be met from a single place. {IMLE
Steady on there, tiger. I never mentioned "social engineeering". For what it's worth, I agree with your observations. Persuading someone to hand over a password &c. is just a straightforward confidence trick - manipulation by deception. What you're talking about is propaganda - the means to manipulate a large audience through deliberate distorted messages. It goes on, too - and the subtler, the scarier.
You are asked for your gender. Why do you suppose this is so, if they are not proposing marriage? Put simply, they use this information to show women adverts for shoes and men adverts for video games. If someone is listening to your inbound traffic and sees you are receiving advertisements for shoes, they can infer that you are a woman, and therefore a suitable potential rape victim.
That's why giving away unnecessary information is dangerous.
Yes, but my concern is that it is far quicker to memorise a four-digit number than to learn to forge a signature. And the machine can't pick up on as many subtle clues as an experienced human being. Awkward pen holding angles, facial expressions, hesitation, that sort of thing. If the thief has to spend an hour perfecting an imitation of a signature and the associated body language, then you have an hour in which to discover and report the card stolen. In an urban area, there are more security personnel available; in a rural area, people are naturally suspicious of strangers. {Now hold on there a minute, bawy. I knows you ain't ol' Jed Baxter, 'cause the Jed Baxter done gotten him a wooden leg, an' your two legs there, see, they don't look to me like they's a-made o' woood ..... <sound of shotgun being loaded>}
:-)
It would perhaps be more secure if the hologram on the card was of the cardholder. Then the thief would at least have to look like the victim as well as be able to remember four digits. Surely this is possible nowadays? Actually, even if it isn't used for bank cards, a 3D digital camera would be a bloody nice toy
It seems to me that the problem is a social one, not a technological one, and therefore we should be looking for solutions in the social domain.
..... usually official letters such as gas / electricity statements and bank statements for your address, and a passport or driving licence for your signature and photo. If you join a video club, for example, you might have to produce two bills and a signature, and you'll get a card which is only good for renting videos; there is no information on the video card that links it back to the papers you submitted. Of course you could mug someone on their way to or from joining a video club and get their papers that way, but if you already knew what they were about to do you probably already know enough about them.
..... but it's recognised that the name and address aren't enough, so other documents are also usually required. {And if, say, my electric bill shows I paid 10 last Saturday, they might want to see my payment card and make sure the account number matches.} Most places also require a signature, and you may even be required to sign the form in front of them. It does take skill to forge signatures with an audience ..... I could do a very convincing one of my last-but-one boss's, but nowhere near as quickly as he could.
..... there is a published part known to everybody, a secret part known only to one individual and a mathematical relationship that makes it difficult to determine the secret part from the published part. If I just send you ajs318's public key, that doesn't prove I am ajs318. If I sign something with ajs318's secret key, and you can recover it with ajs318's public key, then that at least proves I know ajs318's secret key, and there's a better chance that I might actually be ajs318. It seems to me that the SSN {which identifies without authentiation} is being misused.
Somebody who knows me is better qualified to say "That is the real ajs318" {or not} than some piece of machinery ever will be. A human being can check subtle things like signatures far more reliably than a machine. But the corporate mentality seems to be far too trusting of machines and far too distrustful of human beings. It's well known that humans make mistakes, but who designed and built the machines?
In Britain, we have a National Insurance Number as a unique per-person identifier, but it is only used for taxation purposes. Also, your employer is responsible for stopping your tax right out of your wages before you ever see them, making it physically impossible for the working classes to commit tax fraud.
With no national identity card, anyone requiring ID has to seek it from multiple sources
Now, your name and address are published in the telephone directory. So places insist on official letters. Of course these could be forged
It seems the problem in the USA is that the social security number {which uniquely identifies a person} is treated as though it were a secret, unknown to any entity beyond the person it identifies. That clearly is not the case. Look at how PGP works
The other thing is, when you go into somewhere like a newsagent's shop, you are recognised by the regular staff there. {Kids in my old village used to shoplift from the local newsagents' once at most. The items they took got added onto their parents' slate.} The point is, the main identity used in that situation is the person themself, which is hard to forge. In a large impersonal supermarket, there is less potential for recognition, so if you pay by payment card or credit card then they require a signature {though trials are underway where the shopper will merely have to enter a 4-digit PIN, thus relieving the cashier of the responsibility to check a signature and not at all paving the way for brand new opportunities in crime}; on the Internet, none at all.
If you want security, stick with old fashioned pound notes, because they can only steal as many of those as you actually have. And, until they get RFID in money, it's untraceable. You can't look at a 20 note and see it was won in a poker game, for instance.
In Britain, your "letter box" is just a slot in your front door, far enough from the locking mecchanism that you can't put your hand in and open the door. Stuff can be pushed in, but not taken out. It works quite well.
What you forget about China is that the VCRs, stereos, laptops, cellphones and other goodies they make are only for Western consumers. Chinese people are lucky if they get a mono MW radio, powered by leaky Zn-C batteries that last a few hours, and worse-built than the stuff we get.
The working conditions in China and other countries would be totally unacceptable in this country or the USA, for example, and I for one would like to know why anyone is allowed to import goods where the conditions of manufacture do not conform to the prevailing laws in the destination country.
In fact, I think I will be contacting my MEP about this issue next year.
My DNA belongs to me, obviously.
But what about DNA in other life forms? I have a piebald gerbil, who everyone thinks is the prettiest of the lot. Whose is her DNA? Have I the right to breed from her and sell the offspring? Probably not if you believe the animal rights extremists {BTW, if you're one of them: organic fertiliser is made from animals} but what's a gerbil going to do by way of revenge? {Apart from escape from her cage and chew through my CAT5 in several places, but that's too horrible a thought to contemplate}. However, once I have sold any of my fancy-coloured gerbils, I lose all claim to them. I can't prevent them breeding {actually it is physically possible to sterilise a gerbil, but the anaesthetic is the sticking point; too little and it dies of pain, too much and it never comes around. You could dilute the dope to measure it [easier to measure whole grammes at 0.1% than milligrammes at full strength], but you'd need to re-purify it before administering it.} Anyway. The point is that if I breed an animal or a plant, its DNA does not belong to me.
Or, suppose I had bred a certain Medicinal Herb that had particularly fine qualities, with the intention of selling it in ten-pound wraps. If I really wanted to make sure nobody else could grow my wonder Weed, then I should be responsible for making sure it has no viable seeds in it -- and if I fail, and someone else starts selling the same product cheaper, well, that's my tough titty. {Don't try this at home, kids; the offspring from first generation hybrids may bear little resemblance to the parent stock. Draw some mendel diagrams if you want to prove it to yourself.} DNA is in the Public Domain. We just haven't quite finished recovering the source from the munged binaries we were given.
At any rate, we need to push for an INTERNATIONAL law that there is NO "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY" IN LIVING THINGS, and impose sanctions on countries whose laws do not recognise this concept. This may upset a few rich people, but so did the abolition of slavery. Ultimately it would ensure that science would benefit society {e.g. disease-resistant crops to feed the world} rather than harming it {e.g. high-maintenance crops upon which biotechnology and associated companies, and precious few others, get fat}.
Yeah, but my programming language of choice is 60% tin, 40% lead.
Perhaps it's time for a last-ditch attempt to get a law on the statute books that would effectively ban DRM. Make it so that when any product is sold to a consumer, then nothing about that product is a secret from its rightful owner. In other words, the owner of a DVD should have a legitimate right to view the content recorded on it by virtue of owning the disc. {Of course this has wider implications beyond DVDs .....} Then, consumers would be protected from manufacturers' excesses of authority, as they could not legally lock you out of playing a disc you own.
If this isn't already law, we should be campaigning to get someone to try to make it law. No secrets from lawful owners of property -- it sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It would effectively make the worst kinds of DRM unenforceable. Could we even get one of ourselves elected?
I cannot, however, in all honesty see how anyone can expect these encumbrances to work. It takes only one copy to be made by analogue transfer, and then it is possible to make an indefinite number of digital copies no worse than the original. And there are people who would go to the lengths to crack anything they can try. As long as there are fences, there will be someone with the urge to climb over them.
That was my idea, almost. Stick a bunch of DRAMs as wide as your bus, with self-refreshing circuits on a board, with a counter on the address lines. Set it up to write every data word sent to the address which matches the port address of a real sound card to a successive memory location. You don't need to emulate the card's responses if you have an actual example of the same card in the machine, all you need is to be able to make sense of the data. This you do with the aid of the sound card programmer's manual, of course; so be sure to choose a well-documented sound card to work with.
..... they already have, haven't they. Ah, well. The media companies will just have to find a way to get your brain to finally unscramble the signal.
Once they twig onto this and hide the digital signals from somewhere as exposed as the PCI bus, then it will need cunning. You will have to deploy your own analogue-to-digital converters, of course, as fewer and fewer manufacturers are including line-in jacks on their boards {but some still have an analogue audio input for the CD-ROM sound, that could be used in an emergency}.
Beyond that, we will have to wait for someone to invent a device that transforms sound waves into electrical impulses. Oh, wait
Yeah, it is overkill ..... I've just realised, all you have to do is make sure there is <650MB of free space on the hard disk, so there won't be enough room to fit a disc image. D'oh!
I'm related to somebody who used to work for the BBC. And all the between-programme adverts for real stuff as opposed to other programmes are for the BBC's own stuff - books, videos, and of course the Radio Times. If you watch closely, you'll see Eastenders &c. blur out real product brand names or create fictitious ones.
- Install only enough software - and hack and recompile the sources, if necessary - for the machine to be able to record from an existing datafile/TOCfile pair on the HDD.
- Don't have a "proper" shell, just a simple menu which gives you a choice of CDs.
- Password-protect the BIOS, so the machine can't simply be rebooted from a CD.
- Assume that a librarian will be able to spot anyone up to no good and deal with them before they do any real damage.
It might even be possible to hack the ide-scsi module so as to make a CD-RW drive emulate a write-only device.There are no adverts at all on the BBC, except for other programmes on the BBC. Product placement is frowned upon even on ITV and Channel Four {though Five and the Sky channels are just cheap whores}. The BBC has been known to edit out scenes which are blatant product placement. Even brand names are removed.
I can see that not all of the code in a TiVo is covered by the GPL, but surely the non-GPL portions are the ones that deal with the TiVo specific hardware? In which case, they won't work anyway without a rather expensive hardware dongle {a TiVo motherboard} so they're still useless to anyone except a TiVo owner. And if you own a TiVo, then you have a right to the code anyway.
It sounds to me like someone has spat their dummy out.