I'd be much less repulsed by this idea if I had any belief that the fees would be distributed in a fair fashion. As someone who listens to a fair deal of indie stuff (and virtually no major label stuff), I'm concerned that there's no way in hell anyone not on a major label would get to see a dime of the money.
Yup, no different from licencing fees in other areas, like APRA's "MUSIC IN THE WORKPLACE" and "Background Music" public performance licences.
We distribute small business licence fees according to our analysis of radio playlists. APRA regards these playlists as representative of background music performed in small businesses, restaurants and hotels. Commercial radio stations in Australia provide APRA with a full census of the works they broadcast, while community radio is sampled. APRA also receives regular logs from television stations and analyses these for distribution purposes.
You can bet that that's probably how any internet-piracy levy would work, and from memory it's similar to how the media levies in some countries are arrived at.
What's the alternative?
Well, in the case of small businesses it could be as simple as a "black box" provided by the local rights management agency that plays music pulled off the net and phones home details of what was played and how much. That wouldn't necessarily involve an increase in the licence fees either, although there might be a cost associated with the provision of the infrastructure behind all that. In the case of P2P stuff and a pirate-tax on net connections, it'd involve P2P software "sanctioned" by the rights management organisations that would report back with details of what was being downloaded so payments could be properly apportioned. Maybe that could be managed through details from central rights management organisation P2P trackers rather than per-client phoning home.
So... either the payments get apportioned out in a way that might or might not be representative of reality, or you have full reporting and auditing of what *actually* happens. Neither look particularly palatable, do they?
Given that situation, what's the best possible outcome? Ironically, it may well be for the rights holders or their anointed representatives (RIAA, MPAA, APRA/AMCOS, et al) to keep their grubby little hands off our internet connections and continue tracking down and prosecuting anyone they can catch. At the same time, they should also be trying to get the music industry to find ways of distributing music that are convenient for purchasers and which don't impinge on fair and traditional personal use of that material. Unfortunately, for many people piracy is more convenient and provides a product that's "better" from their POV than getting the product legally - and it's not necessarily just about the money, given the kind of DRM "thou shalt play this on nowt but the approved devices" bullshit that some of the commercial offerings are infested with.
So, they are inhaling a toxic gas? How can this be good for them?
I think that's the point entirely - H2S is not good for them. Neither is common table salt, ethanol, water - you can kill any higher animal with enough of any of those.
What is good is the careful application of those substances. Too much or too little salt and you've got problems, but keep or restore the balance and you're good to go. Increase water intake without maintaining the electrolyte balance and you've got problems. Drink six bottles of vodka in a sitting and you've got problems, but if you scull a fifth of torpedo juice you'll probably find the hospital sticking you on an ethanol drip.
H2S is supposedly involved in a few metabolic processes - one of which supposedly involves temperature regulation - and what's being experimented with here is a way to reversibly shut/slow down cells. I wouldn't expose myself to H2S for shits-and-giggles, but there may well be a medical application for it and that possibility deserves further investigation.
I heard that arsenic is a good preservative too.
*sheesh*
BTW, Arsenic Trioxide is used in treating certain kinds of leukemia - but that doesn't mean it's appropriate, or safe, for the general populace to drink Fowler's Solution as a health tonic. Also, at one time arsenic compounds were one of the few available treatments for syphilis (before penicillin), and there's been some recent work into whether arsenic compounds can be used to treat penicillin-resistant infections. So no, I wouldn't dust my biscuits with arsenic, but if I had leukemia or an incurably resistant strain of Golden Staph and the doctor started talking about Arsenic, I'd listen.
Again, they'll still get DNS queries that will consume bandwidth that someone will have to pay for.
An awful lot of mail systems have been set up as set-and-forget by work-for-hire conslutants, who never end up touching them again. The only way to get those kind of systems re-configured is for the organisations that use them to suffer some pain. It's arguable that that pain is deserved, since they're obviously not running their mail systems responsibly. Anyone who used ORDB and responsibly managed their mail system knew long ago that ORDB was going to do this and stopped using it ages ago.
Besides, there may well come a day on which that domain lapses and falls prey to squatters - or worse. Don't you think that J. Random-Hacker would love to get information on poorly-configured or poorly-maintained systems? ORDB have to stop people querying them before they can even think about relinquishing the domain, if only to protect the ignorant from themselves. In the case of ORDB, it's probably not much of an issue - but imagine what would happen if Ironport decided to pull the plug on Spamcop and then forgot to renew the domain before January 30 next year and there were still a few thousand ill-informed people generating queries against the SpamCop RBL. Not pretty...
RBLs are horribly broke & you should never use them as a sole method of determining if an email is spam.
Then, why do I have an extremely low reported false-positive rate from them? Maybe it's got something to do with which ones I choose to use, how I choose to use them, the mix of mail people at my organisation expect to receive, and the mitigating whitelistings I've stuck in place over the years. There is no "zero false-positive anti-spam magic bullet", but for my specific values of "workable" (i.e. my users get a few pieces of spam rather than a deluge, and I don't get many questions about accidentally blocked mail from real people outside the organisation), I've found carefully selected and applied RBLs to be invaluable as a first-line of defence - when you've got between half a million and a million delivery attempts per day, 95% of which you don't end up accepting, you don't want to run that many resource-intensive tests if you don't have to.
Seriously, are you trying to tell me that I should just ignore data in something like the CBL or SpamHaus's PBL? In the case of the former, there's something horribly broke about something using the sending IP - and in the case of the latter, the sending IP is being used in a way the sender's connectivity provider has said it shouldn't be used. I have no problem with either of those, and see no reason to specifically white-list around either of those. Additionally, things like SpamCop can be very useful if properly applied - using any new RBL for scoring-only at first and going over your logfiles with a fine-tooth comb for obvious things you might want to whitelist (like the mail relays of local large ISPs, yes I'm looking at you Bigpond and Optus)can be a good way to ensure there are minimal problems when you do start blocking with them. Plus, a local list of whitelistings can minimise the effort and research required when evaluating and adding other RBLs in future. Granted, mine has been built up over a number of years and I'd hate to have to start from scratch, but it should be possible for any organisation to know what they'll need to whitelist for before they start blocking using RBLs if they use the list for scoring for a while and then go over their logs looking for hits.
Perhaps the biggest problem with RBLs isn't so much the lists themselves (although there are some poor ones out there), but how they're applied and the response of an organisation that uses them when you contact them to report a piece of mail that you think should have got through. Personally, I find them invaluable and I think the last RBL-related "false-postive" that was reported here was a few months back. Give them to a lazy, useless, know-it-all admin who hasn't looked at their potential darker side and isn't willing to do the hard work to make sure they don't cause significant problems, and you've got a recipe for disaster....but the same could be said about a whole lot of SA rules that look like a good idea too that you can't apply too high a score to in practice(No MsgID? Yeah, there are a lot of Domino servers out there in businesses that would affect mail from. Percentage of HTML? Good luck with Chinese webmail.)
Sheesh guys, spam filtering is hard. That's why there are so many commercial products out there, following so many different methodologies, and why so many places seem to have difficulty doing a fair to decent job of it.
I'm no lawyer, and my understanding may be wrong. If it is, please tell me - I might be worried about nothing.
Suppose the hypothetical AntennaCorp(TM), who have tons of design and manufacturing experience, choose to implement this design in a commercial product. They build good gear, not the cheapest but the quality is second-to-none and they've got some patented manufacturing processes and parts like the design of their baluns and mounting hardware.
For obvious reasons, they want to protect their commercial properties as they give them an edge over their competitors.
What *exactly* is covered by the GPL here, and to what extent is the claimed "viral" nature of it going to affect its implementation?
It might be arguable that the protected items are the actual dimensions that define the behaviour of the device, and the actual hardware that it's implemented in/on shouldn't be covered - in much the same way that your router or your computer aren't necessarily fully open just because they run GPL software. In this case, improvements to the basic design (e.g. the discovery that changes to the dimensions improve performance) need to be given back to the community, but the way it's implemented (their super-secret balun design, their particular way of producing spacers and stand-offs etc) do not.
Or, it might be that *any* derived antenna design is covered under the GPL, meaning they need to open up all aspects of it fully. This is *not* a piece of code, it's a design for a physical object. It could end up covered under the same patent rules that affect code incorporated into GPL'd software - basically, either *don't* do that, or licence that tech for everyone to use freely in open-source products. If that was the interpretation that applied, and I owned a particular balun design that gave me an edge over my competitors, I'd be nervous about using that component in a manufactured item covered by the GPL - my competitors wouldn't be able to use the balun in closed-design antennas, but they could in anything that they chose to open the design for.
That second interpretation wouldn't be good for users or consumers, because surely the best implementation possible would be best possible outcome, and there would be impediments to AntennaCorp(TM) using the best techniques and parts.
It could all be a storm in a teacup, and I could be imagining problems that aren't there. I hope I am. Improvements to the essential electrical design of the antenna should be covered by the GPL, and it should be possible for anyone to produce an item that has the same electrical characteristics freely. Implementation details, though - the construction of the stand-offs if they're sufficiently unique and novel to earn protection, etc - *should* be able to be protected.
I like the GPL - a lot. I use a lot of GPL'd software and I've even given code and ideas back to a project (it wasn't used in that form, and was rendered unnecessary by other subsequent changes to the software that did the same thing and more, but that's not the point). But I don't want the GPL to be an impediment to these things being manufactured by the very people we would prefer making them.
Testing LSD on elephants isn't that nasty, not compared with other things they might have tried. Testing hash brownies on elephants would have been particulary bad - can you imagine trying to get a half dozen stoned elephants out of a convenience store at 3 in the morning? Or lager - an elephant throwing up 300 pints, ten bushels of curry and a gross of onion bhajis would not be a pretty sight.
Voice recorders must also use solid state technology instead of magnetic tape, which is vulnerable to damage and loss of reliability
Okay. Good luck with splicing together itty bitty fragments of flash memory chips. Good luck with pulling information out of flash memory chips that have been under a couple of miles of salt water, and had the briny deep seep in between the legs and the epoxy and into their inner goodness. I hope they've got all kinds of grinding machines designed to allow them to separate individual chips off busted boards and prepare them for reliable connection to special test jigs, because the chance of them being able to play back from a flight recorder that's just fallen from 40,000 feet must be pretty slim.
I'm not saying you couldn't build a solid-state flight recorder that could survive most conceivable crashes, but surely tape and solid-state should be viewed as complementary technologies - current, perhaps improved magnetic recorders for the current timeframes (so you've got at least the last half hour on something you can piece together and pull an analog signal off, if need be) and the whole flight on an ever-improving series of solid-state recorders that would have to consider mil-spec as a starting point for where they need to head.
Good god, is there a Slashdot award for the most depressing post ever? I'm half inclined to go and kill everyone I like to spare them the possibility.
The problem isn't so much with the tech itself, as with its application. I wrote that post from the assumption that a one-size-fits-all technological solution will be applied in some cases, and that it in some of those it will fail to help its "beneficiaries" in terrifying ways that aren't immediately apparant to their carers.
Maybe in a couple of decades, once people are used to having head-up displays in their Ray-Bans and have come to rely on their PDA telling them where they met the person they're talking to right now, they'll have enough trust in the glowing golden letters and the whispered words. I'm sure there would be many people who would benefit from this kind of tech - people with mild dementia but who are perfectly mobile could be reminded by the voice to turn the bath water off, take out the garbage, feed the cat, get things ready for the meals-on-wheels lady and generally improve their quality-of-life and stay out of supported accomodation. Hell, truth be told, there are times when I'd probably find a little digital nagging in my ear or overlaid on reality to be helpful right now. I'm just worried that people will get Grandpa a "Voice" and assume that it will just make things better when in fact it's doing exactly the opposite.
I think this would be excellent tech to provide to Alzheimer's sufferers, as long as they could remember they had it!
And that would be the problem for some.
Imagine yourself with Alzheimers. Imagine you used to be a sane, normal person - perhaps a little paranoid, because you worked in IT or security or some other field in which the knowledge that other people could be dicks was rubbed in your face day after day, or just from reading one newspaper too many.
Now, imagine that part of your everyday environment is a little voice that whispers details to you about what you've supposedly done, people you've supposedly seen, things you don't remember. Or glowing words that appear in mid-air - "This is your son. His last visit was a week ago, and he brought your grandchildren". Only, you don't remember any of that - and that can't be your son, because he's five years old and that man was close to fifty. And it won't stop. You *do* remember that people who hear voices or see things get carted off to places far less pleasant than the one you're in, even though you don't quite know where *here* is, and keep your mouth shut.
Perhaps things would be better if the person you used to be had trained themselves to accept direction better. Only, you don't know that's the problem because you've forgotten all that - and you were always more of a goat than a sheep anyway. So, you shut up out of self-preservation, go through the motions and pretend to recognise the strangers who show up bearing names of relatives. Only, that man who claims to be your son actually looks a little like your father. Could it be... your hands, they're old... you suddenly realise for a few seconds who you are and what you've become, and you break down into uncontrollable tears. Then, just as the man you claims to be your son calls for the nurse, it stops and you ask him "Who are you? What are we doing here?", just as you always do. The voice tells you that this is your son (only it can't be, your son is ten), and that you're home. You remember the voice - it's the only constant in your life, and you remember it lies, but you can't make it stop and you're too weak to do anything but go along with it. So, you nod along, pretend to know the people who show up ("Ah, he's a little better this week - no outbursts, and he seems to know everyone") and occasionally remember enough to want to pray for forgetfulness - and forget to be thankful when that prayer is answered.
So, in a near-weightless environment, if belching would result in vomiting what would farting result in? Crapping your shorts?
The difference is that your stomach contents will be near-liquid, and your bowel contents less so. Belching while upright on earth doesn't usually result in vomiting because the gas separates from the rest of your stomach contents and bubbles up to the top, where you can belch it up and stop when you start hitting the more substantial contents... in free-fall the separation might result in large bubbles of gas, but not anything that your stomach could easily separate out from the rest of the contents without the aid of gravity. If you've got liquid bowel contents, then farting isn't wise no matter where you are - if you've got well-formed stools then the gas should pass around the fecal matter without crapping your shorts, no gravity required.
I won't care until I can run this off of my SD card plugged into the Wii, as opposed to needing an SDGecko to go through my Gamecube Memory card port. Until then, ZZzzzZZZzzzzzZZ
Given that you can get an SDGecko or knock-off for under USD$7 including postage from a few reasonably reliable Hong Kong suppliers, it's not that much of an impediment. Also, because of the nature of the attack, it's unlikely that that hack will get direct to the Wii's SD slot - it's more likely that a loader program in the SDGecko would attempt to boot code from the Wii's own SD slot or USB port or off the network. I'd be really happy to be proven wrong, though.
Launching stuff through the Twilight Princess hack is great for geek cred, but not something the rest of the family can necessarily enjoy. The real holy grail is finding a way to boot Wii-mode homebrew from discs in modified consoles. GCLinux on the Wii in Wii mode (complete with working wifi or a USB ethernet adaptor) would make a really nifty media centre - stick the disc in as you would with any other disc, start it in the usual way, then watch whatever you've recorded off-air to the server in the back room. I want something my wife and kids can drive, and it's not quite there yet. I also don't want a half-dozen consoles lying around to do different things - I could do that kind of thing with a cheap second-hand X-Box right now, but there IS such a thing as too many consoles and too much clutter.
Bah to you and all the guys who use Lynx, use Telnet, lick wires, hand-craft ones and zeroes, and all the rest.
I waggle my fingers between my laser pointer and the end of a piece of fibre, and I now use a beam diffuser/attenuator that means I can safely read the return data with my remaining eye.
Of course it's not sequestration, but thanks for the clarification anyway... and I probably should have been clearer by using quotes around that word anyway. My point was that if we're going to the trouble of extracting CO2 from power plant waste gases and finding a way to extract the carbon from that, we may as well do something useful with it that reduces emissions from other sources. The comments in your blog about possibly getting things going with CO2 from lime kilns, followed by a fully distributed infrastructure involving people pumping hydrocarbons back into the gas supply mains, is very interesting. It does, however, rely on reliable base-load electricity from renewable sources and I don't think we're quite there yet. Who knows, this kind of tech could be a stepping-stone to reliable base-load electricity anyway... make hydrocarbons when the sun shines, burn them to fuel gas turbines when it doesn't and maybe even distribute excess gas production for other industrial or domestic uses like home heating. How would that affect your figures - centralised hydrocarbon production, and perhaps better insulation and more efficient gas furnaces for home heating? Or am I way off in terms of what could be reasonably produced?
Yeah, I know you were quoting Weird Al, but the Alice's Restaurant thing was too good to pass up.
You can get any thing you want at Jon Lech Johansen's Restaurant (Excluding Jonny...) . .
"And creating a nuisance", and they all came back and sat next to me on the Group W bench, talking about father raping and selling crack and operating torrent trackers and all kinds of groovy stuff..."
Is that the smell of a brand new Slashdot Meme, perhaps? Or just of Arlo throwing up in disgust?
The technology that's being talked about is carbon mineralifcation - the technology to turn CO2 into graphite, or diamond, or soot. That's would be a huge help in fighting global warming.
What would be really useful would be a way to take this carbon and sequester it in, oh, I don't know, liquid molecules consisting mostly of carbon and hydrogen. If the energy inputs for this were mostly from renewable sources like geothermal or solar, we could effectively get double-value CO2-wise out of whatever coal we burn for power. Efficiency wouldn't have to be brilliant to start with, just good enough to make this cost-competitive with pumping black goop out of the ground and refining it. Sure, we'd still be dumping all that CO2 into the atmosphere eventually, but with less mineral oil being burned there'd be much less of it overall. Ultimately we'd be well served looking for renewable sources of everything, but in the meantime every little bit of effort to reduce the amount of CO2 from fuels outside of that cycle can help. Liquid hydrocarbons are so damn convenient, and we've got a century of experience at using them for transport that is too good to just toss out the window.
I had mod points, but wasn't sure whether to mod you flambait or something else - don't quite know what.
So, I'll reply instead, on the off-chance that it was a serious question.
I am not a Muslim. Hell, I'm not really much of anything. But I've picked up a few things about religions in general and people in general. Regardless of their religion, people will act as people do - and that often means having the strength to do what they believe is necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. Whether that's "right" or "wrong" to you depends on how it affects you or people you know or your belief structures - again, that's human.
Many Muslims believe lying is prohibited, regardless of whether the person being lied to is a muslim or not. That's fine, many other religions hold similar views about lies - the Ninth Commandment, anybody?
However, there appears to be room for a practice called al-Taquiyya (see http://www.al-islam.org/ENCYCLOPEDIA/chapter6b/1.html ) Other religious scholars in other religions have likely held similar views - the early Christians under Rome kept their beliefs secret, as a matter of self-preservation. I wouldn't mind betting that Jewish theologians have debated things like "passing for non-Jewish" in the Third Reich. A strange form of Christianity evolved in Japan between when the Jesuits were kicked out and when Japan started to become more open again, because families had to keep their beliefs secret or face persecution. People will do what's necessary.
Now, on the surface, there appears to be nothing wrong with al-Taquiyya at all. Indeed, in times of persecution or harassment, what's wrong with hiding matters and keeping private things private for the sake of your survival and the survival of your family? Allah will know your intentions, and won't object if it's a matter of survival. No hypocracy required - it's better to be alive and a good person who told a necessary lie than a dead good person who never told a lie in their life. You can't do more good works if you're dead.
The trouble is, people are people - and interpret things differently, and have different priorities. One person might interptet al-Taquiyya to permit them to do what's needful - to denounce the Prophet and Allah in order to avoid being stoned by an angry mob, for example, but only in direct self-preservation or direct preservation of another. Another might perhaps interpret it as permitting the denouncement of Allah and the Prophet in order to gain access to an aircraft, because they believe it's necessary to gain access to and blow up a passenger aircraft to advance the cause of muslims everywhere. From their perspective, they'd be thinking of the bigger picture.
So, no. Asking people to denounce the Prophet of Islam wouldn't do you any good as it wouldn't necessarily reveal those you wanted to reveal - they'd perhaps consider it necessary to speak words other than those in their hearts. It would, however, probably reveal a lot of people of other faiths who believe it's inappropriate to denounce other faiths. Let's see, false-positives, false-negatives... not particularly useful.
How do you KNOW to complain if you are unable to view the site to confirm that it does not contain objectionable material? I know if I'm blocked by work/library/etc that I can go home, check, and complain if they block something OK. But here they are talking about the whole country.(ignoring workarounds)
A very good point. You don't know - unless you have work-arounds like an alternate DNS server or maybe something like TOR or one of those free-but-dodgy proxying websites that also try to rape your Windows install. That's the problem, you just won't know, and that works to the advantage of whoever constructs the lists. Anyone who complained about inaccuracies and was able to provide proof would also draw attention to themselves as someone who was bypassing the government-mandated filtering... and that might not be a good thing to do. Hell, any Dictator worthy of the title would put in place mandatory blocks with all kinds of extra dissent-blocking - and a nice, friendly, easy-to-use reporting mechanism for mis-classified sites (and, by extension, self-reporting of potential dissidents).
I work for a University, and we have a commercial web-filter to try to keep objectionable and time-wasting material off people's machines and out of labs.
$WEB_FILTER_VENDOR has decided that http://www.littlebigshots.com.au/ belongs under "Adult/Sexually Explicit" - whereas it is, in fact, about a childrens' film festival. I've filed a report, and locally whitelisted it until they get around to doing something about it, but still... can you imagine what kind of damage could be done by a secret ISP-level list required by government, and the embarrassment associated with challenging such listings? Who would admit to saying they tried to view a site listed by the government as a child-porn site? Well, I would - if I knew for a fact that the listing was wrong - but most people aren't like me. I wonder what else, perhaps of a political nature, might make its way onto such lists?
Slashdot Mirror
At least they're up-front about how they're going to figure out what to pay to whom, though:
http://www.amcos.com.au/music-users/Licences/all_about_licences/faq.asp
From that page: You can bet that that's probably how any internet-piracy levy would work, and from memory it's similar to how the media levies in some countries are arrived at.
What's the alternative?
Well, in the case of small businesses it could be as simple as a "black box" provided by the local rights management agency that plays music pulled off the net and phones home details of what was played and how much. That wouldn't necessarily involve an increase in the licence fees either, although there might be a cost associated with the provision of the infrastructure behind all that. In the case of P2P stuff and a pirate-tax on net connections, it'd involve P2P software "sanctioned" by the rights management organisations that would report back with details of what was being downloaded so payments could be properly apportioned. Maybe that could be managed through details from central rights management organisation P2P trackers rather than per-client phoning home.
So... either the payments get apportioned out in a way that might or might not be representative of reality, or you have full reporting and auditing of what *actually* happens. Neither look particularly palatable, do they?
Given that situation, what's the best possible outcome? Ironically, it may well be for the rights holders or their anointed representatives (RIAA, MPAA, APRA/AMCOS, et al) to keep their grubby little hands off our internet connections and continue tracking down and prosecuting anyone they can catch. At the same time, they should also be trying to get the music industry to find ways of distributing music that are convenient for purchasers and which don't impinge on fair and traditional personal use of that material. Unfortunately, for many people piracy is more convenient and provides a product that's "better" from their POV than getting the product legally - and it's not necessarily just about the money, given the kind of DRM "thou shalt play this on nowt but the approved devices" bullshit that some of the commercial offerings are infested with.
Said, "There is one thing I do know.
A woman is fine,
and a sheep is divine,
but a LLAMA is Numero Uno !"
Baaa!
What is good is the careful application of those substances. Too much or too little salt and you've got problems, but keep or restore the balance and you're good to go. Increase water intake without maintaining the electrolyte balance and you've got problems. Drink six bottles of vodka in a sitting and you've got problems, but if you scull a fifth of torpedo juice you'll probably find the hospital sticking you on an ethanol drip.
H2S is supposedly involved in a few metabolic processes - one of which supposedly involves temperature regulation - and what's being experimented with here is a way to reversibly shut/slow down cells. I wouldn't expose myself to H2S for shits-and-giggles, but there may well be a medical application for it and that possibility deserves further investigation.
BTW, Arsenic Trioxide is used in treating certain kinds of leukemia - but that doesn't mean it's appropriate, or safe, for the general populace to drink Fowler's Solution as a health tonic. Also, at one time arsenic compounds were one of the few available treatments for syphilis (before penicillin), and there's been some recent work into whether arsenic compounds can be used to treat penicillin-resistant infections. So no, I wouldn't dust my biscuits with arsenic, but if I had leukemia or an incurably resistant strain of Golden Staph and the doctor started talking about Arsenic, I'd listen.
An awful lot of mail systems have been set up as set-and-forget by work-for-hire conslutants, who never end up touching them again. The only way to get those kind of systems re-configured is for the organisations that use them to suffer some pain. It's arguable that that pain is deserved, since they're obviously not running their mail systems responsibly. Anyone who used ORDB and responsibly managed their mail system knew long ago that ORDB was going to do this and stopped using it ages ago. Besides, there may well come a day on which that domain lapses and falls prey to squatters - or worse. Don't you think that J. Random-Hacker would love to get information on poorly-configured or poorly-maintained systems? ORDB have to stop people querying them before they can even think about relinquishing the domain, if only to protect the ignorant from themselves. In the case of ORDB, it's probably not much of an issue - but imagine what would happen if Ironport decided to pull the plug on Spamcop and then forgot to renew the domain before January 30 next year and there were still a few thousand ill-informed people generating queries against the SpamCop RBL. Not pretty...
Seriously, are you trying to tell me that I should just ignore data in something like the CBL or SpamHaus's PBL? In the case of the former, there's something horribly broke about something using the sending IP - and in the case of the latter, the sending IP is being used in a way the sender's connectivity provider has said it shouldn't be used. I have no problem with either of those, and see no reason to specifically white-list around either of those. Additionally, things like SpamCop can be very useful if properly applied - using any new RBL for scoring-only at first and going over your logfiles with a fine-tooth comb for obvious things you might want to whitelist (like the mail relays of local large ISPs, yes I'm looking at you Bigpond and Optus)can be a good way to ensure there are minimal problems when you do start blocking with them. Plus, a local list of whitelistings can minimise the effort and research required when evaluating and adding other RBLs in future. Granted, mine has been built up over a number of years and I'd hate to have to start from scratch, but it should be possible for any organisation to know what they'll need to whitelist for before they start blocking using RBLs if they use the list for scoring for a while and then go over their logs looking for hits.
Perhaps the biggest problem with RBLs isn't so much the lists themselves (although there are some poor ones out there), but how they're applied and the response of an organisation that uses them when you contact them to report a piece of mail that you think should have got through. Personally, I find them invaluable and I think the last RBL-related "false-postive" that was reported here was a few months back. Give them to a lazy, useless, know-it-all admin who hasn't looked at their potential darker side and isn't willing to do the hard work to make sure they don't cause significant problems, and you've got a recipe for disaster....but the same could be said about a whole lot of SA rules that look like a good idea too that you can't apply too high a score to in practice(No MsgID? Yeah, there are a lot of Domino servers out there in businesses that would affect mail from. Percentage of HTML? Good luck with Chinese webmail.)
Sheesh guys, spam filtering is hard. That's why there are so many commercial products out there, following so many different methodologies, and why so many places seem to have difficulty doing a fair to decent job of it.
I'm no lawyer, and my understanding may be wrong. If it is, please tell me - I might be worried about nothing.
Suppose the hypothetical AntennaCorp(TM), who have tons of design and manufacturing experience, choose to implement this design in a commercial product. They build good gear, not the cheapest but the quality is second-to-none and they've got some patented manufacturing processes and parts like the design of their baluns and mounting hardware.
For obvious reasons, they want to protect their commercial properties as they give them an edge over their competitors.
What *exactly* is covered by the GPL here, and to what extent is the claimed "viral" nature of it going to affect its implementation?
It might be arguable that the protected items are the actual dimensions that define the behaviour of the device, and the actual hardware that it's implemented in/on shouldn't be covered - in much the same way that your router or your computer aren't necessarily fully open just because they run GPL software. In this case, improvements to the basic design (e.g. the discovery that changes to the dimensions improve performance) need to be given back to the community, but the way it's implemented (their super-secret balun design, their particular way of producing spacers and stand-offs etc) do not.
Or, it might be that *any* derived antenna design is covered under the GPL, meaning they need to open up all aspects of it fully. This is *not* a piece of code, it's a design for a physical object. It could end up covered under the same patent rules that affect code incorporated into GPL'd software - basically, either *don't* do that, or licence that tech for everyone to use freely in open-source products. If that was the interpretation that applied, and I owned a particular balun design that gave me an edge over my competitors, I'd be nervous about using that component in a manufactured item covered by the GPL - my competitors wouldn't be able to use the balun in closed-design antennas, but they could in anything that they chose to open the design for.
That second interpretation wouldn't be good for users or consumers, because surely the best implementation possible would be best possible outcome, and there would be impediments to AntennaCorp(TM) using the best techniques and parts.
It could all be a storm in a teacup, and I could be imagining problems that aren't there. I hope I am. Improvements to the essential electrical design of the antenna should be covered by the GPL, and it should be possible for anyone to produce an item that has the same electrical characteristics freely. Implementation details, though - the construction of the stand-offs if they're sufficiently unique and novel to earn protection, etc - *should* be able to be protected.
I like the GPL - a lot. I use a lot of GPL'd software and I've even given code and ideas back to a project (it wasn't used in that form, and was rendered unnecessary by other subsequent changes to the software that did the same thing and more, but that's not the point). But I don't want the GPL to be an impediment to these things being manufactured by the very people we would prefer making them.
Testing LSD on elephants isn't that nasty, not compared with other things they might have tried. Testing hash brownies on elephants would have been particulary bad - can you imagine trying to get a half dozen stoned elephants out of a convenience store at 3 in the morning? Or lager - an elephant throwing up 300 pints, ten bushels of curry and a gross of onion bhajis would not be a pretty sight.
I'm not saying you couldn't build a solid-state flight recorder that could survive most conceivable crashes, but surely tape and solid-state should be viewed as complementary technologies - current, perhaps improved magnetic recorders for the current timeframes (so you've got at least the last half hour on something you can piece together and pull an analog signal off, if need be) and the whole flight on an ever-improving series of solid-state recorders that would have to consider mil-spec as a starting point for where they need to head.
What kind of world of hurt would the person in TFA have had to go through if the battery was flat, or the laptop was defective?
Yeah, right - so much for "You keep out of the music business, and we won't sell computers".
How long until we see a shiny new Macbook and iPod as a special edition, complete with the familiar green logo?
Maybe in a couple of decades, once people are used to having head-up displays in their Ray-Bans and have come to rely on their PDA telling them where they met the person they're talking to right now, they'll have enough trust in the glowing golden letters and the whispered words. I'm sure there would be many people who would benefit from this kind of tech - people with mild dementia but who are perfectly mobile could be reminded by the voice to turn the bath water off, take out the garbage, feed the cat, get things ready for the meals-on-wheels lady and generally improve their quality-of-life and stay out of supported accomodation. Hell, truth be told, there are times when I'd probably find a little digital nagging in my ear or overlaid on reality to be helpful right now. I'm just worried that people will get Grandpa a "Voice" and assume that it will just make things better when in fact it's doing exactly the opposite.
Imagine yourself with Alzheimers. Imagine you used to be a sane, normal person - perhaps a little paranoid, because you worked in IT or security or some other field in which the knowledge that other people could be dicks was rubbed in your face day after day, or just from reading one newspaper too many.
Now, imagine that part of your everyday environment is a little voice that whispers details to you about what you've supposedly done, people you've supposedly seen, things you don't remember. Or glowing words that appear in mid-air - "This is your son. His last visit was a week ago, and he brought your grandchildren". Only, you don't remember any of that - and that can't be your son, because he's five years old and that man was close to fifty. And it won't stop. You *do* remember that people who hear voices or see things get carted off to places far less pleasant than the one you're in, even though you don't quite know where *here* is, and keep your mouth shut.
Perhaps things would be better if the person you used to be had trained themselves to accept direction better. Only, you don't know that's the problem because you've forgotten all that - and you were always more of a goat than a sheep anyway. So, you shut up out of self-preservation, go through the motions and pretend to recognise the strangers who show up bearing names of relatives. Only, that man who claims to be your son actually looks a little like your father. Could it be... your hands, they're old... you suddenly realise for a few seconds who you are and what you've become, and you break down into uncontrollable tears. Then, just as the man you claims to be your son calls for the nurse, it stops and you ask him "Who are you? What are we doing here?", just as you always do. The voice tells you that this is your son (only it can't be, your son is ten), and that you're home. You remember the voice - it's the only constant in your life, and you remember it lies, but you can't make it stop and you're too weak to do anything but go along with it. So, you nod along, pretend to know the people who show up ("Ah, he's a little better this week - no outbursts, and he seems to know everyone") and occasionally remember enough to want to pray for forgetfulness - and forget to be thankful when that prayer is answered.
Launching stuff through the Twilight Princess hack is great for geek cred, but not something the rest of the family can necessarily enjoy. The real holy grail is finding a way to boot Wii-mode homebrew from discs in modified consoles. GCLinux on the Wii in Wii mode (complete with working wifi or a USB ethernet adaptor) would make a really nifty media centre - stick the disc in as you would with any other disc, start it in the usual way, then watch whatever you've recorded off-air to the server in the back room. I want something my wife and kids can drive, and it's not quite there yet. I also don't want a half-dozen consoles lying around to do different things - I could do that kind of thing with a cheap second-hand X-Box right now, but there IS such a thing as too many consoles and too much clutter.
I waggle my fingers between my laser pointer and the end of a piece of fibre, and I now use a beam diffuser/attenuator that means I can safely read the return data with my remaining eye.
Of course it's not sequestration, but thanks for the clarification anyway... and I probably should have been clearer by using quotes around that word anyway. My point was that if we're going to the trouble of extracting CO2 from power plant waste gases and finding a way to extract the carbon from that, we may as well do something useful with it that reduces emissions from other sources. The comments in your blog about possibly getting things going with CO2 from lime kilns, followed by a fully distributed infrastructure involving people pumping hydrocarbons back into the gas supply mains, is very interesting. It does, however, rely on reliable base-load electricity from renewable sources and I don't think we're quite there yet. Who knows, this kind of tech could be a stepping-stone to reliable base-load electricity anyway... make hydrocarbons when the sun shines, burn them to fuel gas turbines when it doesn't and maybe even distribute excess gas production for other industrial or domestic uses like home heating. How would that affect your figures - centralised hydrocarbon production, and perhaps better insulation and more efficient gas furnaces for home heating? Or am I way off in terms of what could be reasonably produced?
"And creating a nuisance", and they all came back and sat next to me on the Group W bench, talking about father raping and selling crack and operating torrent trackers and all kinds of groovy stuff..."
Is that the smell of a brand new Slashdot Meme, perhaps? Or just of Arlo throwing up in disgust?
I had mod points, but wasn't sure whether to mod you flambait or something else - don't quite know what.
So, I'll reply instead, on the off-chance that it was a serious question.
I am not a Muslim. Hell, I'm not really much of anything. But I've picked up a few things about religions in general and people in general. Regardless of their religion, people will act as people do - and that often means having the strength to do what they believe is necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. Whether that's "right" or "wrong" to you depends on how it affects you or people you know or your belief structures - again, that's human.
Many Muslims believe lying is prohibited, regardless of whether the person being lied to is a muslim or not. That's fine, many other religions hold similar views about lies - the Ninth Commandment, anybody?
However, there appears to be room for a practice called al-Taquiyya (see http://www.al-islam.org/ENCYCLOPEDIA/chapter6b/1.html ) Other religious scholars in other religions have likely held similar views - the early Christians under Rome kept their beliefs secret, as a matter of self-preservation. I wouldn't mind betting that Jewish theologians have debated things like "passing for non-Jewish" in the Third Reich. A strange form of Christianity evolved in Japan between when the Jesuits were kicked out and when Japan started to become more open again, because families had to keep their beliefs secret or face persecution. People will do what's necessary.
Now, on the surface, there appears to be nothing wrong with al-Taquiyya at all. Indeed, in times of persecution or harassment, what's wrong with hiding matters and keeping private things private for the sake of your survival and the survival of your family? Allah will know your intentions, and won't object if it's a matter of survival. No hypocracy required - it's better to be alive and a good person who told a necessary lie than a dead good person who never told a lie in their life. You can't do more good works if you're dead.
The trouble is, people are people - and interpret things differently, and have different priorities. One person might interptet al-Taquiyya to permit them to do what's needful - to denounce the Prophet and Allah in order to avoid being stoned by an angry mob, for example, but only in direct self-preservation or direct preservation of another. Another might perhaps interpret it as permitting the denouncement of Allah and the Prophet in order to gain access to an aircraft, because they believe it's necessary to gain access to and blow up a passenger aircraft to advance the cause of muslims everywhere. From their perspective, they'd be thinking of the bigger picture.
So, no. Asking people to denounce the Prophet of Islam wouldn't do you any good as it wouldn't necessarily reveal those you wanted to reveal - they'd perhaps consider it necessary to speak words other than those in their hearts. It would, however, probably reveal a lot of people of other faiths who believe it's inappropriate to denounce other faiths. Let's see, false-positives, false-negatives... not particularly useful.
Besides, I recognise the subtle distinction between "time-wasting material" and "theraputic measures which prevent people climbing the clock tower".
I work for a University, and we have a commercial web-filter to try to keep objectionable and time-wasting material off people's machines and out of labs.
$WEB_FILTER_VENDOR has decided that http://www.littlebigshots.com.au/ belongs under "Adult/Sexually Explicit" - whereas it is, in fact, about a childrens' film festival. I've filed a report, and locally whitelisted it until they get around to doing something about it, but still... can you imagine what kind of damage could be done by a secret ISP-level list required by government, and the embarrassment associated with challenging such listings? Who would admit to saying they tried to view a site listed by the government as a child-porn site? Well, I would - if I knew for a fact that the listing was wrong - but most people aren't like me. I wonder what else, perhaps of a political nature, might make its way onto such lists?