Wait, when did they adopt h.264? My understanding was that they refused to adopt any standard -- h.264 is a defacto "standard", but so far, there's no actual standard codec.
That sounds well and good, but we are still talking about a beating for a spitting. Good thing in your case, because the guy did learn his lesson, instead of retaliating later. I'd prefer not to actually escalate it -- start with something closer in kind to what he's doing.
I guess this one is harder -- I had a lot of teasing, but not a lot of physical bullying. It stopped when I learned to stop reacting or caring as much what others thought -- "sticks and stones", right?
No punishment at all is better than punishing both parties. The bully expects to be punished and often doesn't care.
However, "No punishment" tells him that it's OK to do whatever he wants so long as there are no adult witnesses. At least punishment has the possibility of deterring some bullies, some of the time, which is better than none at all.
I don't buy that it isn't obvious who the victim is when there is bullying. I can always spot the nerd.
The nerd who may well be taking a martial art, or simply hitting with a bigger weapon? Or maybe it was the nerd who instigated the whole thing, trying the best to get the "bully" angry enough to do something that would get him into trouble?
At least with no punishment you are saying to the nerds defend yourself and there wont be consequences.
Punishing both parties does this always, except that it also provides an incentive for running. If you get away, probably neither of you are punished. If you don't, both of you are going to be punished -- so you might as well fight back.
Or the guys maintaining the Linux kernel can spend their money merging the Google code themselves,
Not realistically. Some of the affected areas include the kernel-userspace boundary -- basically, fixing that to the point where the Google code would make any sense upstream necessarily entails changing the userspace code that it connects to. In this case, that userspace code is also Google's code -- I'm not entirely sure it's open.
Realistically, this will take cooperation from both sides, and at the moment, Google is the only one who seems to have stopped cooperating.
I agree, but at least this way, the system is mechanically predictable. It's still prone to abuse, but not nearly as much.
Consider the implications if the ruling went the other way -- if the kid who fought back was judged to be the aggressor, and the bully played nice and managed to avoid any punishment. That's much worse than both kids being punished.
And consider the implications if there was no punishment at all. Well then, the bullying can simply continue without interference. At least this way, there's the guarantee that the bully is punished, and that's hopefully some sort of a deterrent, even if hurting the victim makes it a reward at the same time.
I don't have a solution, but I understand why the system is set up the way it is. I might naively suggest a few things (look for the kid who's more severely beat up and assume they're the victim), but my naive suggestions tend to have serious flaws ("victims" who know martial arts, or bullies who know how to inflict a lot of pain without leaving a mark).
I'm responding to the hypothetical that even if the RIAA were forced to fork over more money, it wouldn't do anything, because MediaSentry would somehow be shielded -- the point I'm making is that if the RIAA were forced to pay the defense's legal fees, maybe even a fine, it would at the very least force them to change how they approach the legal system.
Judicial decisions like this are valid only on a per-case basis.
For the most part, that's as it should be, but it seems like at some point you have to give organizations which repeatedly abuse the legal system more than a slap on the wrist -- and if that did happen (not likely), it would necessarily involve a comprehensive review of all of their cases, taken as a whole.
But my point was more that their M.O. is pretty clear, and that I would be very surprised if this case was actually different -- and I have yet to see evidence that it is.
When an abusive husband promises that he's changed, that it'll be different now, that he loves you... Just how many black eyes is it going to take before you stop giving him the benefit of the doubt?
I'd like to add: Developers, developers, developers, developers. Google should spend that money. Consider it an investment in your platform -- it makes it that much more attractive to other developers.
Just because the defendant prevails in a case doesn't mean that the case was frivolous.
No, and I don't mean to imply that...
To say that it was a frivolous case would mean that the plaintiff had no hope of winning from the outset.
The RIAA has sued a 12-year-old girl, an 85-year-old grandmother who never touched a computer in her life (not sure about the precise ages, but about that), a dead person, and a network printer.
I suppose it's possible this case had some reasonable grounds, but in general, they've been litigious bastards, and it seems pretty clear that it was never their goal to win in court, but rather, to pressure the defense (financially, with legal fees) into a settlement.
I'm not a lawyer, and I have no idea whether it was actually frivolous, but it seems to me that this is exactly the reason we have the ability to award legal fees -- to prevent litigious bastards from abusing the system.
Well, true, but MediaSentry doesn't exist in a vacuum. More money paid to lawsuits means either less money to actually spend on artists (and thus, artists leaving to form indie labels), or less money to spend on MediaSentry. Either one is a good thing in the long run.
More importantly, it would mean the defendant wouldn't have to pay those obscene legal fees, they'd just have to waste a ton of time. So it's not quite a win for the defendant, but it isn't quite what it is now, where a defendant is likely to settle just because their legal fees may well outweigh any possible settlement.
Finally, if it set a precedent, it would break this habit the RIAA has of simply suing everyone and asking questions later. Right now, it's actually profitable for them to do so, because occasionally they do get a settlement. If it cost them that much more each time they failed, they might pay a little more attention to who they sue in the first place.
Firefox (and Chrome) can autoupdate themselves. Chrome also runs in a low privileged mode, at least on Linux. According to other posters, DEP isn't unique to IE.
Now that that's out of the way, does IE do the same multiprocess trick Chrome does? (I think so.) And especially, how quickly are IE bugs patched versus other browsers?
I think that for static pages it's possible to implement something like page signing, so that it will be possible to download those pages without encryption and still be sure that pages are authentic.
Well, and dynamic pages could be done in a much more efficient manner, also. But with the realities of what servers and browsers support at the moment, HTTPS is either CPU-intensive or hardware-aided, probably both.
That's not an answer. I realize Telnet itself is entirely insecure with respect to the data transmitted, but there's a huge difference between a Telnet client that understands not to trust any data from the remote side, and a Telnet client which just passes control characters through to the local terminal willy-nilly. The latter would mean that telnet-ing to a remote machine could give the remote machine (or any MITM) the ability to access my local machine.
Similarly, any more traditional security vulnerabilities -- buffer overruns, etc -- would again give the remote machine the ability to exploit my local machine.
The situation may well be, especially in a case like a MUD, that I really don't care about the security of the bits transmitted over that particular Telnet connection, but I still want my local machine to remain secure.
In this respect, I would guess that Windows Telnet is much more likely to be vulnerable, as it just runs in a "DOS box", whereas PuTTY runs its own terminal emulator which is written specifically for this purpose.
if you can find a mud server that will let you use SSH that would be more secure.
It would indeed, but these vulnerabilities I'm talking about would be independent of crypto -- that is, depending on your SSH client, it might be just as vulnerable to the remote machine pwning you. Granted, it's more secure even here in that a man-in-the-middle would have a much harder time doing anything at all, whereas with Telnet, both the MITM and the remote machine can pwn you -- but it's still the same problem.
Generating it was painfully slow. Canvas will allow single-pixel operations...
You couldn't switch the background color of an existing element? That's a lot faster than regenerating the entire table, and it would give you "per-pixel" operations...
Damned straight. Keep in mind that this is the bare minimum that ISP sysadmins have done, so it's not as if the new legislation has caused any more harm than no legislation.
Presumably, it does prevent some of the more egregious things that corrupt ISP sysadmins could have done, and explicitly stated that they planned to do, such as charging twice for the same bits (once to you, once to Google), prioritizing traffic based on business relationships (Skype goes up, SIP goes down, or vice versa), and so on.
I'm not saying I agree with this decision, but it sounds like you're saying, "See? The government didn't do it perfectly this time! THE GOVERNMENT ALWAYS LIES TO YOU AND YOU SHOULD TRUST THE FREE MARKET INSTEAD ALL THE TIME FOREVER." I don't see how that follows.
Nothing will happen to torrents, relax. The market is always controlled by the consumers, in some way.
Indeed it is, so long as we don't relax. If we do relax, just assume it'll all go our way, and go back to our couch-potato existence, it'll be controlled by the corporations, not the consumers.
Just look at cannabis...
Yes, look at it. Look at the basic human rights which are robbed of people whose only crime is partaking in a substance which may, in the very worst case, harm only themselves. Ask yourself why that is, especially if the consumers are in charge.
You have elevated logic, the ability of your mind as the final arbiter of all truth.
That's not what logic is. Please look it up. Logic is also external to the mind, unless you wish to claim that the universe is basically illogical, which would have dangerous implications for the sort of deity who would create such a universe.
Please don't confuse "logic" with "opinion". An "opinion" might be that 2+2=5 -- opinions can be true or false. Logic is what tells you with absolute certainty and no possibility of being wrong that 2+2=4.
The reason that you think that killing of what you term innocent women and children is so terrible, is because your logical view of death is limited to the here and now.
Death is still likely to be incredibly painful and scary, and that says nothing of rape. Keep in mind that there are places in the world today where young children are sold as sex slaves.
However it is not that you don't have faith, but your faith is in the ability of your mind to reason.
A dictionary would do you some good.
I have confidence and trust on my ability to reason, based on past experience -- I have generally been good at reasoning, and it has generally led me to truth.
Faith is to believe without sufficient evidence or reason.
As in science and engineering, there has to be a standard. For me, the standard is the Bible, as it has been transmitted to us over the ages.
Why the Bible and not the Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, or the Tao Te Ching?
How do you explain that the Bible has endured it for centuries, as the most widely distributed book, if it is not the word of God, supernaturally protected?
I've explained this to you over and over, to the extent that I have ideas about the subject, even when the burden is not on me to explain why, but rather on you to explain why a supernatural explanation is the only one that fits.
Regardless, I will not explain it again.
Jesus is the only one who was physically resurrected. All the other religious gurus and Prophets are dead and buried.
Except Elijah, according to the book. And Rama, for that matter -- if I recall, he also ascended bodily to heaven, without his body having to physically die. Even L. Ron Hubbard was not dying, but leaving his body to return to another planet.
I just hope that nobody ever accused of a serious crime gets you on their jury.
If that happens, I am sure I will be properly briefed about the rules of evidence by someone who knows, not by a Slashdot apologist.
I only have to look at one thing that all non-Christian religions have in common. All their founders or leaders are dead.
That is an incredibly narrow-minded view, and I hope you never have to represent your religion to an interfaith council or anything of the sort.
There is no greater truth that any human can ever obtain in all of eternity, than to know Jesus Christ is God.
You do not know this, you believe it, you have faith. In fact, you choose to believe it as a conscious act of will, something many skeptics find curious.
But because you believe it, you are uninterested in finding out whether or not your belief is true, or whether there might be other related, important truths, or truths unrelated to it. If you ever change your view and decide truth is actually important to you, you're going to have to start by learning some critical thinking, something you seem to entirely lack right now.
I have not given up learning lesser truths, otherwise I would not be interested in technology.
No, it's only the big, important, life-altering truths that you've given up learning. Remember: If you think you know everything important, you cannot learn, and this holds for any su
Considering how routine these shenanigans are, is it any wonder the employers usually lose?
It kind of is, given they have the money and the power -- look at what the RIAA and MPAA are able to accomplish. While I'm glad your conclusion is what it is, it's still surprising (and encouraging!) to see them lose at, well, anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, when did they adopt h.264? My understanding was that they refused to adopt any standard -- h.264 is a defacto "standard", but so far, there's no actual standard codec.
You know which one spreads hepatitis and genital warts, right?
Fair point.
Also, in a "boys will be boys" environment, punching and wrestling are way more acceptable than anything non-standard.
Acceptable to the authorities? Weird.
I wasn't suggesting spitting directly -- rather, some sort of interesting surprise in his locker. I'm not sure; get creative.
That sounds well and good, but we are still talking about a beating for a spitting. Good thing in your case, because the guy did learn his lesson, instead of retaliating later. I'd prefer not to actually escalate it -- start with something closer in kind to what he's doing.
I guess this one is harder -- I had a lot of teasing, but not a lot of physical bullying. It stopped when I learned to stop reacting or caring as much what others thought -- "sticks and stones", right?
No punishment at all is better than punishing both parties. The bully expects to be punished and often doesn't care.
However, "No punishment" tells him that it's OK to do whatever he wants so long as there are no adult witnesses. At least punishment has the possibility of deterring some bullies, some of the time, which is better than none at all.
I don't buy that it isn't obvious who the victim is when there is bullying. I can always spot the nerd.
The nerd who may well be taking a martial art, or simply hitting with a bigger weapon? Or maybe it was the nerd who instigated the whole thing, trying the best to get the "bully" angry enough to do something that would get him into trouble?
At least with no punishment you are saying to the nerds defend yourself and there wont be consequences.
Punishing both parties does this always, except that it also provides an incentive for running. If you get away, probably neither of you are punished. If you don't, both of you are going to be punished -- so you might as well fight back.
That's the obvious tag.
Seeing as they seem to be going for something biological, I'm going to guess they'll regret summoning Azathoth.
Or the guys maintaining the Linux kernel can spend their money merging the Google code themselves,
Not realistically. Some of the affected areas include the kernel-userspace boundary -- basically, fixing that to the point where the Google code would make any sense upstream necessarily entails changing the userspace code that it connects to. In this case, that userspace code is also Google's code -- I'm not entirely sure it's open.
Realistically, this will take cooperation from both sides, and at the moment, Google is the only one who seems to have stopped cooperating.
Oh, it's probably not going to work, but punching over a spit is actually turning you into a bit of a bully yourself.
I agree, but at least this way, the system is mechanically predictable. It's still prone to abuse, but not nearly as much.
Consider the implications if the ruling went the other way -- if the kid who fought back was judged to be the aggressor, and the bully played nice and managed to avoid any punishment. That's much worse than both kids being punished.
And consider the implications if there was no punishment at all. Well then, the bullying can simply continue without interference. At least this way, there's the guarantee that the bully is punished, and that's hopefully some sort of a deterrent, even if hurting the victim makes it a reward at the same time.
I don't have a solution, but I understand why the system is set up the way it is. I might naively suggest a few things (look for the kid who's more severely beat up and assume they're the victim), but my naive suggestions tend to have serious flaws ("victims" who know martial arts, or bullies who know how to inflict a lot of pain without leaving a mark).
I think you missed the key word "would".
I'm responding to the hypothetical that even if the RIAA were forced to fork over more money, it wouldn't do anything, because MediaSentry would somehow be shielded -- the point I'm making is that if the RIAA were forced to pay the defense's legal fees, maybe even a fine, it would at the very least force them to change how they approach the legal system.
Judicial decisions like this are valid only on a per-case basis.
For the most part, that's as it should be, but it seems like at some point you have to give organizations which repeatedly abuse the legal system more than a slap on the wrist -- and if that did happen (not likely), it would necessarily involve a comprehensive review of all of their cases, taken as a whole.
But my point was more that their M.O. is pretty clear, and that I would be very surprised if this case was actually different -- and I have yet to see evidence that it is.
When an abusive husband promises that he's changed, that it'll be different now, that he loves you... Just how many black eyes is it going to take before you stop giving him the benefit of the doubt?
Nice summary.
I'd like to add: Developers, developers, developers, developers. Google should spend that money. Consider it an investment in your platform -- it makes it that much more attractive to other developers.
It's worse than that -- yes, it's being in a fight. He doesn't have to try to defend himself. He just has to be unsuccessful at running away.
Just because the defendant prevails in a case doesn't mean that the case was frivolous.
No, and I don't mean to imply that...
To say that it was a frivolous case would mean that the plaintiff had no hope of winning from the outset.
The RIAA has sued a 12-year-old girl, an 85-year-old grandmother who never touched a computer in her life (not sure about the precise ages, but about that), a dead person, and a network printer.
I suppose it's possible this case had some reasonable grounds, but in general, they've been litigious bastards, and it seems pretty clear that it was never their goal to win in court, but rather, to pressure the defense (financially, with legal fees) into a settlement.
I'm not a lawyer, and I have no idea whether it was actually frivolous, but it seems to me that this is exactly the reason we have the ability to award legal fees -- to prevent litigious bastards from abusing the system.
Well, true, but MediaSentry doesn't exist in a vacuum. More money paid to lawsuits means either less money to actually spend on artists (and thus, artists leaving to form indie labels), or less money to spend on MediaSentry. Either one is a good thing in the long run.
More importantly, it would mean the defendant wouldn't have to pay those obscene legal fees, they'd just have to waste a ton of time. So it's not quite a win for the defendant, but it isn't quite what it is now, where a defendant is likely to settle just because their legal fees may well outweigh any possible settlement.
Finally, if it set a precedent, it would break this habit the RIAA has of simply suing everyone and asking questions later. Right now, it's actually profitable for them to do so, because occasionally they do get a settlement. If it cost them that much more each time they failed, they might pay a little more attention to who they sue in the first place.
Where do you work that Slashdot is allowed but recordingindustryvspeople isn't?
No fees is sanity? Shouldn't the RIAA have to pay for bringing what seems to be an essentially frivolous lawsuit?
Firefox (and Chrome) can autoupdate themselves. Chrome also runs in a low privileged mode, at least on Linux. According to other posters, DEP isn't unique to IE.
Now that that's out of the way, does IE do the same multiprocess trick Chrome does? (I think so.) And especially, how quickly are IE bugs patched versus other browsers?
I think that for static pages it's possible to implement something like page signing, so that it will be possible to download those pages without encryption and still be sure that pages are authentic.
Well, and dynamic pages could be done in a much more efficient manner, also. But with the realities of what servers and browsers support at the moment, HTTPS is either CPU-intensive or hardware-aided, probably both.
No maxima? How about kmplot?
it's still the telnet protocol so no.
That's not an answer. I realize Telnet itself is entirely insecure with respect to the data transmitted, but there's a huge difference between a Telnet client that understands not to trust any data from the remote side, and a Telnet client which just passes control characters through to the local terminal willy-nilly. The latter would mean that telnet-ing to a remote machine could give the remote machine (or any MITM) the ability to access my local machine.
Similarly, any more traditional security vulnerabilities -- buffer overruns, etc -- would again give the remote machine the ability to exploit my local machine.
The situation may well be, especially in a case like a MUD, that I really don't care about the security of the bits transmitted over that particular Telnet connection, but I still want my local machine to remain secure.
In this respect, I would guess that Windows Telnet is much more likely to be vulnerable, as it just runs in a "DOS box", whereas PuTTY runs its own terminal emulator which is written specifically for this purpose.
if you can find a mud server that will let you use SSH that would be more secure.
It would indeed, but these vulnerabilities I'm talking about would be independent of crypto -- that is, depending on your SSH client, it might be just as vulnerable to the remote machine pwning you. Granted, it's more secure even here in that a man-in-the-middle would have a much harder time doing anything at all, whereas with Telnet, both the MITM and the remote machine can pwn you -- but it's still the same problem.
Generating it was painfully slow. Canvas will allow single-pixel operations...
You couldn't switch the background color of an existing element? That's a lot faster than regenerating the entire table, and it would give you "per-pixel" operations...
taking it away from ISP sysadmins
Damned straight. Keep in mind that this is the bare minimum that ISP sysadmins have done, so it's not as if the new legislation has caused any more harm than no legislation.
Presumably, it does prevent some of the more egregious things that corrupt ISP sysadmins could have done, and explicitly stated that they planned to do, such as charging twice for the same bits (once to you, once to Google), prioritizing traffic based on business relationships (Skype goes up, SIP goes down, or vice versa), and so on.
I'm not saying I agree with this decision, but it sounds like you're saying, "See? The government didn't do it perfectly this time! THE GOVERNMENT ALWAYS LIES TO YOU AND YOU SHOULD TRUST THE FREE MARKET INSTEAD ALL THE TIME FOREVER." I don't see how that follows.
Nothing will happen to torrents, relax. The market is always controlled by the consumers, in some way.
Indeed it is, so long as we don't relax. If we do relax, just assume it'll all go our way, and go back to our couch-potato existence, it'll be controlled by the corporations, not the consumers.
Just look at cannabis...
Yes, look at it. Look at the basic human rights which are robbed of people whose only crime is partaking in a substance which may, in the very worst case, harm only themselves. Ask yourself why that is, especially if the consumers are in charge.
You have elevated logic, the ability of your mind as the final arbiter of all truth.
That's not what logic is. Please look it up. Logic is also external to the mind, unless you wish to claim that the universe is basically illogical, which would have dangerous implications for the sort of deity who would create such a universe.
Please don't confuse "logic" with "opinion". An "opinion" might be that 2+2=5 -- opinions can be true or false. Logic is what tells you with absolute certainty and no possibility of being wrong that 2+2=4.
The reason that you think that killing of what you term innocent women and children is so terrible, is because your logical view of death is limited to the here and now.
Death is still likely to be incredibly painful and scary, and that says nothing of rape. Keep in mind that there are places in the world today where young children are sold as sex slaves.
However it is not that you don't have faith, but your faith is in the ability of your mind to reason.
A dictionary would do you some good.
I have confidence and trust on my ability to reason, based on past experience -- I have generally been good at reasoning, and it has generally led me to truth.
Faith is to believe without sufficient evidence or reason.
As in science and engineering, there has to be a standard. For me, the standard is the Bible, as it has been transmitted to us over the ages.
Why the Bible and not the Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, or the Tao Te Ching?
How do you explain that the Bible has endured it for centuries, as the most widely distributed book, if it is not the word of God, supernaturally protected?
I've explained this to you over and over, to the extent that I have ideas about the subject, even when the burden is not on me to explain why, but rather on you to explain why a supernatural explanation is the only one that fits.
Regardless, I will not explain it again.
Jesus is the only one who was physically resurrected. All the other religious gurus and Prophets are dead and buried.
Except Elijah, according to the book. And Rama, for that matter -- if I recall, he also ascended bodily to heaven, without his body having to physically die. Even L. Ron Hubbard was not dying, but leaving his body to return to another planet.
I just hope that nobody ever accused of a serious crime gets you on their jury.
If that happens, I am sure I will be properly briefed about the rules of evidence by someone who knows, not by a Slashdot apologist.
I only have to look at one thing that all non-Christian religions have in common. All their founders or leaders are dead.
That is an incredibly narrow-minded view, and I hope you never have to represent your religion to an interfaith council or anything of the sort.
There is no greater truth that any human can ever obtain in all of eternity, than to know Jesus Christ is God.
You do not know this, you believe it, you have faith. In fact, you choose to believe it as a conscious act of will, something many skeptics find curious.
But because you believe it, you are uninterested in finding out whether or not your belief is true, or whether there might be other related, important truths, or truths unrelated to it. If you ever change your view and decide truth is actually important to you, you're going to have to start by learning some critical thinking, something you seem to entirely lack right now.
I have not given up learning lesser truths, otherwise I would not be interested in technology.
No, it's only the big, important, life-altering truths that you've given up learning. Remember: If you think you know everything important, you cannot learn, and this holds for any su
Considering how routine these shenanigans are, is it any wonder the employers usually lose?
It kind of is, given they have the money and the power -- look at what the RIAA and MPAA are able to accomplish. While I'm glad your conclusion is what it is, it's still surprising (and encouraging!) to see them lose at, well, anything.