It sounds a bit sad to say it now, but I met my first gf on a mud, back in '95:) A friend of mine met his wife on irc years ago too. So no, none of this seems unusual to me. I don't even agree with the premise of the story, that we "often forget", I can't imagine that anyone 'forgets', we all know full well we're interacting with other people etc.
Because Skype was one of the early VoIP services, they have network effects working in their favour (e.g. I "have to" use Skype because all my colleagues/friends and even clients already use it - it will now be quite difficult to switch in fact). I'm sure they realise this, I think it's already made them a bit lazy compared to their competitors, but I think they overestimate their position - there aren't that many Skype users yet that that a [new] competitor couldn't outgrow them. According to my Skype client there are typically between 3 and 5 million users on at any given time. That's miniscule compared to what the total number of VoIP users will be in 5 or 10 years. You're supposed to wait until you've really cornered a market before you start trying stupid stunts like this.
OMG its a huge monopoly, quick, bring the anti-trust laws against them
It's not illegal to be a monopoly. It's illegal to abuse your monopoly position to unfairly lock out competitors or do other 'harm' to consumers such as 'forcing' them to buy products they don't really want (e.g. product tying).
It's true what you say. I think the DoJ judgements had very little effect at all on Microsoft, but slowly (but surely) the market itself is waking up and looking for (and offering) better/cheaper alternatives - there are definitely signs of this, and a little bit of "healthy colour" seems to be returning to what until recently looked like a rather pale sickly market (IMO). I think Microsoft will need to start adapting in the longer term (one problem is their corporate culture is anti-innovation, so instead they continue looking for ways to manipulate the market rather than improve their offerings, such as their latest patent craze). But anyway, the "free market" is indeed doing something positive here, but it's doing it too slowly for my liking... I spent nearly the last decade of my life programming on horrible Microsoft systems, and watched the industry grind to near complete stagnation, seemingly getting "stuck" in the early 90's technology-wise. I realise that five or ten years is incredibly tiny in the grand scheme of things, but it's not tiny in *my* scheme of things --- I do need to enjoy my work, and ten years is a big chunk!
If they become less efficient, a competitor will eventually arise to capitalize on their "monopoly profits" and choice will be restored.
The keyword here is "eventually" though... the question is, how long?
The problem with (some) monopolies is that, even if they become inefficient, they may as a result of their position be able to influence the market in a way that allows them to manipulate and distort a "free" market into a "not free" market. Not to harp on the Microsoft case again, but it's a good example: Microsoft had (in fact still has) a lot of power over the OEMs that allowed them to effectively "force" the OEMs into only selling Windows, and selling Windows with every computer sold. By doing this they literally blocked major market entry access points for potential competitors - in effect, artificially making the market less free.
There are dozens of other ways still that monopolies (or even just powerful companies) can artificially distort markets in their favour, but that's venturing off-topic.
True, if you rip your own from CD. If you are purchasing online music though it will already be compressed... some existing audio stego techniques are integrated into the compressors, e.g. mp3stego:
"The hiding process takes place at the heart of the Layer III encoding process namely in the inner_loop. The inner loop quantizes the input data and increases the quantiser step size until the quantized data can be coded with the available number of bits. Another loop checks that the distortions introduced by the quantization do not exceed the threshold defined by the psycho acoustic model."
Oops, I don't actually know all that much about steg., it was years ago that I was into it (and mostly for images) and I've forgotten a lot of it now, so I don't feel that mod was deserved... but anyway, this looks like a fair starting point: http://www.jjtc.com/stegdoc/... there are quite a few different techniques, most of which are detectable though.
Not really, but I know what you mean. You answer this yourself though with "do people have an alternative". The question one should ask to determine if something is or is not a monopoly is "are there substitutes available"? In the case of Windows, if I as an individual need to run some particular software that only runs on Windows, then I have no substitute (unless that other software itself has a substitute that runs on another platform). In a world where 99% of software runs only on Windows, it seems reasonable to say that an effective substitute for Windows does not exist. Hence the feeling many people get that they are effectively "forced" to buy Windows, even though alternatives like OS X or Linux do technically exist --- their existence doesn't automatically make them substitutes in the market.
You may seem to have a "monopoly" on the services of Leon Geeste, but the real question is, do your customers need "Leon Geeste" specifically or do they need "the services you provide"? Are you the product? No, unless you're a celebrity the services you provide are probably the product, not you, and to determine whether or not you are a monopoly you ask "do your clients have market substitutes"... i.e. are there others that provide similar services. Are your services unique and highly specialised?
In the case of iPod+iTMS, it seems to me that reasonable market substitutes are available no matter how you look at it. The music itself? Sure, you can get that elsewhere (e.g. buy the CD). *Online* music? Again, alternatives exist. Music that runs on the iPod? Again, you can put MP3s on an iPod so the iPod can run music that comes from anywhere. Portable music players? Again, there are others in the market that are substitutes... nobody needs to buy an iPod to do what an iPod does (unless they are so seriously 'branded' that buying anything other than an iPod would be beneath them).
Lawyers who will no doubt seek millions in damages and take a hefty cut for their personal fortunes are now socialists? WTF, you have got to be kidding me. What in your world does a 'greedy capitalist' look like then?
That's a valid intput, but steganographers thought of that years ago already. Decent steganographic techniques include low-frequency information that can make them quite resilient to a fair deal of subsampling, recompressing, re-encoding and so on. The idea is not to make a "miniscule variation" but a very subtle variation over a large area. You can think of it like, the actual information is in the 'high bits' not the 'low bits'. Info in the 'low bits' is easily destroyed.
Hmm... interesting, a good portion of my mp3 collection consists of files copied from people without their knowledge (e.g. open shares found at LANs or at work). Not to mention Joe User's box getting hacked and the files getting copied without his knowledge. They might be able to prove whose file it was but can they really prove piracy unless they find (and identify) Joe User himself personally sharing that file on a p2p network?
I know I might be accused of not picking up the humorous tone of your post here;), but most modern grammarians do seem to agree it's OK to end a sentence with a preposition. From answers.com:
"It was John Dryden who first promulgated the doctrine that a preposition may not be used at the end of a sentence, probably on the basis of a specious analogy to Latin. Grammarians in the 18th century refined the doctrine, and the rule has since become one of the most venerated maxims of schoolroom grammar. But sentences ending with prepositions can be found in the works of most of the great writers since the Renaissance. English syntax does allow for final placement of the preposition, as in 'We have much to be thankful for' or 'I asked her which course she had signed up for'. Efforts to rewrite such sentences to place the preposition elsewhere can have stilted and even comical results, as Winston Churchill demonstrated when he objected to the doctrine by saying 'This is the sort of English up with which I cannot put.'"
Yup, it's ridiculous. Even if there were only two tones an e-mail could have, this also seems disconnected somehow from a rather obvious point of how well-written the messages were. Language use that is well thought out and well constructed would definitely improve the chances of the 'correct' tone being conveyed to the reader. Most of the misunderstandings I've seen in online discussions were simply the result of poor writing skills. Or poor reading skills, for that matter. This study also doesn't seem to say anything about the reading skills and intelligence of the readers.
So the future is 'like UNIX but with a subscription model', hooray!
Seriously, I remember being able to access my UNIX desktop from anywhere in the world already ten years ago. The media rage about the idea as if it's some coming wave of the future, and certain companies market it as such as they add more elements from UNIX over the years to their systems. But the media rage about it as if it's new because they don't know any better - I mean, they don't know what UNIX is and what it could do 20 years ago already - and although that's partially symptomatic of what's wrong with modern "journalism", it's also perhaps a sign of the failure of the UNIX and F/OSS "communities" to market their solutions better.
The analogies explaining this are too many to count
Yeah, and this is precisely the problem with analogies, they create cute "sound bites" that people can latch onto without having to properly think something through. Your TV analogy is flawed, because the hospital isn't expected to be "looking after it's own stuff" here and it isn't the hospital's "own stuff" that is at risk... it's the lives and private info of the clients of the hospital, who pay the hospital specifically with the expectation that they do properly look after those things.
A better anology would be if you specifically pay a security company to watch your stuff, and your house gets broken into because the security guards just didn't even bother to pitch. Would you tell that security company "no problem, it's completely the thief's fault"? I don't think so.
If I pay a hospital a lot of money to look after my life (and my private information), I do expect them to take every reasonable measure to in fact do so. And if they don't do so they are in fact liable for not doing so.
The crowbar company is not at fault. I am not at fault, even if I am stupid for having left the car unlocked. The thief is at fault, the end.
This is a bad analogy. Sure, if you're talking about your own car, and you failed to lock it, the thief is at fault. But it's your own car, and nobody paid you to properly look after it.
But your analogy is flawed because it's not the hospital's "car" at risk here: It's the private information and the very lives of the clients of the hospital, that have been entrusted to the hospital's care, and that the clients are paying the hospital to properly take care of.
If you don't implement proper security for your own stuff, you're on your own when you get hacked. But hell, when you are being paid by other people specifically to implement proper security for their stuff, you'd better damn well make sure to implement "reasonable" security, or you are liable, very possibly even legally.
It's your fault I just smashed your window with a rock. You should have hired guards to keep me away
Everyone keeps using this "you should lock your house" type of analogy. This analogy is completely flawed, because the "house" isn't the hospital's. The "house" belongs to the hospital's clients, as they are the ones entrusting their lives and their private information and so on to the hospital (and paying for precisely that).
If you don't secure your own computer and it gets hacked and you lose your backups, that's one thing - it's your own fault. But it's a whole other thing entirely if you pay another company specifically to look after your data, and they are negligent in protecting their network (e.g. not applying patches, using Windows, connecting it all to the open Internet) and it gets hacked and your data is lost or ends up in the hands of hackers. Would you still think it's your own fault? I don't think so.
The hospital has a responsibility and duty to its clients to look after the data (and their lives) properly, and in fact are most likely required by law to do so too. It's not the hospital's own data and owners' lives at stake. It's someone elses.
but then realized that "security vulnerabilities" would not exist if there were no dirtbags exploiting them
Yes they would - security vulnerabilities are defects/holes in the software and they would exist regardless of whether or not they were exploited. (If a lock manufacturer makes locks that are easy to pick, those locks are easy to pick regardless of whether anyone actually uses that fact to break into something. Your 'tree falls in a forest' logic is wrong, unless you believe in 100% relativism, which anyone who has ever bumped their toe against something in the dark will be able to tell you is nonsense.)
Perhaps you were thinking of "exploits". But if you can't even get the most incredibly basic security terminology right, I'm not sure you are qualified to be saying anything about computer security at all.
Making people spend additional money in order to be able to do the same things they already do today does not "help" the economy in any sense. It just decreases efficiency and increases expenditure without creating new wealth.
Bacteria can change more quickly than apes because bacteria reproduce much more quickly, but relative to the organisms themselves, the changes are slow.
Just a technicality, that's not the full picture: An additional reason bacteria can change more quickly than cellular organisms is that they can actually absorb and exchange genes directly. Thus even a single bacterium can within its own lifetime "evolve" quite dramatically, in a way that has no parallel in complex life forms like apes... it's a totally different method, not just "relative (because they're smaller)".
What if (like the vast majority of people) you don't care if it's proprietary? Then it's just logical that one would choose from the better of two proprietary systems. Then, uh, "dude", the GP post actually makes perfect sense.
Believe it or not some people don't choose OSs based on their openness, but on whether or not they are crap.
Slashdot Mirror
... it was comics "[1] [2].
Seems like there will always be a "scary bogeyman" "corrupting our children".
It sounds a bit sad to say it now, but I met my first gf on a mud, back in '95 :) A friend of mine met his wife on irc years ago too. So no, none of this seems unusual to me. I don't even agree with the premise of the story, that we "often forget", I can't imagine that anyone 'forgets', we all know full well we're interacting with other people etc.
Because Skype was one of the early VoIP services, they have network effects working in their favour (e.g. I "have to" use Skype because all my colleagues/friends and even clients already use it - it will now be quite difficult to switch in fact). I'm sure they realise this, I think it's already made them a bit lazy compared to their competitors, but I think they overestimate their position - there aren't that many Skype users yet that that a [new] competitor couldn't outgrow them. According to my Skype client there are typically between 3 and 5 million users on at any given time. That's miniscule compared to what the total number of VoIP users will be in 5 or 10 years. You're supposed to wait until you've really cornered a market before you start trying stupid stunts like this.
OMG its a huge monopoly, quick, bring the anti-trust laws against them
It's not illegal to be a monopoly. It's illegal to abuse your monopoly position to unfairly lock out competitors or do other 'harm' to consumers such as 'forcing' them to buy products they don't really want (e.g. product tying).
It's true what you say. I think the DoJ judgements had very little effect at all on Microsoft, but slowly (but surely) the market itself is waking up and looking for (and offering) better/cheaper alternatives - there are definitely signs of this, and a little bit of "healthy colour" seems to be returning to what until recently looked like a rather pale sickly market (IMO). I think Microsoft will need to start adapting in the longer term (one problem is their corporate culture is anti-innovation, so instead they continue looking for ways to manipulate the market rather than improve their offerings, such as their latest patent craze). But anyway, the "free market" is indeed doing something positive here, but it's doing it too slowly for my liking ... I spent nearly the last decade of my life programming on horrible Microsoft systems, and watched the industry grind to near complete stagnation, seemingly getting "stuck" in the early 90's technology-wise. I realise that five or ten years is incredibly tiny in the grand scheme of things, but it's not tiny in *my* scheme of things --- I do need to enjoy my work, and ten years is a big chunk!
If they become less efficient, a competitor will eventually arise to capitalize on their "monopoly profits" and choice will be restored.
The keyword here is "eventually" though ... the question is, how long?
The problem with (some) monopolies is that, even if they become inefficient, they may as a result of their position be able to influence the market in a way that allows them to manipulate and distort a "free" market into a "not free" market. Not to harp on the Microsoft case again, but it's a good example: Microsoft had (in fact still has) a lot of power over the OEMs that allowed them to effectively "force" the OEMs into only selling Windows, and selling Windows with every computer sold. By doing this they literally blocked major market entry access points for potential competitors - in effect, artificially making the market less free.
There are dozens of other ways still that monopolies (or even just powerful companies) can artificially distort markets in their favour, but that's venturing off-topic.
True, if you rip your own from CD. If you are purchasing online music though it will already be compressed ... some existing audio stego techniques are integrated into the compressors, e.g. mp3stego:
"The hiding process takes place at the heart of the Layer III encoding process namely in the inner_loop. The inner loop quantizes the input data and increases the quantiser step size until the quantized data can be coded with the available number of bits. Another loop checks that the distortions introduced by the quantization do not exceed the threshold defined by the psycho acoustic model."
Oops, I don't actually know all that much about steg., it was years ago that I was into it (and mostly for images) and I've forgotten a lot of it now, so I don't feel that mod was deserved ... but anyway, this looks like a fair starting point: http://www.jjtc.com/stegdoc/ ... there are quite a few different techniques, most of which are detectable though.
Strictly speaking, everyone is a monopoly.
Not really, but I know what you mean. You answer this yourself though with "do people have an alternative". The question one should ask to determine if something is or is not a monopoly is "are there substitutes available"? In the case of Windows, if I as an individual need to run some particular software that only runs on Windows, then I have no substitute (unless that other software itself has a substitute that runs on another platform). In a world where 99% of software runs only on Windows, it seems reasonable to say that an effective substitute for Windows does not exist. Hence the feeling many people get that they are effectively "forced" to buy Windows, even though alternatives like OS X or Linux do technically exist --- their existence doesn't automatically make them substitutes in the market.
You may seem to have a "monopoly" on the services of Leon Geeste, but the real question is, do your customers need "Leon Geeste" specifically or do they need "the services you provide"? Are you the product? No, unless you're a celebrity the services you provide are probably the product, not you, and to determine whether or not you are a monopoly you ask "do your clients have market substitutes" ... i.e. are there others that provide similar services. Are your services unique and highly specialised?
In the case of iPod+iTMS, it seems to me that reasonable market substitutes are available no matter how you look at it. The music itself? Sure, you can get that elsewhere (e.g. buy the CD). *Online* music? Again, alternatives exist. Music that runs on the iPod? Again, you can put MP3s on an iPod so the iPod can run music that comes from anywhere. Portable music players? Again, there are others in the market that are substitutes ... nobody needs to buy an iPod to do what an iPod does (unless they are so seriously 'branded' that buying anything other than an iPod would be beneath them).
Lawyers who will no doubt seek millions in damages and take a hefty cut for their personal fortunes are now socialists? WTF, you have got to be kidding me. What in your world does a 'greedy capitalist' look like then?
That's a valid intput, but steganographers thought of that years ago already. Decent steganographic techniques include low-frequency information that can make them quite resilient to a fair deal of subsampling, recompressing, re-encoding and so on. The idea is not to make a "miniscule variation" but a very subtle variation over a large area. You can think of it like, the actual information is in the 'high bits' not the 'low bits'. Info in the 'low bits' is easily destroyed.
Hmm ... interesting, a good portion of my mp3 collection consists of files copied from people without their knowledge (e.g. open shares found at LANs or at work). Not to mention Joe User's box getting hacked and the files getting copied without his knowledge. They might be able to prove whose file it was but can they really prove piracy unless they find (and identify) Joe User himself personally sharing that file on a p2p network?
I know I might be accused of not picking up the humorous tone of your post here ;), but most modern grammarians do seem to agree it's OK to end a sentence with a preposition. From answers.com:
"It was John Dryden who first promulgated the doctrine that a preposition may not be used at the end of a sentence, probably on the basis of a specious analogy to Latin. Grammarians in the 18th century refined the doctrine, and the rule has since become one of the most venerated maxims of schoolroom grammar. But sentences ending with prepositions can be found in the works of most of the great writers since the Renaissance. English syntax does allow for final placement of the preposition, as in 'We have much to be thankful for' or 'I asked her which course she had signed up for'. Efforts to rewrite such sentences to place the preposition elsewhere can have stilted and even comical results, as Winston Churchill demonstrated when he objected to the doctrine by saying 'This is the sort of English up with which I cannot put.'"
I recommend that anyone vaguely interested in this problem should read "less than words can say" (available online), by Richard Mitchell.
Yup, it's ridiculous. Even if there were only two tones an e-mail could have, this also seems disconnected somehow from a rather obvious point of how well-written the messages were. Language use that is well thought out and well constructed would definitely improve the chances of the 'correct' tone being conveyed to the reader. Most of the misunderstandings I've seen in online discussions were simply the result of poor writing skills. Or poor reading skills, for that matter. This study also doesn't seem to say anything about the reading skills and intelligence of the readers.
So the future is 'like UNIX but with a subscription model', hooray!
Seriously, I remember being able to access my UNIX desktop from anywhere in the world already ten years ago. The media rage about the idea as if it's some coming wave of the future, and certain companies market it as such as they add more elements from UNIX over the years to their systems. But the media rage about it as if it's new because they don't know any better - I mean, they don't know what UNIX is and what it could do 20 years ago already - and although that's partially symptomatic of what's wrong with modern "journalism", it's also perhaps a sign of the failure of the UNIX and F/OSS "communities" to market their solutions better.
I'm not too familiar with US law but wouldn't that be 'manslaughter', not murder?
The analogies explaining this are too many to count
Yeah, and this is precisely the problem with analogies, they create cute "sound bites" that people can latch onto without having to properly think something through. Your TV analogy is flawed, because the hospital isn't expected to be "looking after it's own stuff" here and it isn't the hospital's "own stuff" that is at risk ... it's the lives and private info of the clients of the hospital, who pay the hospital specifically with the expectation that they do properly look after those things.
A better anology would be if you specifically pay a security company to watch your stuff, and your house gets broken into because the security guards just didn't even bother to pitch. Would you tell that security company "no problem, it's completely the thief's fault"? I don't think so.
If I pay a hospital a lot of money to look after my life (and my private information), I do expect them to take every reasonable measure to in fact do so. And if they don't do so they are in fact liable for not doing so.
The crowbar company is not at fault. I am not at fault, even if I am stupid for having left the car unlocked. The thief is at fault, the end.
This is a bad analogy. Sure, if you're talking about your own car, and you failed to lock it, the thief is at fault. But it's your own car, and nobody paid you to properly look after it.
But your analogy is flawed because it's not the hospital's "car" at risk here: It's the private information and the very lives of the clients of the hospital, that have been entrusted to the hospital's care, and that the clients are paying the hospital to properly take care of.
If you don't implement proper security for your own stuff, you're on your own when you get hacked. But hell, when you are being paid by other people specifically to implement proper security for their stuff, you'd better damn well make sure to implement "reasonable" security, or you are liable, very possibly even legally.
It's your fault I just smashed your window with a rock. You should have hired guards to keep me away
Everyone keeps using this "you should lock your house" type of analogy. This analogy is completely flawed, because the "house" isn't the hospital's. The "house" belongs to the hospital's clients, as they are the ones entrusting their lives and their private information and so on to the hospital (and paying for precisely that).
If you don't secure your own computer and it gets hacked and you lose your backups, that's one thing - it's your own fault. But it's a whole other thing entirely if you pay another company specifically to look after your data, and they are negligent in protecting their network (e.g. not applying patches, using Windows, connecting it all to the open Internet) and it gets hacked and your data is lost or ends up in the hands of hackers. Would you still think it's your own fault? I don't think so.
The hospital has a responsibility and duty to its clients to look after the data (and their lives) properly, and in fact are most likely required by law to do so too. It's not the hospital's own data and owners' lives at stake. It's someone elses.
but then realized that "security vulnerabilities" would not exist if there were no dirtbags exploiting them
Yes they would - security vulnerabilities are defects/holes in the software and they would exist regardless of whether or not they were exploited. (If a lock manufacturer makes locks that are easy to pick, those locks are easy to pick regardless of whether anyone actually uses that fact to break into something. Your 'tree falls in a forest' logic is wrong, unless you believe in 100% relativism, which anyone who has ever bumped their toe against something in the dark will be able to tell you is nonsense.)
Perhaps you were thinking of "exploits". But if you can't even get the most incredibly basic security terminology right, I'm not sure you are qualified to be saying anything about computer security at all.
True, indeed. (Although they do at least partially 'make up for it in numbers')
Making people spend additional money in order to be able to do the same things they already do today does not "help" the economy in any sense. It just decreases efficiency and increases expenditure without creating new wealth.
Bacteria can change more quickly than apes because bacteria reproduce much more quickly, but relative to the organisms themselves, the changes are slow.
Just a technicality, that's not the full picture: An additional reason bacteria can change more quickly than cellular organisms is that they can actually absorb and exchange genes directly. Thus even a single bacterium can within its own lifetime "evolve" quite dramatically, in a way that has no parallel in complex life forms like apes ... it's a totally different method, not just "relative (because they're smaller)".
What if (like the vast majority of people) you don't care if it's proprietary? Then it's just logical that one would choose from the better of two proprietary systems. Then, uh, "dude", the GP post actually makes perfect sense.
Believe it or not some people don't choose OSs based on their openness, but on whether or not they are crap.