Be a shame to try it, only to find that it takes three minutes to get to the point where it'll actually listen to the song; so here's hoping that they use something approaching smart design, and make the introduction/pickup time in general VERY short.
Ye gods, might this possibly be a first post? Probably not, with the time it took to write this, but anyway...
Can't verify this at my work computer, but it's worth noting that there's more to zipping than compression; even in already-compressed or otherwise difficult-to-compress situations, it's the ubiquitous Windows equivalent to tar, after all. If there are multiple files in the archive, the download is already easier. If not, well, a few bytes of compression is better than none; considering the stated demands of running the thing, the time to decompress is trivial.
The grandparent did not state that the emotional bleakness invalidated the argument, only that it's a reason to think it might be flawed(for reasons which the sibling poster has already mentioned).
It is true that science produces some bleak or happy notions, but most of them can go either way.
The actual flaws listed later in the grandparent post are more significant. IANAPhysicist, but I do know that, indeed, the first law of thermodynamics only applies completely in a closed system. In an open system, the environment can have an effect.
This notion is also why the brain can learn, becoming more ordered, decreasing in entropy despite the tendency of entropy to increase; because in decreasing its own entropy, the brain releases heat that increases the entropy of the universe by a greater amount.
Science is a powerful tool, but all principles being brought up need to be clearly understood.
Oversimplifying and/or parroting phrases without knowing the underlying principles is quite likely to make arguments fall apart under scrutiny; and indeed, bringing up thermodynamics was inappropriate in the article. Certainly, software developers need to get paid; but even assuming OSS can't get them a single penny, who's to say that software development is their only possible source of income? It's not a closed system; people can be getting their money from hardware sales, the use of their expertise as consultants, another job, a well-invested nest egg, inheritance, or good fortune(lottery, etc). And those are just what I can think of off the top of my head without even trying hard.
No, the emotion of the argument does not render it invalid; but that's not what the grandparent said. Other things render it invalid.
This would be why PlayFair itself is now stored in a place that's not bound by the DMCA. Let the user beware, though... as long as the user is in the US.
Anyone who relies on a free or cheap e-mail system to deal with secure information is out of his or her mind, but if you're on a number of binary mailing lists and don't mind people seeing the traffic from it, why not? Just be careful of what you do with the Gmail address.
Cutting lasers don't actually cut using heat; they use the momentum of light. Arguably, if you cut from the side and go slow, you could shave into it so gently that heat loss doesn't become an issue.
If it's in a sensitive context, you'd probably want to perform this in a low-pressure or inert-gas environment for other reasons. Clean air shouldn't significantly scatter the laser light at any distance until the dispersal becomes significant.
Punching a hole into the middle of something is, I think, a more difficult problem than cutting from the side, but IANAPhysicist.
As this is proof of concept, I wouldn't be surprised if the heat problem is one they have to consider, but I don't know its magnitude. Still, if they can accomplish such fine cutting on such delicate material, it's a good sign.
Neither Gaim under FreeBSD (haven't tried it under Win32) nor even Trillian under Win98 work reliably with file transfers for me. They work for chatting, and for SENDING files to people, I can pop them onto my server, but receiving files is more difficult if they're too large for my e-mail box. (I don't seem to have inbound SMTP available through Cogeco, so my own e-mail server isn't an option.)
However, that's largely irrelevant since it's not the same architecture anyway. This is reverse engineering in the most literal sense - taking a known set of responses and going backwards from it to a design that will yield the desired result. Analyzing the blueprints wouldn't be reverse engineering at all; it would actually be making a direct copy.
Also, language shifts and the power of popular usage apply. A lot of words are in the dictionary that wouldn't have been accepted as proper English in the not too distant past, when they were "just" slang.
And, true, crackers CAN be hackers, it's just that the most prevalent and irritating breed of them don't really know what they're doing.
Actually, that very lingual shift was already being referred to when I talked about the "malicious" usage crowding even farther. Thus, I fail to see how there's a double standard. Is it a "double standard" to not like how other people drive?
Last I checked, having preferences did not make one guilty of a double standard.
And the hacker community loses a little more ground with this... "Hacker" is already common public usage for what some others who wear that name would rather call "cracker"; how long before it crowds even farther?
Doesn't help that the two opposing groups both lay claim to the same name.
Even pictures of naked children aren't necessarily intended to be pornorgraphic. But then, such pictures aren't depicted in anything remotely resembling a sexual situation, either. Usually they focus on the exact opposite - on childish innocence with regard to the world at large.
The core problem with child porn is that the kids involved are not fully informed, and cannot be effectively so informed. Until they hit puberty, they won't have any idea what the fuss is all about.
Note that this general statement is just that, and was NOT made by a psychologist of any kind, but a prepubescent child doesn't have a suitable frame of reference to understand what an adult gets out of the situation. Combine this with the fact that adults can intimidate, cajole, deceive, or physically overpower children far more easily than they can generally do those things to other adults, and that adds up to bad news.
I may have my own conceptions about the age of consent, but a child who is physically or mentally incapable of experiencing sex as an adult does can't be said to be giving informed consent, even if the consent isn't on a blatantly false premise.
Now, people who visit nudist colonies for wank material have problems of their own, and are almost certainly missing the point; but there is, indeed, nothing wrong with nudity, and nudity does not equate to sex.
Perhaps, but setting it up as a desktop requires more overhead than some of the Linux distros out there. Certainly it can be done(I'm waiting to go home to my FBSD box myself), but it's harder for the average user to get to that point.
For the less ambitious(and as a nod to possibly large P2P clients), the boot disk net-installs a P2P client, then hands over control to do the rest. (Mini-install CDs could have it built in.) FreeBSD already has a whole crapload of mirrors as it is, wouldn't surprise me if the others do as well. P2P might make it easier for people to set up mini-mirrors without committing the massive bandwidth and online-time requirements, but until such a user base is up and running, the existing servers could distribute the load if equipped with such a system.
Don't know if they'd be referred to as peers in this sense(since, updates notwithstanding, they don't receive). Multiple-Origin Transfer Protocol? Thought of "multiple-source" first, but I can't imagine OSS advocates wanting to use MSTP.
Maybe that caution in the spam-armour munging should be taken into account, hm? After all, if you spam the developers, they'll have brand new samples with which to test their anti-spam routines... get THEM fed up with spam and they're right at the source! Larger projects would take a little longer to have that effect(though, since nobody in their right mind likes spam, those larger projects have more people to work on it, too; that could be seen as good or bad, depending).
Spam an ordinary person until they're saturated, and you won't get through to that person. Spam the devs for a system that works well on servers, and none of the customers of those servers will get your spam anymore, either...
For that matter, take it one step further and install the portupgrade utility. Want to install something? "portinstall name-of-port". Doesn't quite find what you want? "portinstall directory/name-of-port"(though I rarely have this problem). Want to remove it? "pkg_deinstall name-and-version"(which is easily found in/var/db/pkg on default installs).
Want to recompile everything that's out of date? CVSup your ports tree, then "portupgrade -a" and go on vacation.
If they did have to pay such a royalty, so would FreeBSD, as well as every Linux flavour I've encountered, because they all had Fat32 support. My guess is that as long as they don't use Microsoft code to accomplish it, and instead people just peered at the raw data until they figured it out, it's okay(or the FreeBSD project and anyone else who includes fat32 drivers does in fact pay).
Or is there some ultra-important distinction I'm missing? Wouldn't be the first time.
If their products are absurdly overpriced, why do you need absurdly overpriced products? A Ferrari is absurdly overpriced too, does that mean you should illegally acquire one? Do you need a Ferrari? Or do you just want one because it's a damn good car, but you can't afford it?
It's becoming increasingly difficult to get by without a computer, and a computer needs an OS. MS would like us to believe(as anybody in the business would, including, with arguably more merit, the FOSS developers) that their OS is the best one for us.
They've been charging increasing amounts of money for the lowest-level offering. They don't offer an economy Windows, and many Slashdotters would deride them for offering crippled software if they did. Granted, there are heavier-duty versions that are better suited to servers(bear with me here, please) than the consumer offering, but even the consumer offering is getting pretty steep.
Photomanipulation and 3D rendering programs take it to respectively greater degrees. They're niche markets, and are often used by business customers. Thus, the companies set prices that only businesses can afford, and keep individuals from legally getting into the field; thus, only businesses buy the software, and are on record as being the ones that mostly use it...
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, personally, if I ever get into photo manupilation I'm far more likely to try to learn the GIMP or something like that than to pirate Photoshop; ditto if there's a good OSS 3D modeler out there(though I don't yet know what such options may exist).
If I start using the software for profit, I'm likely to either look for a slightly higher-end program that carries a small charge, or send a contribution to the people involved in the tool that I do use(which contribution might or might not be monetary, depending on whether I have relevant skills to the project).
Too, going back to the original topic, don't forget that this act might get weaseled around to apply to perfectly legitimate uses of P2P software. All those people on Bittorrent for Linux ISOs had better watch out... Is it really hard to imagine that, since the program you're using could be used to distribute copyrighted material, the suits(2) will brush aside the fact that you, personally, weren't doing so at the time? You might be able to win such a case in time, but only if the legal fees don't grind you into the ground first.
From what I recall from discussions in high school and first-level-university physics(myriad sources that I couldn't possibly provide a bibliography for now), as well as casual discussions afterward(Grain Of Salt time), that alone wasn't Chernobyl's problem; they had removed the control rods from their housings, and when they tried to put them back in, they had warped and wouldn't fit. Whoops.
I make absolutely no attempt to deny that the void coefficient helped send the reaction through the roof, the heat from which warped the (removed) rods. Multiple errors(or instances of stupidity) went into that one.
Oh, and I'm amazed whenever I see a commercial for "clean American coal".
Maybe because the OO.o people will actually let their users know about it, whereas MS would rather clam up and just hope the next service pack comes out before anybody notices?
Slashdot Mirror
Ye gods, where did all those posts come from? I swear the page was empty when I first clicked Reply. Ah well, no first post for me. I will live.
Be a shame to try it, only to find that it takes three minutes to get to the point where it'll actually listen to the song; so here's hoping that they use something approaching smart design, and make the introduction/pickup time in general VERY short.
Ye gods, might this possibly be a first post? Probably not, with the time it took to write this, but anyway...
Can't verify this at my work computer, but it's worth noting that there's more to zipping than compression; even in already-compressed or otherwise difficult-to-compress situations, it's the ubiquitous Windows equivalent to tar, after all. If there are multiple files in the archive, the download is already easier. If not, well, a few bytes of compression is better than none; considering the stated demands of running the thing, the time to decompress is trivial.
The grandparent did not state that the emotional bleakness invalidated the argument, only that it's a reason to think it might be flawed(for reasons which the sibling poster has already mentioned).
It is true that science produces some bleak or happy notions, but most of them can go either way.
The actual flaws listed later in the grandparent post are more significant. IANAPhysicist, but I do know that, indeed, the first law of thermodynamics only applies completely in a closed system. In an open system, the environment can have an effect.
This notion is also why the brain can learn, becoming more ordered, decreasing in entropy despite the tendency of entropy to increase; because in decreasing its own entropy, the brain releases heat that increases the entropy of the universe by a greater amount.
Science is a powerful tool, but all principles being brought up need to be clearly understood.
Oversimplifying and/or parroting phrases without knowing the underlying principles is quite likely to make arguments fall apart under scrutiny; and indeed, bringing up thermodynamics was inappropriate in the article. Certainly, software developers need to get paid; but even assuming OSS can't get them a single penny, who's to say that software development is their only possible source of income? It's not a closed system; people can be getting their money from hardware sales, the use of their expertise as consultants, another job, a well-invested nest egg, inheritance, or good fortune(lottery, etc). And those are just what I can think of off the top of my head without even trying hard.
No, the emotion of the argument does not render it invalid; but that's not what the grandparent said. Other things render it invalid.
This would be why PlayFair itself is now stored in a place that's not bound by the DMCA. Let the user beware, though... as long as the user is in the US.
Didn't anybody see Short Circuit 2?
Okay, that was a text marquee and not a billboard as such, but nevertheless...
Anyone who relies on a free or cheap e-mail system to deal with secure information is out of his or her mind, but if you're on a number of binary mailing lists and don't mind people seeing the traffic from it, why not? Just be careful of what you do with the Gmail address.
Cutting lasers don't actually cut using heat; they use the momentum of light. Arguably, if you cut from the side and go slow, you could shave into it so gently that heat loss doesn't become an issue.
If it's in a sensitive context, you'd probably want to perform this in a low-pressure or inert-gas environment for other reasons. Clean air shouldn't significantly scatter the laser light at any distance until the dispersal becomes significant.
Punching a hole into the middle of something is, I think, a more difficult problem than cutting from the side, but IANAPhysicist.
As this is proof of concept, I wouldn't be surprised if the heat problem is one they have to consider, but I don't know its magnitude. Still, if they can accomplish such fine cutting on such delicate material, it's a good sign.
Neither Gaim under FreeBSD (haven't tried it under Win32) nor even Trillian under Win98 work reliably with file transfers for me. They work for chatting, and for SENDING files to people, I can pop them onto my server, but receiving files is more difficult if they're too large for my e-mail box. (I don't seem to have inbound SMTP available through Cogeco, so my own e-mail server isn't an option.)
However, that's largely irrelevant since it's not the same architecture anyway. This is reverse engineering in the most literal sense - taking a known set of responses and going backwards from it to a design that will yield the desired result. Analyzing the blueprints wouldn't be reverse engineering at all; it would actually be making a direct copy.
Also, language shifts and the power of popular usage apply. A lot of words are in the dictionary that wouldn't have been accepted as proper English in the not too distant past, when they were "just" slang.
And, true, crackers CAN be hackers, it's just that the most prevalent and irritating breed of them don't really know what they're doing.
Actually, that very lingual shift was already being referred to when I talked about the "malicious" usage crowding even farther. Thus, I fail to see how there's a double standard. Is it a "double standard" to not like how other people drive?
Last I checked, having preferences did not make one guilty of a double standard.
And the hacker community loses a little more ground with this... "Hacker" is already common public usage for what some others who wear that name would rather call "cracker"; how long before it crowds even farther?
Doesn't help that the two opposing groups both lay claim to the same name.
Whoever posted about this article didn't RTFA. It states in there that at the time of the interview, none other had been made, but others have since.
Even pictures of naked children aren't necessarily intended to be pornorgraphic. But then, such pictures aren't depicted in anything remotely resembling a sexual situation, either. Usually they focus on the exact opposite - on childish innocence with regard to the world at large.
The core problem with child porn is that the kids involved are not fully informed, and cannot be effectively so informed. Until they hit puberty, they won't have any idea what the fuss is all about.
Note that this general statement is just that, and was NOT made by a psychologist of any kind, but a prepubescent child doesn't have a suitable frame of reference to understand what an adult gets out of the situation. Combine this with the fact that adults can intimidate, cajole, deceive, or physically overpower children far more easily than they can generally do those things to other adults, and that adds up to bad news.
I may have my own conceptions about the age of consent, but a child who is physically or mentally incapable of experiencing sex as an adult does can't be said to be giving informed consent, even if the consent isn't on a blatantly false premise.
Now, people who visit nudist colonies for wank material have problems of their own, and are almost certainly missing the point; but there is, indeed, nothing wrong with nudity, and nudity does not equate to sex.
Isn't that what the grandparent said?
Perhaps, but setting it up as a desktop requires more overhead than some of the Linux distros out there. Certainly it can be done(I'm waiting to go home to my FBSD box myself), but it's harder for the average user to get to that point.
For the less ambitious(and as a nod to possibly large P2P clients), the boot disk net-installs a P2P client, then hands over control to do the rest. (Mini-install CDs could have it built in.) FreeBSD already has a whole crapload of mirrors as it is, wouldn't surprise me if the others do as well. P2P might make it easier for people to set up mini-mirrors without committing the massive bandwidth and online-time requirements, but until such a user base is up and running, the existing servers could distribute the load if equipped with such a system.
Don't know if they'd be referred to as peers in this sense(since, updates notwithstanding, they don't receive). Multiple-Origin Transfer Protocol? Thought of "multiple-source" first, but I can't imagine OSS advocates wanting to use MSTP.
Maybe that caution in the spam-armour munging should be taken into account, hm? After all, if you spam the developers, they'll have brand new samples with which to test their anti-spam routines... get THEM fed up with spam and they're right at the source! Larger projects would take a little longer to have that effect(though, since nobody in their right mind likes spam, those larger projects have more people to work on it, too; that could be seen as good or bad, depending).
Spam an ordinary person until they're saturated, and you won't get through to that person. Spam the devs for a system that works well on servers, and none of the customers of those servers will get your spam anymore, either...
For that matter, take it one step further and install the portupgrade utility. Want to install something? "portinstall name-of-port". Doesn't quite find what you want? "portinstall directory/name-of-port"(though I rarely have this problem). Want to remove it? "pkg_deinstall name-and-version"(which is easily found in /var/db/pkg on default installs).
Want to recompile everything that's out of date? CVSup your ports tree, then "portupgrade -a" and go on vacation.
If they did have to pay such a royalty, so would FreeBSD, as well as every Linux flavour I've encountered, because they all had Fat32 support. My guess is that as long as they don't use Microsoft code to accomplish it, and instead people just peered at the raw data until they figured it out, it's okay(or the FreeBSD project and anyone else who includes fat32 drivers does in fact pay).
Or is there some ultra-important distinction I'm missing? Wouldn't be the first time.
If their products are absurdly overpriced, why do you need absurdly overpriced products? A Ferrari is absurdly overpriced too, does that mean you should illegally acquire one? Do you need a Ferrari? Or do you just want one because it's a damn good car, but you can't afford it?
It's becoming increasingly difficult to get by without a computer, and a computer needs an OS. MS would like us to believe(as anybody in the business would, including, with arguably more merit, the FOSS developers) that their OS is the best one for us.
They've been charging increasing amounts of money for the lowest-level offering. They don't offer an economy Windows, and many Slashdotters would deride them for offering crippled software if they did. Granted, there are heavier-duty versions that are better suited to servers(bear with me here, please) than the consumer offering, but even the consumer offering is getting pretty steep.
Photomanipulation and 3D rendering programs take it to respectively greater degrees. They're niche markets, and are often used by business customers. Thus, the companies set prices that only businesses can afford, and keep individuals from legally getting into the field; thus, only businesses buy the software, and are on record as being the ones that mostly use it...
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, personally, if I ever get into photo manupilation I'm far more likely to try to learn the GIMP or something like that than to pirate Photoshop; ditto if there's a good OSS 3D modeler out there(though I don't yet know what such options may exist).
If I start using the software for profit, I'm likely to either look for a slightly higher-end program that carries a small charge, or send a contribution to the people involved in the tool that I do use(which contribution might or might not be monetary, depending on whether I have relevant skills to the project).
Too, going back to the original topic, don't forget that this act might get weaseled around to apply to perfectly legitimate uses of P2P software. All those people on Bittorrent for Linux ISOs had better watch out... Is it really hard to imagine that, since the program you're using could be used to distribute copyrighted material, the suits(2) will brush aside the fact that you, personally, weren't doing so at the time? You might be able to win such a case in time, but only if the legal fees don't grind you into the ground first.
I think that qualifies as more of an excuse than a valid, logical reason.
From what I recall from discussions in high school and first-level-university physics(myriad sources that I couldn't possibly provide a bibliography for now), as well as casual discussions afterward(Grain Of Salt time), that alone wasn't Chernobyl's problem; they had removed the control rods from their housings, and when they tried to put them back in, they had warped and wouldn't fit. Whoops.
I make absolutely no attempt to deny that the void coefficient helped send the reaction through the roof, the heat from which warped the (removed) rods. Multiple errors(or instances of stupidity) went into that one.
Oh, and I'm amazed whenever I see a commercial for "clean American coal".
Maybe because the OO.o people will actually let their users know about it, whereas MS would rather clam up and just hope the next service pack comes out before anybody notices?