Specifically: I have no problem buying a product if it is worth it (there is opinion here, my value assignment may be higher/lower then yours) I do not buy DRM stuff for my PCs. I only allow iTunes and similar stuff on one PC in the house (as a pragmatic issue), not on any others. I would watch downloaded movies from the studios if they made them available, I'd even deal with an embedded ad or two and one trailer (more than that and I'll start looking for something stripped of that). Look to Netflix as a viable business model. -nB
At some point that will stop as well because those in the know will want to preserve their last free zones and protect them from the masses, because once the masses can get there easily so can the lawyers. The other option is a darknet/TOR style network, but latency and throughput suck enough that it is not a very viable option. -nB
That is actually really cool, but the opening for trolling is huge! name your file todays.hot.movie.avi but have it be a slideshow of the best ever internet toll shock images... aside from that however, I think it is a really interesting idea for dense areas where person to person near field contact is likely (NY, SF, London, Tokyo, etc.) -nB
CFCs are still available for specialty applications, a waiver is required from the EPA, and for you or me that is no easy feat. For NASA this should have been doable. IIRC there were several studies on the new foam and it was found lacking in insulation qualities and adhesion qualities, what I don't know is if they put 2 and 2 together: lower insulation == greater porosity, which == more water can be adsorbed and frozen. Poorer adhesion means more likely to fracture and fall off. Combined, the added water weight makes the adhesion issue worse, and also increases the mass of the striking element, thus increasing the damage. WRT Columbia, the chunk that fell off hit a particularly unfortunate part of the shuttle and was unusually large, in all other cases the damage was a non issue. Statistically Columbia was possible, but highly unlikely, I accept that, but I don't have to like it. -nB
I don't think most people would find it acceptable if one of our clinical trials said 'drug X is pretty dangerous and will likely kill people' and we shrugged and put it out anyway.
I know of one case/class of drugs where this is a true statement, and yet is considered acceptable (but again the tradeoff is worse): Chemotherapy drugs. Some of those are downright nasty, of course if you don't take them you are guaranteed to die... but they do have a much higher risk of death than normal meds. -nB
Fine then, I will stipulate to every space related "accident" being preventable. Some of these incidents were acceptable risk, even if there was the possibility of risk mitigation.
Using rad hardened parts and still getting a rad induced error (has happened): mitigation triple up on flight electronics and use the voting system. result: we would not have sent both mars rovers, likely neither because of the cost.
Unshielded electronics short out in LEO (or GEO, or GTO): add shielding, making the payload heavier, requiring more fuel for station keeping. Engineering likely did the risk assessment and chose less shilding to lower cost over something that certainly was less than 1% probability, likely less than 0.1%. etc. most of the accidents could be prevented: true. At what cost? slower space development progress, higher cost, etc. One place where you will not get any argument from me is Challenger and Columbia. Both those were immensely preventable. -nB
I do believe you are both rather correct, but looking at separate issues. oh_my is harping specifically on management ignoring the rocket scientists specifically tasked with knowing if it is safe to launch, and to that end he is correct. Then he goes and generalizes it, which, I suspect is where you take issue.
You point out that spaceflight is inherently dangerous, this is true. Everyone signs on knowing it could be their last trip, the Apollo guys knowing it could be a 1 way trip to the moon, where they would eventually suffocate... I think that'd be worse than blowing up myself. But even you have to admit that in the case of Challenger it was a needless loss of life caused by (mis)management stupidity and pigheadedness. -nB
And of all these fatalities, only Challenger was genuinely preventable. All the other deaths happened as a result of an accident (though I have my own feelings about Columbia*), and those accidental deaths were accepted by those who took the risk as possible. Do we want them to have died? no. Could we have prevented it? Yes, with hindsight.
Challenger was an example of everything that is broken in the space program, much how we harp on megacorps here for not looking longer term then the next quarter or possibly the next year for business results, the NASA management looked no farther than "This launch is being simulcast to thousands of schools for the first teacher in space. Launch the SOB we don't want to disappoint the kiddos." Well I have a news flash for them, us kiddos (I was watching live in my 6th grade class) were beyond disappointed, my teacher was weeping in the back of the room, and all of a sudden space was no longer wondrous, but rather scary for most all of us. -nB * Columbia was preventable had NASA not embraced the tree huggers and switched to a CFC free foam for the main fuel tank. The new foam had a higher porosity and poorer adhesion. Let's face it, there are not enough shuttle launches in a year to appreciably matter when it comes to CFC emissions from making the foam insulation, and the SRB exhaust is much worse for the environment anyway./rant
I was responding to the specific difference of whipping it out Vs. viewing a photo. The photo is a first amendment issue, while there is plenty of case law to support indecency charges. I do not *know* that the photos would be protected, but I reasonably believe they are, and would refuse to censor them as it is the first step to censoring undesirable speech. First they came for the porn viewers and I said nothing because I wasn't a porn viewer, then they came for the occupy folks, and I did not say anything because I was not an occupy person, then they came for the political dissenters, but I said nothing because I did not dissent, then they came for me, but there was no one left to speak for me. type issue. -nB
oblig followup: At some point one must make the decision is it better to pay the penalty for non-compliance, or for what evidence is there that would incriminate you. That is the pragmatic view. One thing I do that is mathematically provable and while would net me a destruction of evidence charge, would permanently hide all the data: I have a small 10 meg partition that is loaded by truecrypt with a password (25 alphanumeric). This partition has a shell script that loads the crypto keys and drive mappings for all the other drives on the server. I do not know these keys. If I corrupt the 10 meg block with a dev/zero then I can not ever load the other drives. Also, I can truthfully say I do not know the password for the drives, and so long as they don't ask for the password for the 10 meg block I still have not lied (just not stated the whole truth). -nB
This may be a stretch, but: they ask for the password, give them gibberish. when they come back and ask again, you point out you never promised to tell them the truth. they get pissy, and make you: swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God. you then plead the fifth, as they are asking you at that point to testify against yourself.
I seriously have issues with this as a precedent. -nB
Because, like it or not, the photo is protected, but the act is not. (I can already see the counter argument of freedom of expression). that simple really.
I believe it is a protected thing, mostly because I do not want to have any slippery slope. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean it should not be protected. I applaud the library for obviously being staunch supporters of the first amendment.
All of that said, I think the guy is quite an asshole. Talking about no taste in public behavior. -nB
I had a friend who just bought a bluray player/drive for his PC. The software player it shipped with was out of date and they wanted to charge $70 for an update. He bought anyDVDHD instead. heh. -nB
I do backups on my home array, and I have a mirror for StuffThatMatters (tm). I still run fsck & chkdisk on my linux and windows machines. More than once I have had them raise flags about a drive that had recoverable read errors. This means it is time to add a new drive to the mirror or a new JBOD disk and re-sync or copy everything over to the new disk and unjoin ore remove the failing disk. While downtime is not an issue for me at home, it is inconvenient. Having these tools run at night when I don't need the machine allows me to not even have to deal with restoring my backups. Much Easier. -nB
I'm still hating on carter to present, with a small exemption for Regan, mostly because he was from CA and I am from CA (and the Berlin wall thing), I'm only disliking him. Seriously though, I think we need a new rule: If someone wants to be POTUS, then they are obviously not qualified mentally to be POTUS, and under no circumstances should be given access to the football. -nB
This is true *but*: There is a hard rule in aircraft assembly that the bolt be placed head up nut down. This is to protect the plane if/when a nut falls off, gravity will still hold the bolt in place, hopefully long enough to land, or at least to eject. This is not an optional rule, and assembly workers have it drilled into them at their new hire instruction, and every annual refresher, and whenever someone sees a mistake in QA, and just because someone thought now would be a good time to bring it up again. It is "how it's done". <- full stop Now, in this particular case, a dumbass engineer decided to have the bolt installed in contravention of this hard rule. He chose this because in the other orientation there was an issue with control cables, and for whatever reason the following options were not viable: move the bolt hole, use a shorter bolt, re-route the control cable. The worker put the bolt in the way that she is "supposed to always" install bolts. Naturally this was not the right way for this bolt, and she is not blameless, but she is also not to be blamed for the entirety of the issue. She should have called her supervisor over and complained that the design conflicts with her training. Then put the bolt in upside down when her supervisor tells her to "just do it, will ya". I still refuse to hold her as the sole cause of the issue. I've had people where I work refuse to do something against the "always do it this way" kind of rules and a design calls out something against that. 9/10 times we kick back the design as invalid. 1/10 we end up doing it, but only after everyone on the team has been trained that this one widget goes in wrong, and why. It prevents the "I know better" issues with people.
To sum up: Just because you don't pay them to think does not mean they will not think. Better to explain to them why things are done wrong in a particular case, then they will understand that it is not a stupid mistake that needs correcting, but rather a design tradeoff that had to be made. -nB
Specifically the acronym means Digital Rights Management. Embedding who is licensed to use the file is part of the rights management. It is not CP ans in HDCP where you specifically are preventing copying, it is about managing rights. I have often thought DRM in its self is not evil, just that it is being used to do evil things, much like firearms don't kill people, it is the person using the firearm that causes the death of another person.
I prefer once more into/unto the breach. But loosing the dogs of war will do fine, thank you.
I try very hard not to judge people by their misuse of words, but to me there are some mistakes that instantly set my brain into "this person is 13 years old" mode. Namely when someone uses there instead of their (or less commonly their instead of they're). Now I should know better because I correct my wife's papers and she's got a fistful of degrees and still makes homonym errors galore, but the fact remains it makes you look less skilled. Here on/. it is harder to judge. Is the person young, English a second (or third or fourth) language, trolling for Grammar Nazi posts? Also,/. is somewhere between blog postings and IM convos, in the former I expect excellent grammar, while in the latter (and on/.) you can not correct errors once you've posted...
AFAIK neither of those formats are actually "free" they both are licensed. Just that they are well documented and the genie is out of the bottle making actual licensing difficult or impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically:
I have no problem buying a product if it is worth it (there is opinion here, my value assignment may be higher/lower then yours)
I do not buy DRM stuff for my PCs. I only allow iTunes and similar stuff on one PC in the house (as a pragmatic issue), not on any others.
I would watch downloaded movies from the studios if they made them available, I'd even deal with an embedded ad or two and one trailer (more than that and I'll start looking for something stripped of that).
Look to Netflix as a viable business model.
-nB
*blink*
At some point that will stop as well because those in the know will want to preserve their last free zones and protect them from the masses, because once the masses can get there easily so can the lawyers.
The other option is a darknet/TOR style network, but latency and throughput suck enough that it is not a very viable option.
-nB
That is actually really cool, but the opening for trolling is huge!
name your file todays.hot.movie.avi but have it be a slideshow of the best ever internet toll shock images...
aside from that however, I think it is a really interesting idea for dense areas where person to person near field contact is likely (NY, SF, London, Tokyo, etc.)
-nB
I'd go with:
"Hey Cary! Welcome to the Internet, now GTFO."
-nB
CFCs are still available for specialty applications, a waiver is required from the EPA, and for you or me that is no easy feat. For NASA this should have been doable. IIRC there were several studies on the new foam and it was found lacking in insulation qualities and adhesion qualities, what I don't know is if they put 2 and 2 together: lower insulation == greater porosity, which == more water can be adsorbed and frozen. Poorer adhesion means more likely to fracture and fall off. Combined, the added water weight makes the adhesion issue worse, and also increases the mass of the striking element, thus increasing the damage. WRT Columbia, the chunk that fell off hit a particularly unfortunate part of the shuttle and was unusually large, in all other cases the damage was a non issue. Statistically Columbia was possible, but highly unlikely, I accept that, but I don't have to like it.
-nB
I don't think most people would find it acceptable if one of our clinical trials said 'drug X is pretty dangerous and will likely kill people' and we shrugged and put it out anyway.
I know of one case/class of drugs where this is a true statement, and yet is considered acceptable (but again the tradeoff is worse): Chemotherapy drugs. Some of those are downright nasty, of course if you don't take them you are guaranteed to die... but they do have a much higher risk of death than normal meds.
-nB
Fine then, I will stipulate to every space related "accident" being preventable.
Some of these incidents were acceptable risk, even if there was the possibility of risk mitigation.
Using rad hardened parts and still getting a rad induced error (has happened): mitigation triple up on flight electronics and use the voting system. result: we would not have sent both mars rovers, likely neither because of the cost.
Unshielded electronics short out in LEO (or GEO, or GTO): add shielding, making the payload heavier, requiring more fuel for station keeping. Engineering likely did the risk assessment and chose less shilding to lower cost over something that certainly was less than 1% probability, likely less than 0.1%.
etc.
most of the accidents could be prevented: true. At what cost? slower space development progress, higher cost, etc.
One place where you will not get any argument from me is Challenger and Columbia. Both those were immensely preventable.
-nB
Since you're both douche bags.... ;)
I do believe you are both rather correct, but looking at separate issues.
oh_my is harping specifically on management ignoring the rocket scientists specifically tasked with knowing if it is safe to launch, and to that end he is correct. Then he goes and generalizes it, which, I suspect is where you take issue.
You point out that spaceflight is inherently dangerous, this is true. Everyone signs on knowing it could be their last trip, the Apollo guys knowing it could be a 1 way trip to the moon, where they would eventually suffocate... I think that'd be worse than blowing up myself. But even you have to admit that in the case of Challenger it was a needless loss of life caused by (mis)management stupidity and pigheadedness.
-nB
And of all these fatalities, only Challenger was genuinely preventable.
All the other deaths happened as a result of an accident (though I have my own feelings about Columbia*), and those accidental deaths were accepted by those who took the risk as possible. Do we want them to have died? no. Could we have prevented it? Yes, with hindsight.
Challenger was an example of everything that is broken in the space program, much how we harp on megacorps here for not looking longer term then the next quarter or possibly the next year for business results, the NASA management looked no farther than "This launch is being simulcast to thousands of schools for the first teacher in space. Launch the SOB we don't want to disappoint the kiddos." Well I have a news flash for them, us kiddos (I was watching live in my 6th grade class) were beyond disappointed, my teacher was weeping in the back of the room, and all of a sudden space was no longer wondrous, but rather scary for most all of us. /rant
-nB
* Columbia was preventable had NASA not embraced the tree huggers and switched to a CFC free foam for the main fuel tank. The new foam had a higher porosity and poorer adhesion. Let's face it, there are not enough shuttle launches in a year to appreciably matter when it comes to CFC emissions from making the foam insulation, and the SRB exhaust is much worse for the environment anyway.
I was responding to the specific difference of whipping it out Vs. viewing a photo. The photo is a first amendment issue, while there is plenty of case law to support indecency charges. I do not *know* that the photos would be protected, but I reasonably believe they are, and would refuse to censor them as it is the first step to censoring undesirable speech.
First they came for the porn viewers and I said nothing because I wasn't a porn viewer, then they came for the occupy folks, and I did not say anything because I was not an occupy person, then they came for the political dissenters, but I said nothing because I did not dissent, then they came for me, but there was no one left to speak for me. type issue.
-nB
oblig followup:
At some point one must make the decision is it better to pay the penalty for non-compliance, or for what evidence is there that would incriminate you. That is the pragmatic view. One thing I do that is mathematically provable and while would net me a destruction of evidence charge, would permanently hide all the data:
I have a small 10 meg partition that is loaded by truecrypt with a password (25 alphanumeric). This partition has a shell script that loads the crypto keys and drive mappings for all the other drives on the server. I do not know these keys. If I corrupt the 10 meg block with a dev/zero then I can not ever load the other drives.
Also, I can truthfully say I do not know the password for the drives, and so long as they don't ask for the password for the 10 meg block I still have not lied (just not stated the whole truth).
-nB
This may be a stretch, but:
they ask for the password, give them gibberish.
when they come back and ask again, you point out you never promised to tell them the truth.
they get pissy, and make you:
swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God.
you then plead the fifth, as they are asking you at that point to testify against yourself.
I seriously have issues with this as a precedent.
-nB
Because, like it or not, the photo is protected, but the act is not. (I can already see the counter argument of freedom of expression).
that simple really.
I believe it is a protected thing, mostly because I do not want to have any slippery slope. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean it should not be protected. I applaud the library for obviously being staunch supporters of the first amendment.
All of that said, I think the guy is quite an asshole.
Talking about no taste in public behavior.
-nB
I had a friend who just bought a bluray player/drive for his PC. The software player it shipped with was out of date and they wanted to charge $70 for an update. He bought anyDVDHD instead.
heh.
-nB
I do backups on my home array, and I have a mirror for StuffThatMatters (tm). I still run fsck & chkdisk on my linux and windows machines. More than once I have had them raise flags about a drive that had recoverable read errors. This means it is time to add a new drive to the mirror or a new JBOD disk and re-sync or copy everything over to the new disk and unjoin ore remove the failing disk. While downtime is not an issue for me at home, it is inconvenient. Having these tools run at night when I don't need the machine allows me to not even have to deal with restoring my backups.
Much Easier.
-nB
I'm still hating on carter to present, with a small exemption for Regan, mostly because he was from CA and I am from CA (and the Berlin wall thing), I'm only disliking him.
Seriously though, I think we need a new rule:
If someone wants to be POTUS, then they are obviously not qualified mentally to be POTUS, and under no circumstances should be given access to the football.
-nB
This is true *but*:
There is a hard rule in aircraft assembly that the bolt be placed head up nut down. This is to protect the plane if/when a nut falls off, gravity will still hold the bolt in place, hopefully long enough to land, or at least to eject.
This is not an optional rule, and assembly workers have it drilled into them at their new hire instruction, and every annual refresher, and whenever someone sees a mistake in QA, and just because someone thought now would be a good time to bring it up again.
It is "how it's done". <- full stop
Now, in this particular case, a dumbass engineer decided to have the bolt installed in contravention of this hard rule. He chose this because in the other orientation there was an issue with control cables, and for whatever reason the following options were not viable: move the bolt hole, use a shorter bolt, re-route the control cable.
The worker put the bolt in the way that she is "supposed to always" install bolts. Naturally this was not the right way for this bolt, and she is not blameless, but she is also not to be blamed for the entirety of the issue. She should have called her supervisor over and complained that the design conflicts with her training. Then put the bolt in upside down when her supervisor tells her to "just do it, will ya".
I still refuse to hold her as the sole cause of the issue. I've had people where I work refuse to do something against the "always do it this way" kind of rules and a design calls out something against that. 9/10 times we kick back the design as invalid. 1/10 we end up doing it, but only after everyone on the team has been trained that this one widget goes in wrong, and why. It prevents the "I know better" issues with people.
To sum up: Just because you don't pay them to think does not mean they will not think. Better to explain to them why things are done wrong in a particular case, then they will understand that it is not a stupid mistake that needs correcting, but rather a design tradeoff that had to be made.
-nB
excellent analogy.
+999 internets to you good sir.
Specifically the acronym means Digital Rights Management. Embedding who is licensed to use the file is part of the rights management.
It is not CP ans in HDCP where you specifically are preventing copying, it is about managing rights. I have often thought DRM in its self is not evil, just that it is being used to do evil things, much like firearms don't kill people, it is the person using the firearm that causes the death of another person.
Low energy xrays have a higher capture by the body, and thus are actually more damaging.
I prefer once more into/unto the breach. But loosing the dogs of war will do fine, thank you.
I try very hard not to judge people by their misuse of words, but to me there are some mistakes that instantly set my brain into "this person is 13 years old" mode. /. it is harder to judge. Is the person young, English a second (or third or fourth) language, trolling for Grammar Nazi posts? /. is somewhere between blog postings and IM convos, in the former I expect excellent grammar, while in the latter (and on /.) you can not correct errors once you've posted...
Namely when someone uses there instead of their (or less commonly their instead of they're).
Now I should know better because I correct my wife's papers and she's got a fistful of degrees and still makes homonym errors galore, but the fact remains it makes you look less skilled.
Here on
Also,
AFAIK neither of those formats are actually "free" they both are licensed. Just that they are well documented and the genie is out of the bottle making actual licensing difficult or impossible.