But we're far freer than just about any other country you could name.
This is absolutely false, because there are countries on this planet beside Iran, and North Korea. For example, people in Denmark and Switzerland are significantly freer than people in the US by any relevant measure. They are also richer and the quality of life is much higher.
Then there are many countries which are at least on par with the US - most of the Western Europe and developed countries in odd places around the world.
Now back to the issue of dragging someone to the dungeon. I hate to break the news to you, but the US has the largest prison population in the world and largest percentage of people "behind bars" (circa 2 million, or about 650 per 100,000), with 22% of all prisoners being in American prisons (US has about 4.5% of world population). I mean, how can you even say it with the straight face, when in the US people can be dragged (and are being dragged) to the "dungeon" for the smallest of offences (like smoking pot, selling dildos or having sex at 16).
Don't take offence, but you are clearly deluded (if not outright delusional) about the "freedom" in the United States. I mean, I only touched on some of the facts about what's wrong with the USA, I didn't even mention things like offshore prison camps for children. Please, open your eyes. It's hard to accept, but you don't live in a paradise and most people (in developed countries) would not trade places with you.
Oh, you are speaking for all slashdotters here? That's neat. Now whenether I have a quuestion about what ALL slashdotters think, I will be sure to ask you first.
I don't see why distributing child porn or looking at it is so terribly wrong. It's not. Yes, sexually abusing people is bad, but please don't push this crap against and against. You are against child abuse? Great, now go and donate money to organisations fighting poverty in Africa. Every five seconds a child dies from hunger somewhere in the world. I fail to see how posing nude or even having sex in front of a camera is worse for the child. At least you can be sure he/she is getting fed.
And also note that nobody would suspect your are a latent paedophile until they see your fake indignation t child porn.
The truth is you already don't need SuprNova (torrent host). BitTorrent was horribly bad as a P2P application. The only good thing about it was the flash crowd effect that made releasing more efficient.
With edonkey network (as well as KaZaA and Gnutella) you can distribute small links to content without requiring either torrent hosts or trackers. These systems can work without any dedicated servers at all. I don't understand why everyone was so excited about BitTorrent. Torrents suck. There is nothing good about torrents. They are huge, they require gobs of bandwidth and you can't distribute them without setting a server. ed2k and magnet links, on the other hand, can be distributed much easier. You can post them on Slashdot or any other forum. They only take 100 bytes per file or so, but they completely replace these stupid torrents.
Don't dream about torrents hosted on freenet, dream about torrents dying a painful death and being replaced with links.
To me that's disgusting. In times like this I see that humanity as a whole is not much better than an anthill. You kick it, through stone in it, poor boiling water, piss in it, but they just run about their business, patiently rebuilding what is destroying, saving the aphids, saving the eggs, protecting the queen, but complately unable to see the big picture and do anything worthwhile anything remotedly intelligent.
Here we are, humans endowed with powerful technology, with science that managed to discover so many of Universe's misteries, with production capabilities allowing us to make anything we can conceive, but we still don't see beyond our nose.
These are not miracles, this is stupidity, not mental strength, but inability to do anything remotedly important, not answer to everything, but total lunacy.
And religion that you mention is one of the strong poisons that destroys human mind, preventing it from acting as humans should, building a new and better society and shaping our future instead of marking time.
The media doesn't know "integrity" from their ass. Considering the crap they seem intent on pushing towards the throat of their viewers/readers all the time, I seriously doubt that there was a science editor in all those newspapers and TV channels who said "Well, I think we should not be sensationalistic and report this. Let's wait until there is at least a preprint for some astronomy journal".
The more important reason is that NASA didn't put out a press release and that no news service actually does a decent job anymore.
I don't know about the US media (but it is probably the same), but in the past week a press release was issued by a bunch of quacks in a state research lab. They said they made a prototype of a propulsionless drive. It was reprinted almost verbatim on all online news resources and even in the science section of the leading government paper (Izvestia), which is supposed to be the most respectable. Meanwhile noone reported on the asteroid except for a few fringe sites, who usually did it under "Earth gonna be destroyed" or "We all will die in 2029" headlines.
No, really, the media is crap almost anywhere. Compared with the mainstream news, Roland Piquepaille is the paragon of journalistic integrity.:)
Congratulations, Catbeller, you finally seem to get it! Took you really long, didn't it? That's true, some people just don't value logic and consistency as much as you apparently do. I believe there even was a fancy name for it in the book that Orwell fella wrote...:)
Don't forget that the government is one of the most promising clients for MS in any country with lots of piracy. And the government is one of the most promising clients for custom-developed OSS as well. This is not the most important development, but it's critical in preventing MS from setting a foot in Venezuela. Imagine MS becoming a big supplier for the government (and while local government offices can pirate software, the governemnt as a whole probably would feel uncomfortable with that) and asking it to enforce copyright laws (close the shops, markets, etc.) in exchange for discounts. That would have a negative effect for the economy, but thanks to this decree the risk is avoided.
I suggest a simple test. Post here on Slashdot that you think Bush should be killed. And a good way to do it is during his visit to Nebraska planned for the next week.
After the inevitable conversation with the men in black you can come back and post a lengthy explanation about how it's so different from just criticising and how the SS needs to protect your president.
In capitalism the wealth is anything but spread around. It's usually concentrated in the hands of a rich elite (the so called "millionaires" and "billionaires").
Actually the biggest problem WAS the lack of resources. Because of that all minor problems, which could be easily overcome with twice the power, became important.
It's not productivity destroyer. It's just that a net productivity increase from using more e-mail (marginal effect) at this moment is probably zero. This is normal - we used more and more of it as long as it made sense.
E-mail overall makes a lot of sense and creates enormous value. But some of the messages that you receive have no value or even negative value. But there is nothing bad about it.
It makes one feel almost 'drunk'. sort of powerful, managing things left and right.....- but then I caught myself how I lost contact- I did not respect the other and allow time to listen without doing anything else. I caught myself thinking thousand things while the other was talking . And I did not like it. I saw I was on the point of becoming superficial and unable to understand the really important issues. Like I would read quite a few newspapers every day - which was part of my work - and I would end up reading like a machine just looking for specific words but not bothering to understand the essence, the ideas behind an article.
The best CGI effects are on real people. Spiderman and Matrix sequels both had photorealistic CGI renderings of their lead actors in many closeup scenes.
Interestingly, if they find that a file has the same hash as their legit version, they have no reason to require removal of this file.:)
BitTorrent is dead, long live eXeem or eDonkey2000
on
LokiTorrent vs. MPAA
·
· Score: 1
BitTorrent model is very risky. It's susceptible to attacks against link sites and trackers. Furthermore, a torrent glues together hash data and tracker info. Kill the tracker, you kill the torrent. Also, by storing all hash data in the torrent you make it difficult to distribute torrents without lots of bandwidth and big servers that are easy to shut down.
The perfect model was developed in other P2P networks - the ed2k and magnet links. Calculate the hash of the hashes of all parts, store this hash in the link. Now to distribute a link to the file you don't need to host a 50Kb torrent somewhere, you only need a line of text - 100 bytes. 500 times more efficient (ignoring the need to serve the webpages).
And in more resilient networks you don't need trackers either. eDonkey2000 network upgraded to Kademlia serverless mode allows it to function without servers at all. There is nothing to shut down and you need to sue every user to stop it.
BitTorrent had one great thing - flash crowds, an efficient method of distributing a file very quickly. But the rest was not well suited for file-sharing. When flash crowds are added to eDonkey2000 or when SuprNova operators release the eXeem (if they do it at all, don't know about their current plans now), filesharing will spring back on its feet, even more powerful than it ever was.
Imagine the performance of BitTorrent coupled with ed2k ease of distributing links coupled with serverless network like Kademlia and you have almost a perfect P2P system.
It's not suspicious. MPAA (and their friends) knows when to strike - when a site has bought shiny new servers that can be confiscated as evidence. It's much easier to talk to the police about evil pirates profiting from copyright infridgement when you can show the profit.
Please stop this bullshit about GPL teeth. It wouldn't need the teeth if, for example, we had 5-year copyright terms for software with obligatory source code disclosure.
I would be the first one to celebrate GPL dying if it dies together with current evil copyright regime.
You know the problem with the Google analogy? The problem is that once you point it out enough times, the MPAA would send Google a DMCA notice, which Google would honor, just like it honors most DMCA notices.
Chilling Effects monitors these notices and removal of links from Google results.
So it would be rather simple to force Google to remove the links to trackers (since Google has never shown any intention of fighting DMCA in court, even before the IPO), and then you would lose the ability to argue about selective enforcement.
Check out this Wikinews article. It looks like the big confrontation of MPAA and BitTorrent/eDonkey networks is only just starting, so that article is supposed to cover all important developments in the future, such as police raids, lawsuits and the like. Since it's on Wikinews, everyone can contribute by adding information, editing, reediting, deleting, restructuring, etc.
Russians are immune to starvation.:-) They get sufficient training on the ground. They can tolerate practically anything. Did you know that Russian was practically the only country where almost no tourist flights to the disaster region were cancelled?
Well, you don't have the right to do everything on your job. For example, if you are an animal handler in the circus, you don't have the right to run away when your tiger or bear goes wild if that animal may harm the public. You must (sometimes legally obliged) to risk your life trying to protect other people. When you are a resquer, you don't have the right to stay in a safe place when the disaster is looming. You must risk your life trying to save other people that you never met before. If a resquer concerned about his own safety takes his helicopter to fly away from the area hit by a disaster instead of trying to find the victims and help them, he should be sued, fired, jailed, fined, etc.
Same with the cop. The cop has no right to protect his safety (life) by any means necessary. It is his job to risk his life. For most practical purposes the society considers a life of a cop less valuable than a life of a civilian (except when a criminal murders a cop). That particular cop who killed a kid for a stupid joke betrayed our trust. He should be jailed for that and he should never again serve in the police.
Interesting... I've googled and there are clearly some passing mentions of it being painful to look at the Sun, although I haven't yet found the details covered adequately.
It's said that it's painful (although it isn't explained what kind of pain it is), eyes tear up you get blind spots (afterimage) for seconds or minutes afterwards. I can confirm (from looking at a incandescent lamp filament, although I looked at Sun in the past, like everyone did) that there is an afterimage (kinda obvious), there is definitely some amount of tears, but I don't feel any pain. There is an unusual sensation, which does motivate to look away, it's somewhat unpleasant, but not by any means painful.
On a sunny winter day the discomfort is much more pronounced, as looking in any direction is extremely uncomfortable with all that bright snow (particularly, for the first minutes after going outside). But looking at the sun itself (or in it's direction in summar) is not.
May be you did evolve further (or I lagged behind). Could you elaborate on what kind of pain you experience when looking at bright objects (such as a lamp filament).
When I was a kid, I definitely stared at the sun on several occasions. Can't tell the exact durations, but probably no less than 10-30 seconds at a time looking directly at the sun without blinking. 10-15 years after that my vision is good. I wonder how much time one needs to spend to experience the blindness...
Check out RoboMower from Friendly Robotics. It doesn't have lasers, but your hands and legs are safe, because you don't need to be near it while it works.
Slashdot Mirror
But we're far freer than just about any other country you could name.
This is absolutely false, because there are countries on this planet beside Iran, and North Korea. For example, people in Denmark and Switzerland are significantly freer than people in the US by any relevant measure. They are also richer and the quality of life is much higher.
Then there are many countries which are at least on par with the US - most of the Western Europe and developed countries in odd places around the world.
Now back to the issue of dragging someone to the dungeon. I hate to break the news to you, but the US has the largest prison population in the world and largest percentage of people "behind bars" (circa 2 million, or about 650 per 100,000), with 22% of all prisoners being in American prisons (US has about 4.5% of world population). I mean, how can you even say it with the straight face, when in the US people can be dragged (and are being dragged) to the "dungeon" for the smallest of offences (like smoking pot, selling dildos or having sex at 16).
Don't take offence, but you are clearly deluded (if not outright delusional) about the "freedom" in the United States. I mean, I only touched on some of the facts about what's wrong with the USA, I didn't even mention things like offshore prison camps for children. Please, open your eyes. It's hard to accept, but you don't live in a paradise and most people (in developed countries) would not trade places with you.
Oh, you are speaking for all slashdotters here? That's neat. Now whenether I have a quuestion about what ALL slashdotters think, I will be sure to ask you first.
I don't see why distributing child porn or looking at it is so terribly wrong. It's not. Yes, sexually abusing people is bad, but please don't push this crap against and against. You are against child abuse? Great, now go and donate money to organisations fighting poverty in Africa. Every five seconds a child dies from hunger somewhere in the world. I fail to see how posing nude or even having sex in front of a camera is worse for the child. At least you can be sure he/she is getting fed.
And also note that nobody would suspect your are a latent paedophile until they see your fake indignation t child porn.
The truth is you already don't need SuprNova (torrent host). BitTorrent was horribly bad as a P2P application. The only good thing about it was the flash crowd effect that made releasing more efficient.
With edonkey network (as well as KaZaA and Gnutella) you can distribute small links to content without requiring either torrent hosts or trackers. These systems can work without any dedicated servers at all. I don't understand why everyone was so excited about BitTorrent. Torrents suck. There is nothing good about torrents. They are huge, they require gobs of bandwidth and you can't distribute them without setting a server. ed2k and magnet links, on the other hand, can be distributed much easier. You can post them on Slashdot or any other forum. They only take 100 bytes per file or so, but they completely replace these stupid torrents.
Don't dream about torrents hosted on freenet, dream about torrents dying a painful death and being replaced with links.
To me that's disgusting. In times like this I see that humanity as a whole is not much better than an anthill. You kick it, through stone in it, poor boiling water, piss in it, but they just run about their business, patiently rebuilding what is destroying, saving the aphids, saving the eggs, protecting the queen, but complately unable to see the big picture and do anything worthwhile anything remotedly intelligent.
Here we are, humans endowed with powerful technology, with science that managed to discover so many of Universe's misteries, with production capabilities allowing us to make anything we can conceive, but we still don't see beyond our nose.
These are not miracles, this is stupidity, not mental strength, but inability to do anything remotedly important, not answer to everything, but total lunacy.
And religion that you mention is one of the strong poisons that destroys human mind, preventing it from acting as humans should, building a new and better society and shaping our future instead of marking time.
The media doesn't know "integrity" from their ass. Considering the crap they seem intent on pushing towards the throat of their viewers/readers all the time, I seriously doubt that there was a science editor in all those newspapers and TV channels who said "Well, I think we should not be sensationalistic and report this. Let's wait until there is at least a preprint for some astronomy journal".
:)
The more important reason is that NASA didn't put out a press release and that no news service actually does a decent job anymore.
I don't know about the US media (but it is probably the same), but in the past week a press release was issued by a bunch of quacks in a state research lab. They said they made a prototype of a propulsionless drive. It was reprinted almost verbatim on all online news resources and even in the science section of the leading government paper (Izvestia), which is supposed to be the most respectable. Meanwhile noone reported on the asteroid except for a few fringe sites, who usually did it under "Earth gonna be destroyed" or "We all will die in 2029" headlines.
No, really, the media is crap almost anywhere. Compared with the mainstream news, Roland Piquepaille is the paragon of journalistic integrity.
Congratulations, Catbeller, you finally seem to get it! Took you really long, didn't it? That's true, some people just don't value logic and consistency as much as you apparently do. I believe there even was a fancy name for it in the book that Orwell fella wrote... :)
Don't forget that the government is one of the most promising clients for MS in any country with lots of piracy. And the government is one of the most promising clients for custom-developed OSS as well. This is not the most important development, but it's critical in preventing MS from setting a foot in Venezuela. Imagine MS becoming a big supplier for the government (and while local government offices can pirate software, the governemnt as a whole probably would feel uncomfortable with that) and asking it to enforce copyright laws (close the shops, markets, etc.) in exchange for discounts. That would have a negative effect for the economy, but thanks to this decree the risk is avoided.
I suggest a simple test. Post here on Slashdot that you think Bush should be killed. And a good way to do it is during his visit to Nebraska planned for the next week.
After the inevitable conversation with the men in black you can come back and post a lengthy explanation about how it's so different from just criticising and how the SS needs to protect your president.
In capitalism the wealth is anything but spread around. It's usually concentrated in the hands of a rich elite (the so called "millionaires" and "billionaires").
Well, at least they wouldn't need to worry about the seals anymore...
Interesting and quite wise. Do you have a cryonic suspension policy, though?
BTW, you might enjoy seeing Final Destination and its sequel.
Actually the biggest problem WAS the lack of resources. Because of that all minor problems, which could be easily overcome with twice the power, became important.
It's not productivity destroyer. It's just that a net productivity increase from using more e-mail (marginal effect) at this moment is probably zero. This is normal - we used more and more of it as long as it made sense.
E-mail overall makes a lot of sense and creates enormous value. But some of the messages that you receive have no value or even negative value. But there is nothing bad about it.
The best CGI effects are on real people. Spiderman and Matrix sequels both had photorealistic CGI renderings of their lead actors in many closeup scenes.
Interestingly, if they find that a file has the same hash as their legit version, they have no reason to require removal of this file. :)
BitTorrent model is very risky. It's susceptible to attacks against link sites and trackers. Furthermore, a torrent glues together hash data and tracker info. Kill the tracker, you kill the torrent. Also, by storing all hash data in the torrent you make it difficult to distribute torrents without lots of bandwidth and big servers that are easy to shut down.
The perfect model was developed in other P2P networks - the ed2k and magnet links. Calculate the hash of the hashes of all parts, store this hash in the link. Now to distribute a link to the file you don't need to host a 50Kb torrent somewhere, you only need a line of text - 100 bytes. 500 times more efficient (ignoring the need to serve the webpages).
And in more resilient networks you don't need trackers either. eDonkey2000 network upgraded to Kademlia serverless mode allows it to function without servers at all. There is nothing to shut down and you need to sue every user to stop it.
BitTorrent had one great thing - flash crowds, an efficient method of distributing a file very quickly. But the rest was not well suited for file-sharing. When flash crowds are added to eDonkey2000 or when SuprNova operators release the eXeem (if they do it at all, don't know about their current plans now), filesharing will spring back on its feet, even more powerful than it ever was.
Imagine the performance of BitTorrent coupled with ed2k ease of distributing links coupled with serverless network like Kademlia and you have almost a perfect P2P system.
It's not suspicious. MPAA (and their friends) knows when to strike - when a site has bought shiny new servers that can be confiscated as evidence. It's much easier to talk to the police about evil pirates profiting from copyright infridgement when you can show the profit.
Please stop this bullshit about GPL teeth. It wouldn't need the teeth if, for example, we had 5-year copyright terms for software with obligatory source code disclosure.
I would be the first one to celebrate GPL dying if it dies together with current evil copyright regime.
You know the problem with the Google analogy? The problem is that once you point it out enough times, the MPAA would send Google a DMCA notice, which Google would honor, just like it honors most DMCA notices.
Chilling Effects monitors these notices and removal of links from Google results.
So it would be rather simple to force Google to remove the links to trackers (since Google has never shown any intention of fighting DMCA in court, even before the IPO), and then you would lose the ability to argue about selective enforcement.
Check out this Wikinews article. It looks like the big confrontation of MPAA and BitTorrent/eDonkey networks is only just starting, so that article is supposed to cover all important developments in the future, such as police raids, lawsuits and the like. Since it's on Wikinews, everyone can contribute by adding information, editing, reediting, deleting, restructuring, etc.
Russians are immune to starvation. :-) They get sufficient training on the ground. They can tolerate practically anything. Did you know that Russian was practically the only country where almost no tourist flights to the disaster region were cancelled?
Well, you don't have the right to do everything on your job. For example, if you are an animal handler in the circus, you don't have the right to run away when your tiger or bear goes wild if that animal may harm the public. You must (sometimes legally obliged) to risk your life trying to protect other people. When you are a resquer, you don't have the right to stay in a safe place when the disaster is looming. You must risk your life trying to save other people that you never met before. If a resquer concerned about his own safety takes his helicopter to fly away from the area hit by a disaster instead of trying to find the victims and help them, he should be sued, fired, jailed, fined, etc.
Same with the cop. The cop has no right to protect his safety (life) by any means necessary. It is his job to risk his life. For most practical purposes the society considers a life of a cop less valuable than a life of a civilian (except when a criminal murders a cop). That particular cop who killed a kid for a stupid joke betrayed our trust. He should be jailed for that and he should never again serve in the police.
Interesting... I've googled and there are clearly some passing mentions of it being painful to look at the Sun, although I haven't yet found the details covered adequately.
It's said that it's painful (although it isn't explained what kind of pain it is), eyes tear up you get blind spots (afterimage) for seconds or minutes afterwards. I can confirm (from looking at a incandescent lamp filament, although I looked at Sun in the past, like everyone did) that there is an afterimage (kinda obvious), there is definitely some amount of tears, but I don't feel any pain. There is an unusual sensation, which does motivate to look away, it's somewhat unpleasant, but not by any means painful.
On a sunny winter day the discomfort is much more pronounced, as looking in any direction is extremely uncomfortable with all that bright snow (particularly, for the first minutes after going outside). But looking at the sun itself (or in it's direction in summar) is not.
May be you did evolve further (or I lagged behind). Could you elaborate on what kind of pain you experience when looking at bright objects (such as a lamp filament).
When I was a kid, I definitely stared at the sun on several occasions. Can't tell the exact durations, but probably no less than 10-30 seconds at a time looking directly at the sun without blinking. 10-15 years after that my vision is good. I wonder how much time one needs to spend to experience the blindness...
Check out RoboMower from Friendly Robotics. It doesn't have lasers, but your hands and legs are safe, because you don't need to be near it while it works.