"No, no, no, no, no! magic_quotes_gpc is totally broken."
Yep, and well done for saying it.
What's worse is that each website provider has a different set of options (magic quotes, auto-register globals, etc) which means that your carefully sanitised data doesn't work at all when you switch providers.
Sometimes it changes under your feet, as someone upgrades PHP on a server and of course, every version of PHP has different default options!
"No, it's not the copying that publishers care about. It's DISTRIBUTION that they care about."
Why should we (the society) care about what publishers want? Copyright is for the benefit of the public, so that they get both art, and the ability to copy it. Hence the copy right.
Publishers are a side-issue. We pay them (in terms of temporarily giving up our right to copy their work) for an expectation that they will produce work which is useful to us. And the price we're paying is getting steeper and steeper.
What happens when the price gets too great? When it's demanded that you give up the ability to run a general-purpose computer, and in response all you get is the same quality of books and films that you've had for years? Would you be willing to pay that?
We're giving up our rights to copy, and in return we're not getting any increase in useful art. Exactly who is it that's saying this is a good deal?
Put a decent printer like in the Internet Bookmobile, and they could have a pretty big collection of books available. But no, it's 10p per sheet on an inket.
Libraries in the UK are even selling shareware, probably not even realising the quality of software that they could give away for free if they wished.
"What i meant is that the PAID version you get support for (Microsoft Ofice), and the FREE one (Open Office), you simply don't."
That statement could be confusing to people who know that you get good support with OpenOffice. Where did you get the information that OpenOffice was unsupported? A simple glance at their website would be all that's needed to check.
"In my opinion, the ONLY difference between the FREE office, and the one you have to PAY for, is that you get support for one of them. The decision is up to the people, is it worth it or is it not..?"
Some people here are claiming that you can also get support for Microsoft Office. I don't know the details, but presumably it exists.
"Open Office is free and you don't get anything good for free therefore if something costs more such as Windows or Office it must be better."
You can get a $600 version of OpenOffice if you enjoy the extra quality that comes with a very expensive product. Just ask one of the OpenOffice developers, and they'll be happy to send you as many $600 versions as you have computers to install them on. It's fantastic value compared to some other office suites.
And on every F***'ing default install of a new WindowsXP machine! Dammit, they don't even have office installed, and each time you do a search, there is the little bastard jumping up and down and asking can he search the internet for you.
"Cost to install is not the only cost. With a free product, your own IT guys are the only resource if you encounter a bug or difficult error situation. If you're paying for a license, you have another level of support, i.e. the developer."
Err, let's correct this one right here, and anyone else who's thinking that openoffice is unsupported, could you please subscribe to users@openoffice.org for a couple of days to see the quality of questions and responses being given to anyone who asks for help.
These are developers answering questions, and there are several people who work 40 hours per week answering openoffice support questions. There is absolutely nothing cheapskate about the OpenOffice support.
"In practice, the goal of maximizing publication regardless of the cost to freedom is supported by widespread rhetoric which asserts that public copying is illegitimate, unfair, and intrinsically wrong. For instance, the publishers call people who copy "pirates," a smear term designed to equate sharing information with your neighbor with attacking a ship. (This smear term was formerly used by authors to describe publishers who found lawful ways to publish unauthorized editions; its modern use by the publishers is almost the reverse.) This rhetoric directly rejects the Constitutional basis for copyright, but presents itself as representing the unquestioned tradition of the American legal system.
The "pirate" rhetoric is typically accepted because it blankets the media so that few people realize that it is radical. It is effective because if copying by the public is fundamentally illegitimate, we can never object to the publishers' demand that we surrender our freedom to do so. In other words, when the public is challenged to show why publishers should not receive some additional power, the most important reason of all -- "We want to copy" -- is disqualified in advance.
This leaves no way to argue against increasing copyright power except using side issues. Hence opposition to stronger copyright powers today almost exclusively cites side issues, and never dares cite the freedom to distribute copies as a legitimate public value."
"Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks," though I think now everyone uses the west coast term "stoner."
Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying, or at least never appearing to, was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.
They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.
I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen year olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.
Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem."
"The ironic thing is that email is usually less anonymous than postal mail. Email contains a from address."
Actually, emails are pretty anonymous. They may contain a From address, but you can write whatever you want in it.
They do contain Received headers, if you send them yourself, but typically there's no good reason not to send them through a MixMaster remailer cloud if you want them to be anonymous, which means that somebody else sends on your behalf.
If they're signed, then maybe you can start talking about knowing who sent them, and then we start asking, how trustworthy is the computer that the signature was created on?
"There is copyright law, and then there is wishful thinking ("Hey, since it is soooooo easy to download this stuff, it should be legal")."
There is copyright law, and then there is wishful thinking ("Hey, since we'd get more money and power from making people think that copying should be illegal, we can make it illegal").
"Students learn to repeat the program's motto: ''If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it." That is so incredibly wrong I don't even know where to start."
Welcome to the American education system. Where are _you_ going to emigrate to when your children need a school?
It does indeed, well spotted. Perhaps instead of saying that nobody agrees with David Blunkett, I should have said that at least 800 people in Britain, when asked a question that we don't know the details of, responded in a way which could be interpreted as their "backing" of a plan for ID cards.
[ ] Do you support terrorism?
[ ] Do you fear terrorism?
[ ] If we introduce an ID card to stop terrrorism, would you support it?
Of course, these people who back the plan also said that they didn't want to pay for it. So who will pay for it, if not the government and the taxpayer? Would they still support it if they know how much it will cost them (financially, and in terms of freedom)? Were they given any information on the pros and cons of the scheme? Did they give their backing to the scheme before or after they were told the cost? Where were the people they questioned, and what were the newspapers they just read?
And as others have pointed out, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who believes that survey as reliable evidence either way.
[ ] Would you be prepared to opt-out of the UN convention on human rights, if that were necessary to implement an ID card scheme in Britain?
"Is DCC used by anyone else but file pirates and music traders?"
Of course. It's used for sending pictures, so people can see who they're chatting with.
It's used to send drafts of collaborative documents.
It's used for anything that you'd use email attachments for (when the file is too big to send by email, and you don't want to wait for a carrier-pidgeon or setup an FTP server)
It's used by terrorists to DCC blocks of semtex to each other without having to meet
[[ Please do not feed the trolls ]] -- sorry, did I miss that sign earlier?
IRC is a chat protocol by default, not a file-share protocol. Use GNUNet or BitTorrent or Konspire2B if you want to distribute music efficiently
The actual reason for the introduction of ID cards;
What ID cards can and cannot do;
Who will be able to demand an ID card and under what circumstances;
If ownership of ID cards will be compulsory;
If the carrying of ID cards will be compulsory;
Whether all parties asking for ID cards will be able to see all of the information held on the card;
The security of the ID cards and the centralised database;
The form of any biometric data to be held on ID cards;
How any biometric data might be collected and how much time and effort would be required of that process;
The ability of the cardholding citizen to view personal data held on ID cards;
The accessibility of such information to people using minority computer systems, to those without computers and those requiring assistive technologies;
The ability of the citizen to demand the correction of misleading data held on the ID card;
The supervision of the centralised database necessary to operate the ID card system;
Whether there will be data on the ID card to which the citizen does not have access;
The ability of a citizen to track the usage of their ID card and by whom;
The ability of the government to track ID card usage;
If centralised data will be shared between government departments, researchers or commercial organisations;
If personal data will be exported from the country and hence out of the remit of the Data Protection Acts;
What protections will be put in place to prevent "function creep";
What protections will be put in place to prevent abuse of the ID card system by future administrations;
What protections will be put in place to prevent official abuse of the ID card system;
How the ID card system will not discriminate against ethnic minorities;
If the ID card scheme violates the Data Protection Acts;
If the ID card scheme violates the European Convention on Human Rights (as incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998), especially as legal opinions suggest it will
More to the point, he's literally the only person in the UK who thinks ID cards are a good thing and yet still they're being pushed through.
Even the house of commons thinks he's crazy, and everyone else has been wondering for years why Blunkett still has a job.
Choice quote from STAND:
"Privacy International have worked out what else we could spend 6 billion [pounds sterling] on, instead of ID cards. I didn't realise 10,000 policemen were so cheap, relatively speaking."
You can get xlock or xscreensaver to automatically logout anyone who's been inactive for 15 minutes -- plenty of universities use that for their computer rooms.
"Sure, you may not have enough music to fill up that 20GB, but that doesn't mean that you'll never use the space."
Exactly. Backup of your hard-disk, anyone? Backup of several computers, even.
But if that's a good way to use music players, then it seems surprising that the Creative Jukebox NX comes with software that you're only allowed to run on one computer. If you install the drivers at home, the license says you're not allowed to install them at work. So how do you transfer files?
Slashdot Mirror
"No, no, no, no, no! magic_quotes_gpc is totally broken."
Yep, and well done for saying it.
What's worse is that each website provider has a different set of options (magic quotes, auto-register globals, etc) which means that your carefully sanitised data doesn't work at all when you switch providers.
Sometimes it changes under your feet, as someone upgrades PHP on a server and of course, every version of PHP has different default options!
"Or suppose that a website doesn't work in Mozilla unless you have Mozilla identify itself as Internet Explorer."
Worse, imagine Internet Explorer having to identify as "Mozilla" for fear of websites not working!
"And how do the deaf dial the 800 number without using tty?"
What use is a phone call, Mr Anderson...
Office & Design
- OpenOffice.org
- AbiWord
- GIMP
Internet & Communication
- Mozilla
- FileZilla
- TightVNC
- WinHTTrack
- PuTTY
Multimedia & Games
- Audacity
- CDex
- Crack Attack!
- Sokoban YASC
- Celestia
- Really Slick Screensavers
Utilities & Other
- 7-Zip
- SciTE
- WinPT
- NetTime
Source: TheOpenCD
"No, it's not the copying that publishers care about. It's DISTRIBUTION that they care about."
Why should we (the society) care about what publishers want? Copyright is for the benefit of the public, so that they get both art, and the ability to copy it. Hence the copy right.
Publishers are a side-issue. We pay them (in terms of temporarily giving up our right to copy their work) for an expectation that they will produce work which is useful to us. And the price we're paying is getting steeper and steeper.
What happens when the price gets too great? When it's demanded that you give up the ability to run a general-purpose computer, and in response all you get is the same quality of books and films that you've had for years? Would you be willing to pay that?
We're giving up our rights to copy, and in return we're not getting any increase in useful art. Exactly who is it that's saying this is a good deal?
"More interestingly, the story mentions that despite increases in funding for libraries, spending on books has sharply declined"
And the libraries probably don't know about Project Gutenberg, Baen WikiBooks or the Wikipedia. They're just using it to check their hotmail accounts.
Put a decent printer like in the Internet Bookmobile, and they could have a pretty big collection of books available. But no, it's 10p per sheet on an inket.
Libraries in the UK are even selling shareware, probably not even realising the quality of software that they could give away for free if they wished.
"I tend to think of the "standard" location as being where I can find a file on better than 75% of the systems I've used"
#!c:\perl\bin\perl
"What i meant is that the PAID version you get support for (Microsoft Ofice), and the FREE one (Open Office), you simply don't."
That statement could be confusing to people who know that you get good support with OpenOffice. Where did you get the information that OpenOffice was unsupported? A simple glance at their website would be all that's needed to check.
"In my opinion, the ONLY difference between the FREE office, and the one you have to PAY for, is that you get support for one of them. The decision is up to the people, is it worth it or is it not..?"
Some people here are claiming that you can also get support for Microsoft Office. I don't know the details, but presumably it exists.
"Open Office is free and you don't get anything good for free therefore if something costs more such as Windows or Office it must be better."
You can get a $600 version of OpenOffice if you enjoy the extra quality that comes with a very expensive product. Just ask one of the OpenOffice developers, and they'll be happy to send you as many $600 versions as you have computers to install them on. It's fantastic value compared to some other office suites.
"It's hard to turn off Clippy? Really?"
And on every F***'ing default install of a new WindowsXP machine! Dammit, they don't even have office installed, and each time you do a search, there is the little bastard jumping up and down and asking can he search the internet for you.
"Cost to install is not the only cost. With a free product, your own IT guys are the only resource if you encounter a bug or difficult error situation. If you're paying for a license, you have another level of support, i.e. the developer."
Err, let's correct this one right here, and anyone else who's thinking that openoffice is unsupported, could you please subscribe to users@openoffice.org for a couple of days to see the quality of questions and responses being given to anyone who asks for help.
These are developers answering questions, and there are several people who work 40 hours per week answering openoffice support questions. There is absolutely nothing cheapskate about the OpenOffice support.
"In practice, the goal of maximizing publication regardless of the cost to freedom is supported by widespread rhetoric which asserts that public copying is illegitimate, unfair, and intrinsically wrong. For instance, the publishers call people who copy "pirates," a smear term designed to equate sharing information with your neighbor with attacking a ship. (This smear term was formerly used by authors to describe publishers who found lawful ways to publish unauthorized editions; its modern use by the publishers is almost the reverse.) This rhetoric directly rejects the Constitutional basis for copyright, but presents itself as representing the unquestioned tradition of the American legal system.
The "pirate" rhetoric is typically accepted because it blankets the media so that few people realize that it is radical. It is effective because if copying by the public is fundamentally illegitimate, we can never object to the publishers' demand that we surrender our freedom to do so. In other words, when the public is challenged to show why publishers should not receive some additional power, the most important reason of all -- "We want to copy" -- is disqualified in advance.
This leaves no way to argue against increasing copyright power except using side issues. Hence opposition to stronger copyright powers today almost exclusively cites side issues, and never dares cite the freedom to distribute copies as a legitimate public value."
Misinterpreting Copyright
"Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks," though I think now everyone uses the west coast term "stoner."
Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying, or at least never appearing to, was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.
They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.
I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen year olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.
Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem."
- http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
"The ironic thing is that email is usually less anonymous than postal mail. Email contains a from address."
Actually, emails are pretty anonymous. They may contain a From address, but you can write whatever you want in it.
They do contain Received headers, if you send them yourself, but typically there's no good reason not to send them through a MixMaster remailer cloud if you want them to be anonymous, which means that somebody else sends on your behalf.
If they're signed, then maybe you can start talking about knowing who sent them, and then we start asking, how trustworthy is the computer that the signature was created on?
"There is copyright law, and then there is wishful thinking ("Hey, since it is soooooo easy to download this stuff, it should be legal")."
There is copyright law, and then there is wishful thinking ("Hey, since we'd get more money and power from making people think that copying should be illegal, we can make it illegal").
"If it ain't broke - don't fix it."
What kind of an engineer would say that?!?
If it ain't broke... we'll break it!
"Students learn to repeat the program's motto: ''If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it."
That is so incredibly wrong I don't even know where to start."
Welcome to the American education system. Where are _you_ going to emigrate to when your children need a school?
"This survey shows that your assertion is wrong."
It does indeed, well spotted. Perhaps instead of saying that nobody agrees with David Blunkett, I should have said that at least 800 people in Britain, when asked a question that we don't know the details of, responded in a way which could be interpreted as their "backing" of a plan for ID cards.
[ ] Do you support terrorism?
[ ] Do you fear terrorism?
[ ] If we introduce an ID card to stop terrrorism, would you support it?
Of course, these people who back the plan also said that they didn't want to pay for it. So who will pay for it, if not the government and the taxpayer? Would they still support it if they know how much it will cost them (financially, and in terms of freedom)? Were they given any information on the pros and cons of the scheme? Did they give their backing to the scheme before or after they were told the cost? Where were the people they questioned, and what were the newspapers they just read?
And as others have pointed out, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who believes that survey as reliable evidence either way.
[ ] Would you be prepared to opt-out of the UN convention on human rights, if that were necessary to implement an ID card scheme in Britain?
"Is DCC used by anyone else but file pirates and music traders?"
Of course. It's used for sending pictures, so people can see who they're chatting with.
It's used to send drafts of collaborative documents.
It's used for anything that you'd use email attachments for (when the file is too big to send by email, and you don't want to wait for a carrier-pidgeon or setup an FTP server)
It's used by terrorists to DCC blocks of semtex to each other without having to meet
[[ Please do not feed the trolls ]] -- sorry, did I miss that sign earlier?
IRC is a chat protocol by default, not a file-share protocol. Use GNUNet or BitTorrent or Konspire2B if you want to distribute music efficiently
More to the point, he's literally the only person in the UK who thinks ID cards are a good thing and yet still they're being pushed through.
Even the house of commons thinks he's crazy, and everyone else has been wondering for years why Blunkett still has a job.
Choice quote from STAND:
You can get xlock or xscreensaver to automatically logout anyone who's been inactive for 15 minutes -- plenty of universities use that for their computer rooms.
"Music lovers appear to have a track limit
The perfect size for a portable music player is one that can hold 1,000 songs, a study suggests."
So does anyone with 5% disk usage on their iPod actually go back and make better-quality rips of their music to use the extra space?
Is it worth storing the best songs as WAV if you have 30 "GB" to spare and not enough music to fill it?
"Sure, you may not have enough music to fill up that 20GB, but that doesn't mean that you'll never use the space."
Exactly. Backup of your hard-disk, anyone? Backup of several computers, even.
But if that's a good way to use music players, then it seems surprising that the Creative Jukebox NX comes with software that you're only allowed to run on one computer. If you install the drivers at home, the license says you're not allowed to install them at work. So how do you transfer files?