This means that spammers would effectively have their mail server slashdotted if all the recipients connect to collect their mail.
Well, the problem is that the "spammer's mail server" is actually some poor schmuck on cable or DSL. Slashdotting that person's broadband connection will stop that node's e-mail and possibly teach the owner a lesson, but the spammer has a virtually infinite supply of Windows machines to infect and host his spam from.
Additionally, I don't open spam message bodies - I can tell from the subject line and author whether a message is legitimate or not. If there's a lot of other people like me, nothing's really changed. The spammer gets his message out to the interested idiots, and he makes his sale.
Meanwhile, mailing list owners are in a bit of a bind because they need to scale their system to the point that they have enough bandwidth and CPU power to support their list. Should every medium-sized mailing list have to invest in a cluster to send messages?
For these reasons, I don't think it's going to stop spam, although it might shift some of the cost away from receiving ISPs and users (especially those on dial-up).
If you do pursue it, I'd think you could build it very easily on top of SMTP. All you'd really need to do is add a new header identifying the message as a "detached address label", and a standardized message in the body that provides a URL to visit. If you're using a client that supports the protocol, it'll seamlessly pull the message from the origination server, otherwise it'll give you a URL that you can use to retrieve the message. ISPs can filter messages that have the wrong standardized body, and discard them as spam.
That's a fascinating idea I haven't heard before. Let me think it through a second.
How are recipients notified about an e-mail? Does the sending server push them a message? If so, what's in it? Just the recipient, or a full header? Since most spam filters are designed to consider the entire message, does not having it hinder our ability to filter out spam? Will big companies adopt it?
This idea has merit. Let's see where we can take it.
Make the government take action first, then follow what you're told. Period, end of story.
That's not the whole story. The public reaction to the DOJ subpoenas two weeks ago proves that customers expect companies to consider their actions from more than a financial perspective. Google won geek points by refusing to comply, and they also demonstrated that a government order doesn't need to be the "end of story."
Disclaimer: I'm not a Google fanboy. I'm merely applauding their actions in this one, specific, narrow case.
I'm not sure about you, but my vehicle has a metal sign with a set of letters and numbers several inches tall so they can be read at a distance. I had to pay a fee and register my identity with the government in order to obtain this sign, and the police seem to pull me over more often than other cars on the road if I don't have it displayed.
That's okay. I don't pay attention to analogies anyway unless the analogist shows me a government-issued photo ID with signature to prove he or she is not a terrorist.
If piracy is still rampant on P2P networks, and music sales are still down... doesn't that mean that more people are not buying the music that they claim on slashdot and elsewhere that they'd buy to support the band?
I just don't feel like giving my money to companies that have no qualms about suing over 17,000 people in the U.S. I don't download illegal files via P2P either.
I hope Slashdot readers take note of this development and "vote with their wallets" as they always claim to want to. Personally, I'll be purchasing one, and possibly two, CDs from Nettwerk today (my first in several years) because of this development.
1.) 60 Gigs of Music would take a good while to upload at 32k/sec. No arguments there, except that not everybody has 60 gigs of music, particularly legal music (I only have about 10 ripped from CDs I own, and that more than meets my needs).
2.) This assumes you always have internet connectivity. It assumes you always have Internet connectivity when you want to listen to your music. I'm near a computer surprisingly often throughout the day, and I always have access to broadband at those computers.
3.) Just seems like a huge pain really, and for what gain? There's several gains. It's one less thing to carry around in your pockets. While it's more expensive in the long run, the start-up costs of getting an account are cheap ($3.33 per month for all the disk space you need, versus at least $20 per month to pay off an iPod). The music is presumably backed up more carefully than a typical user's music would be, and immune from being dropped and other problematic situations. I won't deny that there's downsides - just fewer than you might think.
4.) I can do the same thing right now if I wanted to with my broadband connection. Yes, but not everybody else can. For example, I have broadband, but my upload speed isn't high enough to stream high-quality music. Even if it anybody could do this, there's always a market for individuals and companies that specialize in a particular service that you could technically do yourself, but at a higher opportunity cost. That's basic economics.
5.) This is more convienent than my iPod how? Cheaper in the short run maybe, but not more convienent. It depends on your activities. This would be incredibly useful for me, and if I didn't suspect the RIAA might sue me merely for being a member (even if all the music I upload is completely legal and I physically own the media it's ripped from) I might actually look into it a little more.
Are there seriously going to be any adopters for Vista beyond MS lackeys, and those in congress who received the top limit on campaign donations?
Yes. The substantial majority of people who purchase a new computer (excluding Macs) after Vista is released will adopt it. You and I and the rest of Slashdot are in the minority when it comes to caring about DRM. The rest of the public simply doesn't, and they won't bat an eye at this restriction.
Please be kind...this is my first attempt at writing a GreaseMonkey script, and I don't code very often anyway. It definitely has bugs. Hopefully a better coder can work from this to build something more robust.
// ==UserScript== // @name Hide Roland Piquepaille // @namespace http://slashdot.org/~Baricom // @description Hides Slashdot articles from the infamous submitter. // @include http://.slashdot.org/ // @include http://slashdot.org/ // ==/UserScript==
// Licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0 // http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
var submitters = document.evaluate('//div[@class="intro"]/a', document.getElementById('articles'), null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
for (var i = 0; i < submitters.snapshotLength; i++) {
submitter = submitters.snapshotItem(i).firstChild.nodeValue;
I totally agree with your point. I provide two examples for consideration.
First, I haven't left the Windows world to switch to Apple just yet, but I will as soon as it becomes time to junk this computer. Macs are incredibly powerful machines, but there's one thing I'll miss when I switch - full keyboard access to everything.
For most activities I do, I work with the keyboard much faster than I can move to the mouse. This includes menus, tab switching, and more. Keyboard shortcuts make my computer experience much easier and more efficient. I can reach most menu items with Alt shortcuts faster than Windows can draw the menu. Now, OS X does have a "Full Keyboard Access" option in their Accessibility System Preferences, but it's not the same. Ctrl+F1 plus 8 right arrows is a lot more time consuming than Alt+T to get to the Tools menu.
The Java interface I spend most of my time manipulating at work has similar problems. From what I can tell, it is simply impossible to use without a mouse. If it was a well-designed app, I could probably shave what takes me a full day to do down to about two hours.
To respond to your point, I don't believe that a simple key binding is the best solution to the problem (although it would have been a good stopgap measure). Emulating paper forms never struck me as the best way to move people to IT. If you drop the legacy way things are done, you can often develop a user interface that allows substantially better productivity.
By the way, I wish Slashdot had access keys attached to its forms.
Listen, if digg is so good, why don't you stay there? Seriously, I am fed up of all the people promoting digg on slashdot recently.
Ouch. I was going for a "Funny" mod. (Not very well, I suppose, since the moderator didn't get it either.)
If you read my post again, you'll see that I didn't say digg was any good, I wasn't trying to promote digg (and I think the lack of a link lends credence to that), and I'm not an astroturfer (compare the number and quality of my comments on Slashdot and digg).
The point I was trying to make is that it's not at all uncommon to see a post on Slashdot or digg copied to the other within a matter of hours. This annoys me to a certain extent because it means space that could be devoted to additional articles is spent "duping" the other service.
Slashdot and digg cater to a different audience, and the sites (particularly the comments) reflect that. I don't really think there's a competition here - people mention digg on Slashdot (and Slashdot on digg) because they read both. No big deal.
I personally don't like digg all that much. While some of the posts are interesting, many are lame and targeted for a younger crowd, and Slashdot tends to pick up the good ones fairly quickly. Plus, the comment quality from digg, for whatever reason, is abysmal. I do think there are problems with Slashdot's mix of articles (and dupes of articles), but on the whole, I prefer it because the comments that stay above +1 tend to be knowledgable and (dare I say it) educational.
Vint Cerf is still the Chair of ICANN (unless their web site is out of date). I imagine he has at least some pull in determining ICANN policy, which does affect the Internet on a day-to-day basis.
Steve Gibson publically committed on his web site that he would provide a free fix for earlier versions of Windows if Microsoft didn't. He was reverse-engineering the vulnerability and having difficulty making it run as Microsoft implied it would, when he stumbled on how to do this.
Of course, this is all described much more clearly in TFPodcast and presumably TFA.
I know many others are going to cringe at this, but I would suggest starting with PHP. It's not traditionally taught as a first language, but I think it has some positive qualities that might make it useful.
First, PHP shares much of its syntax with other popular languages today. It looks a lot like C*, Perl, Java, and JavaScript. The control structures, many of the operators, and other parts of the language are all remarkably similar. In my opinion, this will reduce your learning curve as you tradition to other languages.
Second, PHP is ubiquitous immediately applicable. You can find it installed on almost any web server, and in a variety of other places. It is designed around being used to create web pages, but it's also rich enough to use it as a general-purpose scripting language without much trouble. Additionally, the core functions take care of many details you may not want to deal with right away, but it gets out of your way if you want to dig deeper into how everything works.
For what it's worth, my learning path as a programmer was GW-BASIC to QBasic to Visual Basic to Perl. I started in elementary school by typing in programs from old children's books. I picked up OOP concepts from Visual Basic. Today, I do most of my programming in PHP, but I have a passing familiarity with Perl and to a lesser extent, Python.
I know a lot of languages, but none very well:)
The ability to do basic (no pun intended) programming is incredibly liberating. Good luck!
The question still stands though, what is the basis for a law making region-free players (somewhat) illegal? A company choosing to use regions for business purposes is a far cry from a legitimate federal law.
The algorithms for doing pretty much anything with DVD's (encoding, decoding, copy protecting, manufacturing, etc.) are patented. Because they're patented, you can't make a legal DVD player without permission from the inventors. You also can't say your machine plays DVD's because you don't have a trademark license.
When you go to the inventors for a license, one of the things you sign off on in the contract is (presumably) that you will lock your player so it only plays discs for the appropriate region.
My guesses as to why region-free players are so common: 1. It's cheaper for the company to manufacture generic players that have the region code set in firmware. 2. The companies manufacturing the players do business in countries that could care less about U.S. IP laws.
I absolutely adore Palm devices. I don't go anywhere without my Tungsten E. Yet, there's still some very small nitpicks I have with it. One of the main problems for me is battery life. My old IIIxe used to go for a month or two on a single pair of AAA batteries. Today, I need to charge nightly in order to keep the battery up. The screen is also a problem - I usually work in areas with lighting that requires me to turn the Palm's backlight up 100% just to read the screen.
If e-paper is as good as others have said, I would jump at the opportunity to carry a Palm-powered e-paper PDA. (Perhaps they could call it "Palm Canvas".) The PDA would be lighter, be easier to read in most light (perhaps with a backlight for those situations where I need it) and last longer on its batteries.
Combining Palm's PDA apps with e-paper would really get my attention. Having it not manufactured by Sony or DRM-encumbered would be really nice, too.
At least once a month the user should let the battery go down to zero and then charge it all the way back up.
iPod batteries are lithium-ion. They don't have a memory effect like nickel-cadium and some other kinds of rechargable batteries, so intentional maintenance is unnecessary - a full discharge just shortens the battery's life by one charge cycle. The only time you would want to do a full discharge and recharge is if the iPod won't be used for a month or so. See here and here for Apple's advice on the care of batteries.
Yes. Digital Restrictions Management (along with constantly-lengthening copyright terms) is being used to shortchange the public domain. The price creators are supposed to pay to get temporary copyright protection for their work is the work's eventual release to the public domain, and the ability to use it for appropriate fair-use purposes today. DRM ensures that neither will happen, ever.
Slashdot Mirror
This means that spammers would effectively have their mail server slashdotted if all the recipients connect to collect their mail.
Well, the problem is that the "spammer's mail server" is actually some poor schmuck on cable or DSL. Slashdotting that person's broadband connection will stop that node's e-mail and possibly teach the owner a lesson, but the spammer has a virtually infinite supply of Windows machines to infect and host his spam from.
Additionally, I don't open spam message bodies - I can tell from the subject line and author whether a message is legitimate or not. If there's a lot of other people like me, nothing's really changed. The spammer gets his message out to the interested idiots, and he makes his sale.
Meanwhile, mailing list owners are in a bit of a bind because they need to scale their system to the point that they have enough bandwidth and CPU power to support their list. Should every medium-sized mailing list have to invest in a cluster to send messages?
For these reasons, I don't think it's going to stop spam, although it might shift some of the cost away from receiving ISPs and users (especially those on dial-up).
If you do pursue it, I'd think you could build it very easily on top of SMTP. All you'd really need to do is add a new header identifying the message as a "detached address label", and a standardized message in the body that provides a URL to visit. If you're using a client that supports the protocol, it'll seamlessly pull the message from the origination server, otherwise it'll give you a URL that you can use to retrieve the message. ISPs can filter messages that have the wrong standardized body, and discard them as spam.
That's a fascinating idea I haven't heard before. Let me think it through a second.
How are recipients notified about an e-mail? Does the sending server push them a message? If so, what's in it? Just the recipient, or a full header? Since most spam filters are designed to consider the entire message, does not having it hinder our ability to filter out spam? Will big companies adopt it?
This idea has merit. Let's see where we can take it.
Make the government take action first, then follow what you're told. Period, end of story.
That's not the whole story. The public reaction to the DOJ subpoenas two weeks ago proves that customers expect companies to consider their actions from more than a financial perspective. Google won geek points by refusing to comply, and they also demonstrated that a government order doesn't need to be the "end of story."
Disclaimer: I'm not a Google fanboy. I'm merely applauding their actions in this one, specific, narrow case.
I'm not sure about you, but my vehicle has a metal sign with a set of letters and numbers several inches tall so they can be read at a distance. I had to pay a fee and register my identity with the government in order to obtain this sign, and the police seem to pull me over more often than other cars on the road if I don't have it displayed.
That's okay. I don't pay attention to analogies anyway unless the analogist shows me a government-issued photo ID with signature to prove he or she is not a terrorist.
If piracy is still rampant on P2P networks, and music sales are still down... doesn't that mean that more people are not buying the music that they claim on slashdot and elsewhere that they'd buy to support the band?
I just don't feel like giving my money to companies that have no qualms about suing over 17,000 people in the U.S. I don't download illegal files via P2P either.
I hope Slashdot readers take note of this development and "vote with their wallets" as they always claim to want to. Personally, I'll be purchasing one, and possibly two, CDs from Nettwerk today (my first in several years) because of this development.
Unless, of course, they're DRM'd.
1.) 60 Gigs of Music would take a good while to upload at 32k/sec.
No arguments there, except that not everybody has 60 gigs of music, particularly legal music (I only have about 10 ripped from CDs I own, and that more than meets my needs).
2.) This assumes you always have internet connectivity.
It assumes you always have Internet connectivity when you want to listen to your music. I'm near a computer surprisingly often throughout the day, and I always have access to broadband at those computers.
3.) Just seems like a huge pain really, and for what gain?
There's several gains. It's one less thing to carry around in your pockets. While it's more expensive in the long run, the start-up costs of getting an account are cheap ($3.33 per month for all the disk space you need, versus at least $20 per month to pay off an iPod). The music is presumably backed up more carefully than a typical user's music would be, and immune from being dropped and other problematic situations. I won't deny that there's downsides - just fewer than you might think.
4.) I can do the same thing right now if I wanted to with my broadband connection.
Yes, but not everybody else can. For example, I have broadband, but my upload speed isn't high enough to stream high-quality music. Even if it anybody could do this, there's always a market for individuals and companies that specialize in a particular service that you could technically do yourself, but at a higher opportunity cost. That's basic economics.
5.) This is more convienent than my iPod how? Cheaper in the short run maybe, but not more convienent.
It depends on your activities. This would be incredibly useful for me, and if I didn't suspect the RIAA might sue me merely for being a member (even if all the music I upload is completely legal and I physically own the media it's ripped from) I might actually look into it a little more.
Are there seriously going to be any adopters for Vista beyond MS lackeys, and those in congress who received the top limit on campaign donations?
Yes. The substantial majority of people who purchase a new computer (excluding Macs) after Vista is released will adopt it. You and I and the rest of Slashdot are in the minority when it comes to caring about DRM. The rest of the public simply doesn't, and they won't bat an eye at this restriction.
I totally agree with your point. I provide two examples for consideration.
First, I haven't left the Windows world to switch to Apple just yet, but I will as soon as it becomes time to junk this computer. Macs are incredibly powerful machines, but there's one thing I'll miss when I switch - full keyboard access to everything.
For most activities I do, I work with the keyboard much faster than I can move to the mouse. This includes menus, tab switching, and more. Keyboard shortcuts make my computer experience much easier and more efficient. I can reach most menu items with Alt shortcuts faster than Windows can draw the menu. Now, OS X does have a "Full Keyboard Access" option in their Accessibility System Preferences, but it's not the same. Ctrl+F1 plus 8 right arrows is a lot more time consuming than Alt+T to get to the Tools menu.
The Java interface I spend most of my time manipulating at work has similar problems. From what I can tell, it is simply impossible to use without a mouse. If it was a well-designed app, I could probably shave what takes me a full day to do down to about two hours.
To respond to your point, I don't believe that a simple key binding is the best solution to the problem (although it would have been a good stopgap measure). Emulating paper forms never struck me as the best way to move people to IT. If you drop the legacy way things are done, you can often develop a user interface that allows substantially better productivity.
By the way, I wish Slashdot had access keys attached to its forms.
Listen, if digg is so good, why don't you stay there? Seriously, I am fed up of all the people promoting digg on slashdot recently.
Ouch. I was going for a "Funny" mod. (Not very well, I suppose, since the moderator didn't get it either.)
If you read my post again, you'll see that I didn't say digg was any good, I wasn't trying to promote digg (and I think the lack of a link lends credence to that), and I'm not an astroturfer (compare the number and quality of my comments on Slashdot and digg).
The point I was trying to make is that it's not at all uncommon to see a post on Slashdot or digg copied to the other within a matter of hours. This annoys me to a certain extent because it means space that could be devoted to additional articles is spent "duping" the other service.
Slashdot and digg cater to a different audience, and the sites (particularly the comments) reflect that. I don't really think there's a competition here - people mention digg on Slashdot (and Slashdot on digg) because they read both. No big deal.
I personally don't like digg all that much. While some of the posts are interesting, many are lame and targeted for a younger crowd, and Slashdot tends to pick up the good ones fairly quickly. Plus, the comment quality from digg, for whatever reason, is abysmal. I do think there are problems with Slashdot's mix of articles (and dupes of articles), but on the whole, I prefer it because the comments that stay above +1 tend to be knowledgable and (dare I say it) educational.
If half of /. is taken out by a nuke then it still survives.
Isn't that what digg is for?
Sorry, no record this time.
Additionally, the reporter was quoting a memo written by a third party verbatim. In that context, the statement seems perfectly reasonable to me.
For people, stop on every other and walk up or down the stairs to the next floor.
I ride a wheelchair, you insensitive clod! (Actually, I don't, but you get the point.) And no, people with disabilities are not "freight."
Vint Cerf is still the Chair of ICANN (unless their web site is out of date). I imagine he has at least some pull in determining ICANN policy, which does affect the Internet on a day-to-day basis.
Basically, yes.
Steve Gibson publically committed on his web site that he would provide a free fix for earlier versions of Windows if Microsoft didn't. He was reverse-engineering the vulnerability and having difficulty making it run as Microsoft implied it would, when he stumbled on how to do this.
Of course, this is all described much more clearly in TFPodcast and presumably TFA.
Steve Jobs? Is that you?
I know many others are going to cringe at this, but I would suggest starting with PHP. It's not traditionally taught as a first language, but I think it has some positive qualities that might make it useful.
:)
First, PHP shares much of its syntax with other popular languages today. It looks a lot like C*, Perl, Java, and JavaScript. The control structures, many of the operators, and other parts of the language are all remarkably similar. In my opinion, this will reduce your learning curve as you tradition to other languages.
Second, PHP is ubiquitous immediately applicable. You can find it installed on almost any web server, and in a variety of other places. It is designed around being used to create web pages, but it's also rich enough to use it as a general-purpose scripting language without much trouble. Additionally, the core functions take care of many details you may not want to deal with right away, but it gets out of your way if you want to dig deeper into how everything works.
For what it's worth, my learning path as a programmer was GW-BASIC to QBasic to Visual Basic to Perl. I started in elementary school by typing in programs from old children's books. I picked up OOP concepts from Visual Basic. Today, I do most of my programming in PHP, but I have a passing familiarity with Perl and to a lesser extent, Python.
I know a lot of languages, but none very well
The ability to do basic (no pun intended) programming is incredibly liberating. Good luck!
IANAL...
The question still stands though, what is the basis for a law making region-free players (somewhat) illegal? A company choosing to use regions for business purposes is a far cry from a legitimate federal law.
The algorithms for doing pretty much anything with DVD's (encoding, decoding, copy protecting, manufacturing, etc.) are patented. Because they're patented, you can't make a legal DVD player without permission from the inventors. You also can't say your machine plays DVD's because you don't have a trademark license.
When you go to the inventors for a license, one of the things you sign off on in the contract is (presumably) that you will lock your player so it only plays discs for the appropriate region.
My guesses as to why region-free players are so common:
1. It's cheaper for the company to manufacture generic players that have the region code set in firmware.
2. The companies manufacturing the players do business in countries that could care less about U.S. IP laws.
I'm at a loss of what I will replace it with (due to losing all of my PalmOS apps unless I can find another).
The obvious answer would be a Treo. Anything in particular keeping you from them?
I absolutely adore Palm devices. I don't go anywhere without my Tungsten E. Yet, there's still some very small nitpicks I have with it. One of the main problems for me is battery life. My old IIIxe used to go for a month or two on a single pair of AAA batteries. Today, I need to charge nightly in order to keep the battery up. The screen is also a problem - I usually work in areas with lighting that requires me to turn the Palm's backlight up 100% just to read the screen.
If e-paper is as good as others have said, I would jump at the opportunity to carry a Palm-powered e-paper PDA. (Perhaps they could call it "Palm Canvas".) The PDA would be lighter, be easier to read in most light (perhaps with a backlight for those situations where I need it) and last longer on its batteries.
Combining Palm's PDA apps with e-paper would really get my attention. Having it not manufactured by Sony or DRM-encumbered would be really nice, too.
At least once a month the user should let the battery go down to zero and then charge it all the way back up.
iPod batteries are lithium-ion. They don't have a memory effect like nickel-cadium and some other kinds of rechargable batteries, so intentional maintenance is unnecessary - a full discharge just shortens the battery's life by one charge cycle. The only time you would want to do a full discharge and recharge is if the iPod won't be used for a month or so. See here and here for Apple's advice on the care of batteries.
Is it always evil to use DRM?
Yes. Digital Restrictions Management (along with constantly-lengthening copyright terms) is being used to shortchange the public domain. The price creators are supposed to pay to get temporary copyright protection for their work is the work's eventual release to the public domain, and the ability to use it for appropriate fair-use purposes today. DRM ensures that neither will happen, ever.
Thanks for teaching me something new today. I had no idea Sprint was an acronym. I'm sorry I don't have any mod points for you.