If I don't like how life is in a game, I'm free to leave at any time and start a new life elsewhere agreeing to the new rules of that society.
Life is bad in the game, but maybe the conditions elsewhere are even worse. So you protest, hoping to improve things here.
cf.: I choose to protest the administration rather than move out of the United States, because despite everything, I still believe I'm happier here than I'd be anywhere else.
What you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is essentially this: not everyone needs PGP security, and those who do already know to encrypt their sensitive data; therefore, it's a waste of time and energy to encrypt all communications by default. As you say, "why bother?"
Here's a couple reasons. When you're in the habit of encrypting everything you do on the network, sensitive or not, you're making it much harder for attackers to tell what's worth decrypting. Drown your important stuff in random traffic, and it becomes much harder to pick out. And consider what happens when you pick up a sensitive project to work on. Unless you're already encrypting everything going in and out, an attacker will notice a spike in the amount of encrypted traffic, which could tip them to listen in more closely.
It's the same reason the U.S. government (among many others) broadcasts random numbers on shortwave radio frequencies, even when there's no actual communication taking place--a sudden increase in coded broadcasts would tip many hands around the world that something's afoot, which is undesirable, even if exactly what remains a mystery.
The ancestor post was describing replacing letters with boxes of an equivalent size, not blurring the orignal text.
Right, but the point of my parent post (which I also wrote, by the way) was that we rely on the shape of words, at least in part, to decipher text as we read it. In order to demonstrate this, it doesn't matter whether the shape is approximated using boxes or Gaussian blur.
If the text was "blurred [...] beyond recognition", how can we "tell what it used to say"?
Did you follow my link? I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. The words are blurred to the point where you can't make any of them out individually. However, because the phrase as a whole is so familiar--I don't know about you, but I see this slogan almost every day--and because you can still basically see the overall shape of the words, you should still be able to read it. At least one other person got it (though they got modded offtopic... go figure.)
OK, I've whipped up a simple example: http://glow.dyndns.org/letterforms.gif. I've taken a well-known slogan and blurred it beyond recognition. See if you can still tell what it used to say.
I've always thought ease of reading has more to do with the shape of the words on the page, rather than the last and first letters per se. I forget where, but I once saw a demonstration where common sayings ("The early bird catches the worm") were printed on a page, except each character had been replaced with a solid black box the same size as the letter. Incredibly, they were all still decipherable (though definitely harder to read than if they'd just switched letters around).
We don't need "music companies", musicians don't need them, and music lovers don't either.
Yes... because it's not like it costs anything to build sound studios, or to equip them with professional equipment or staff them with sound engineers who know how to master decent CDs. And promotion and advertising is free, too.
I don't think so.
I don't know what the answer is, either, but there is definitely a place for these "music companies" you hold in such low regard. In the future, they probably won't play as big a role in control or distribution as they do now, but someone still has to do the dirty work.
I guess you've never heard the legend of Ken Hechtman, a Columbia University undergraduate who was kicked out of school for swiping a mass of radioactive uranium from the underground levels of a university building (where the Manhattan Project was begun) and stashing it in his roommate's alarm clock. But then, I suppose no one actually got hurt there.
Interestingly, he later went on to get himself captured by the Taliban during the war in Afghanistan, where he was working as a freelance reporter.
Are you seriously trying to argue that the % of Macs sold to businesses, as opposed to home users, is greater than the % of PCs sold to businesses, again as opposed to home users?
I won't pretend to know the answer, but I seriously doubt it.
The point, anyway, was that a figure of one million sales of the Macintosh version of Myst doesn't sound unlikely; I'm sure one could find the exact sales figures with a cursory search on Google, as you put it yourself. However, seeing as how you somehow failed to find the numbers for Macintosh sales in 1993 even though they're the second hit on a Google search for those exact same terms, I doubt you in particular would be able to find said figures. No big deal.
As for my foes list, I decided you weren't worth the trouble. Though somehow it's worth the trouble to write replies like this.
There's nothing I hate more than people like you: pretentious snobs so confident in their own infallibility that they spout off without the slightest clue what cocks they really are. From http://m.manilasites.com/stories/storyReader$49:
[February 1993]: Apple ships the ten-millionth Macintosh computer.
What exactly are you trying to say? My point was that India is an incredibly populous nation--so populous, in fact, that even if only a quarter of people in India spoke English fluently, there would still be roughly as many English speakers there as there are in the United States. Still like those odds?
Your argument about the services industry is also full of holes. In India, the service industry is dominated by IT-related activities, while services in the United States are much more diverse. Also remember that a "small percentage" of India's population is hardly a number to sneeze at. The point is, there are probably way more English speaking IT professionals in India than you realize.
Finally, it is not surprising that you can cite examples of Indians you know who didn't learn English until university. Three-quarters of the nation's population lives in rural areas where public education isn't as comprehensive as it is in urban centers. For the other 250,000,000, however, English is almost universally taught as a required second language by secondary school (at the very latest). These are the people who IT workers in the US have to compete with, for better or for worse.
Great, but that's a very silly argument you're trying to make. With a population of over 1 billion, your 59.5% literacy statistic still works out to twice the entire population of the United States. And it is simply not true that "most Indians" don't learn English until university. Let's try to stick to the facts, okay?
Oh, I don't know. It could scan your hard disk and send copies of all your documents to everyone in your address book, or forward all your old email. You're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and your confidential five-year business plan gets sent to all your competitors. Your customers' credit card numbers and Social Security numbers escape into the wild. Legal documents, source code, everything. This would be damaging beyond belief.
Or maybe look for important files like databases and start randomly corrupting them.
Corrupting them? How about mailing them to everyone in the address book? You'd have credit card numbers, confidential company documents, all kinds of things flying around the internet. The legal implications would be staggering, the economic damage enormous. It's only a matter of time before someone writes a worm like this.
I'm not sure, but I think it's different if you're CPR or First Aid certified--in that case the good samaritan laws won't apply to you, as you'll be expected to know how to help people without killing them by accident, and you could be held liable if you choose to step into a situation and fuck up. The good samaritan statute is meant to shield people who are completely clueless about first aid and CPR from liability if they choose to help out.
That's what I was told in my (New York State) CPR/First Aid course, anyway. But it's possible the instructor was just trying make us pay attention by putting the fear of god into us. Anyone have more info?
Eye candy isn't always helpful (witness Windows XP) but sometimes it can be really useful. For example, I've found that the genie effect really does help you keep track of what your windows are doing. Not consciously, but then that's not the point--you shouldn't even have to think about it. "Oh, my window went into the Dock." Same thing with drawers and dialog boxes sliding out everywhere. It's pretty, but you gotta remember there is a reason for it other than aesthetics (which is pretty important by itself).
I don't mean to be facetious, but (other flaws aside) your argument seems to rest on the assumption that criminals are not part of society. This "we" you keep mentioning--it doesn't include criminals? What makes you more qualified than a convicted felon to judge who comprises society?
Further, I would argue that our society (there's that word again) has come, for better or for worse, to view the violation of certain rights to be transgressions simply too severe to bear. I'm not talking Constitutional rights; I'm talking about your right, for example, not to have your eyes pulled piece by piece out of your skull by FBI agents with tweezers.* And speaking for myself, I don't think anyone should be forced to participate in medical experiments against their will. If that means I have to pay taxes to keep them sitting uselessly in jail, then so be it. (Of course, if they volunteer themselves, that's a different story.)
I'm sure there's some reason buried deep in the human psyche for our (my) queasiness, but I'll leave that for the Johnnie Cochrans of evolutionary psychology to explain.
(* I'd also argue that methods like these shouldn't even be used to, say, extract potentially lifesaving information from terrorists, but that's probably a matter of opinion, isn't it?)
What I was wondering was this: under what circumstances could anyone claim economic damages from a GPL violation? The authors of free (speech, beer) code don't really seem to have anything to lose, after all, if other people do as they please with their work.
But after a moment's thought I answered my own question. If someone pasted the source to the Linux kernel into the Windows code tree, for example, I suppose Red Hat could sue for damages. (Not a good example, since AFAIK Red Hat doesn't technically own the copyright on Linux, but you get the idea.)
Yes, I'm slow. Everyone else probably understood this a long time ago. I missed the boat. So what. Move along, move along.;-)
Ah, sorry, I'm English. I didn't know that Americans had such a word.
Actually, Webster claims the "spelt" variant is "chiefly British," for what it's worth...;-) and I actually rather like the way it looks. It aids my pretension.
You can not force your employer's code to be GPL by merely incorporating GPL code into it.
This has happened before. The FSF website even discusses this eventuality. The copyright authors of the code could sue your employer for copyright violation for putting the code into your employer's product in violation of their license, but that does not make the employer's product become GPL.
Interesting... Can you point to a link? I've just spent fifteen minutes scouring the FSF's website, and the closest I came was this FAQ for the GPL.
I was under the impression that in the case of a breach of contract, a judge could order the offender to comply with the terms of the GPL. But of course, IANAL, and I'd appreciate a correction.
Slashdot Mirror
Life is bad in the game, but maybe the conditions elsewhere are even worse. So you protest, hoping to improve things here.
cf.: I choose to protest the administration rather than move out of the United States, because despite everything, I still believe I'm happier here than I'd be anywhere else.
And perhaps ATMs dispense tellers.
What you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is essentially this: not everyone needs PGP security, and those who do already know to encrypt their sensitive data; therefore, it's a waste of time and energy to encrypt all communications by default. As you say, "why bother?"
Here's a couple reasons. When you're in the habit of encrypting everything you do on the network, sensitive or not, you're making it much harder for attackers to tell what's worth decrypting. Drown your important stuff in random traffic, and it becomes much harder to pick out. And consider what happens when you pick up a sensitive project to work on. Unless you're already encrypting everything going in and out, an attacker will notice a spike in the amount of encrypted traffic, which could tip them to listen in more closely.
It's the same reason the U.S. government (among many others) broadcasts random numbers on shortwave radio frequencies, even when there's no actual communication taking place--a sudden increase in coded broadcasts would tip many hands around the world that something's afoot, which is undesirable, even if exactly what remains a mystery.
BTW, Panther's Mail.app is rumored to include transparent encryption. I can't wait.
yours
Cool. You got it. :)
yours
Right, but the point of my parent post (which I also wrote, by the way) was that we rely on the shape of words, at least in part, to decipher text as we read it. In order to demonstrate this, it doesn't matter whether the shape is approximated using boxes or Gaussian blur.
Did you follow my link? I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. The words are blurred to the point where you can't make any of them out individually. However, because the phrase as a whole is so familiar--I don't know about you, but I see this slogan almost every day--and because you can still basically see the overall shape of the words, you should still be able to read it. At least one other person got it (though they got modded offtopic... go figure.)
I guess this is all offtopic, anyways...
yours
OK, I've whipped up a simple example: http://glow.dyndns.org/letterforms.gif. I've taken a well-known slogan and blurred it beyond recognition. See if you can still tell what it used to say.
Cool trick. :)
I've always thought ease of reading has more to do with the shape of the words on the page, rather than the last and first letters per se. I forget where, but I once saw a demonstration where common sayings ("The early bird catches the worm") were printed on a page, except each character had been replaced with a solid black box the same size as the letter. Incredibly, they were all still decipherable (though definitely harder to read than if they'd just switched letters around).
Yeah, you can do all that, but the point is that it really, really sucks. In the end, even Thoreau moved out of the woods.
...saying the people are criminals, which they're not.
They are, actually, under the federal criminal code.
Not that I necessarily think the RIAA is in the right, but I thought you might like to know.
We don't need "music companies", musicians don't need them, and music lovers don't either.
Yes... because it's not like it costs anything to build sound studios, or to equip them with professional equipment or staff them with sound engineers who know how to master decent CDs. And promotion and advertising is free, too.
I don't think so.
I don't know what the answer is, either, but there is definitely a place for these "music companies" you hold in such low regard. In the future, they probably won't play as big a role in control or distribution as they do now, but someone still has to do the dirty work.
yours
I guess you've never heard the legend of Ken Hechtman, a Columbia University undergraduate who was kicked out of school for swiping a mass of radioactive uranium from the underground levels of a university building (where the Manhattan Project was begun) and stashing it in his roommate's alarm clock. But then, I suppose no one actually got hurt there.
Interestingly, he later went on to get himself captured by the Taliban during the war in Afghanistan, where he was working as a freelance reporter.
Are you seriously trying to argue that the % of Macs sold to businesses, as opposed to home users, is greater than the % of PCs sold to businesses, again as opposed to home users?
I won't pretend to know the answer, but I seriously doubt it.
The point, anyway, was that a figure of one million sales of the Macintosh version of Myst doesn't sound unlikely; I'm sure one could find the exact sales figures with a cursory search on Google, as you put it yourself. However, seeing as how you somehow failed to find the numbers for Macintosh sales in 1993 even though they're the second hit on a Google search for those exact same terms, I doubt you in particular would be able to find said figures. No big deal.
As for my foes list, I decided you weren't worth the trouble. Though somehow it's worth the trouble to write replies like this.
yours
There's nothing I hate more than people like you: pretentious snobs so confident in their own infallibility that they spout off without the slightest clue what cocks they really are. From http://m.manilasites.com/stories/storyReader$49:
Welcome to my foes list.
yours
What exactly are you trying to say? My point was that India is an incredibly populous nation--so populous, in fact, that even if only a quarter of people in India spoke English fluently, there would still be roughly as many English speakers there as there are in the United States. Still like those odds?
Your argument about the services industry is also full of holes. In India, the service industry is dominated by IT-related activities, while services in the United States are much more diverse. Also remember that a "small percentage" of India's population is hardly a number to sneeze at. The point is, there are probably way more English speaking IT professionals in India than you realize.
Finally, it is not surprising that you can cite examples of Indians you know who didn't learn English until university. Three-quarters of the nation's population lives in rural areas where public education isn't as comprehensive as it is in urban centers. For the other 250,000,000, however, English is almost universally taught as a required second language by secondary school (at the very latest). These are the people who IT workers in the US have to compete with, for better or for worse.
yours
Great, but that's a very silly argument you're trying to make. With a population of over 1 billion, your 59.5% literacy statistic still works out to twice the entire population of the United States. And it is simply not true that "most Indians" don't learn English until university. Let's try to stick to the facts, okay?
yours
Oh, I don't know. It could scan your hard disk and send copies of all your documents to everyone in your address book, or forward all your old email. You're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and your confidential five-year business plan gets sent to all your competitors. Your customers' credit card numbers and Social Security numbers escape into the wild. Legal documents, source code, everything. This would be damaging beyond belief.
Or maybe look for important files like databases and start randomly corrupting them.
Corrupting them? How about mailing them to everyone in the address book? You'd have credit card numbers, confidential company documents, all kinds of things flying around the internet. The legal implications would be staggering, the economic damage enormous. It's only a matter of time before someone writes a worm like this.
yours
I'm not sure, but I think it's different if you're CPR or First Aid certified--in that case the good samaritan laws won't apply to you, as you'll be expected to know how to help people without killing them by accident, and you could be held liable if you choose to step into a situation and fuck up. The good samaritan statute is meant to shield people who are completely clueless about first aid and CPR from liability if they choose to help out.
That's what I was told in my (New York State) CPR/First Aid course, anyway. But it's possible the instructor was just trying make us pay attention by putting the fear of god into us. Anyone have more info?
Eye candy isn't always helpful (witness Windows XP) but sometimes it can be really useful. For example, I've found that the genie effect really does help you keep track of what your windows are doing. Not consciously, but then that's not the point--you shouldn't even have to think about it. "Oh, my window went into the Dock." Same thing with drawers and dialog boxes sliding out everywhere. It's pretty, but you gotta remember there is a reason for it other than aesthetics (which is pretty important by itself).
I don't mean to be facetious, but (other flaws aside) your argument seems to rest on the assumption that criminals are not part of society. This "we" you keep mentioning--it doesn't include criminals? What makes you more qualified than a convicted felon to judge who comprises society?
Further, I would argue that our society (there's that word again) has come, for better or for worse, to view the violation of certain rights to be transgressions simply too severe to bear. I'm not talking Constitutional rights; I'm talking about your right, for example, not to have your eyes pulled piece by piece out of your skull by FBI agents with tweezers.* And speaking for myself, I don't think anyone should be forced to participate in medical experiments against their will. If that means I have to pay taxes to keep them sitting uselessly in jail, then so be it. (Of course, if they volunteer themselves, that's a different story.)
I'm sure there's some reason buried deep in the human psyche for our (my) queasiness, but I'll leave that for the Johnnie Cochrans of evolutionary psychology to explain.
(* I'd also argue that methods like these shouldn't even be used to, say, extract potentially lifesaving information from terrorists, but that's probably a matter of opinion, isn't it?)
yours
What I was wondering was this: under what circumstances could anyone claim economic damages from a GPL violation? The authors of free (speech, beer) code don't really seem to have anything to lose, after all, if other people do as they please with their work.
;-)
But after a moment's thought I answered my own question. If someone pasted the source to the Linux kernel into the Windows code tree, for example, I suppose Red Hat could sue for damages. (Not a good example, since AFAIK Red Hat doesn't technically own the copyright on Linux, but you get the idea.)
Yes, I'm slow. Everyone else probably understood this a long time ago. I missed the boat. So what. Move along, move along.
yours
Ah, sorry, I'm English. I didn't know that Americans had such a word.
;-) and I actually rather like the way it looks. It aids my pretension.
Actually, Webster claims the "spelt" variant is "chiefly British," for what it's worth...
cheers
Jeez, would it kill you to look in a dictionary (second definition)?
You're right on the second count, though. There's no need to schizophrenically change spelling styles in midsentence.
yours
You can not force your employer's code to be GPL by merely incorporating GPL code into it.
This has happened before. The FSF website even discusses this eventuality. The copyright authors of the code could sue your employer for copyright violation for putting the code into your employer's product in violation of their license, but that does not make the employer's product become GPL.
Interesting... Can you point to a link? I've just spent fifteen minutes scouring the FSF's website, and the closest I came was this FAQ for the GPL.
I was under the impression that in the case of a breach of contract, a judge could order the offender to comply with the terms of the GPL. But of course, IANAL, and I'd appreciate a correction.
yours
Oh boy. Are you trolling, ignorant, or just plain stupid?
yours