I don't think as as society we're at any risk of putting animals at the same level of humans because we have laws against abusing animals (or certain cute ones at least). Nowhere in banning animal cruelty are animals legally raised to the level of humans. It simply recognizes them as sentient creatures that can be harmed. I think that's fair. Using your example of corporations, even if corporations did not have as many rights as they do, you'd still be punished for property crimes against a corporation as you would for such crimes against a person. Because even corporations with limited power can own property.
I disagree with a registry because I don't think we should punish people without having a well thought-out set of rights for the accused and convicted, and a set of punishments that fit crimes, as in our criminal justice system generally (to whatever degree that's true). Registries are abused by prosecutors today and there aren't really effective checks against that.
I guess the point of the registry would be that pet stores and humane societies would be able to check prospective owners against the list. In that sense we have "traffic violation registries" in that our driving records are kept and used by, for example, insurance companies.
As with sex offender registries, there is lots of potential for abuse by heavy-handed prosecutors trying to rack up impressive conviction and registry stats. From what I've read about sex offender registries, the concept of these sorts of registries is not mature or well-vetted. Until protections for the accused are strongly built into the system as is the case with the normal criminal justice system I can't in all honesty support registries for anything. And I guess that includes traffic records.
This is generally a good point. Many common programming errors aren't handled any better in managed environments than native ones.
Interestingly enough, I've worked on a C++ app with a "CPU leak" bug. Some versions of wxWidgets on Linux (such as 2.8.10, which is the current stable release and packaged by many distros) have a bug where certain apps will eat CPU this way if left open but unfocused and idle. Audacity is one such app -- I'm an Audacity developer and none of us could figure out a way to work around the problem.
The point isn't that the business model is illegitimate. The point is that implementing effective DRM in open-source software is practically more difficult than doing it in closed-source. I'm not really sure how they plan on stopping someone from re-compiling Moonlight with patches to save the video to the hard drive.
Such a thing probably violates some patent license, so no reputable distro would package it directly. But if its use became widespread there would be lots of pressure on Microsoft to disallow F/OSS implementations, to come up with DRM extensions that couldn't be used. And then it would become impossible to run many Silverlight apps on Linux at all.
Really, in theory, the same is true of closed-source software. Assembly hackers disassemble and reverse-engineer closed-source apps all the time in order to break their DRM. It's just harder to do, takes longer, and few people are qualified to do it. Eventually "Trusted Computing" is the answer (for some value of "answer") I guess.
It's not government vs. corporations that determines the capability for abuse. It's the degree to which people have choices.
Most people have no reasonable choice to walk away from their employer's health insurance plan. People with lots of money can go out-of-network, pay cash, buy individual insurance, etc., but most people only have one realistic option. Which is why it truly is devastating when an insurer denies coverage. When an insurer decides a condition was "pre-existing" after you've already received treatment (which seems absurd to me -- if an insurer wants to deny you coverage for something they should tell you before you sign up with them so you can make an informed decision to look elsewhere).
So the answer, of course, isn't the status quo, and it's clearly not a government takeover. It's decoupling your health insurance from your employer. Give people real choice. Allow individual insurance to work (a major reason that it doesn't is that employer insurance is heavily subsidized by the government).
Maybe he hasn't. I have. That's not what it says. The movie has a great sense of urgency for precisely that reason: when we start seeing dramatic things close to home it will be too late.
Oddly enough I have witnessed a computer download a virus right before my eyes when that really wasn't what I wanted. I was using some cheesy mail program that came with Windows 95 (that was dumb) and I tried to right-click a spammy message to delete it... it opened the message, executed the script, and 15 minutes later I was reformatting the HD.
Honestly, I have always opened accounts at big corporate banks because I'm in a phase in my life where I'm moving and traveling a lot, and there's a better chance a big bank will have branches and ATMs the next place I go. When I'm more settled I'll probably prefer something more local.
I assume you don't think a human at Slashdot HQ should moderate all posts before they appear. Your argument seems plausible to me when I think about how it affects a video site like YouTube, but when it comes to text comments it seems draconian.
I can understand a legal framework under which YouTube is fine and one under which every video puts it at great risk. Hell, a country could decide that the "publisher" is responsible for unmoderated forum/mailing list/newsgroup posts. The only thing wrong with doing that is that it's impractical; so much of the Internet is "post first, moderate later", that they'd leave many providers of useful services little option but to block all Italian IPs.
Perhaps that's the answer. Imagine that all mailing lists, forums, and newsgroups just stopped serving Italy. It's the logical end result of their policies. Italy would lose out of so much of the useful Internet that they'd have little choice but to go along.
This is one of those things that's only an issue because Apple's store is the only way to get content.
Clearly Apple has a right to choose what goes in their store. I don't have an iPhone but I'd be pretty annoyed if I had to scroll through "apps" that aren't even really apps to get what I was looking for.
But, then, if Apple's store wasn't the only store in town they could keep very high standards and let other stores sell image/points collections and other bullshit.
I wound up installing Kubuntu after my Gentoo machine died. I found that as often as not the solutions on an UbuntuForums search are outdated or even wrong. Even when a thread contains the right answer you have to extract it from all the wrong answers that are surely there. But, then again, I only really search for things I can't figure out myself, or when I know how to do something but want to make sure to do it in a way such that my changes won't get blown away by an update. Maybe for easy stuff it's a decent resource.
Yeah, really. I'm pretty sure 29c/CD is more than I paid total for the last spindle of CDs I bought here in the US.
A media levy would suck for me. I don't P2P and I burn my own music onto those discs.
Ultimately a media levy taxes the wrong thing. People consuming pirated material in large volumes don't use limited-write media like CD-Rs. They use MP3 players with hard drives they can write very many times. I'm sure there's a levy on those as well, but I bet those users pay proportionally far less.
So I guess I like neither the US nor Canadian ways of trying to deal with piracy. Where I probably disagree with most on Slashdot is that I'm perfectly OK with music labels suing file sharers for as much as they can get -- as long as they can properly prove who did it (in many cases their evidence and procedures have been sketchy, which is obviously not OK). Putative damages exist for a reason, and I have no sympathy for anyone caught by the RIAA that's actually guilty.
There are lots of reasons to want good F/OSS graphics drivers. For example: the binary ATI graphics driver doesn't work with on kernels with the realtime-preempt patches, which seem to help JACK-related stuff considerably. I don't think Nvidia's binary drivers do either. F/OSS drivers can be a lot more flexible in this regard. Intel's graphics driver works, for example.
Large companies can have lots of domains and lots of IP addresses. They can deliver ad video from the same domains and IP addresses they deliver content from. Flash is a single point that I can block. I can use Flashblock on Firefox, I can have browsers that can't find the Flash plugin, etc. Really, most types of ads don't bother me much other than the Flash ads.
There are non-flash floating mouse-over ads that are being used already. Those are, AFAIK, tough to block. HTML5 will make it possible to do more without Flash. It's probably a good thing overall that more is possible in HTML, but it will be harder to block ads.
But usually a DoS is about preventing the server from responding to a request from any client. It sounds like he hacked the clients... all of them. I'm sure it was fun, but is that a DoS? A client with better security would not have been affected.
I always think of DoS meaning flooding a system with requests, causing all resources to be used, thus nobody can get service.
It seems like this guy just found a "Halt and Catch Fire" instruction and an overly trusting security policy. Which may have been a first something, but not really a DoS, right? Or am I missing something?
Does it matter if you're countersued in Iceland if you just don't go there?
If someone sued me for libel in the UK I wouldn't bother responding -- I've never been there and don't plan on going, so there's really not much their government can do short of trying to get me extradited (seems unlikely for a civil case). As far as the "peasants" are concerned, unless those peasants need to do business in Iceland it probably won't affect them.
Dual-booting is a real pain if you need to actually do work on two different OSes. Especially between Windows and Linux. It's likely you'll have files you need on both systems, so... what filesystem are you going to use for that? FAT?
I can understand dual-booting in a couple situations. First, if you're considering switching, say, to Linux, but you're not sure. And, second, if you're going to use the secondary OS for something isolated like games.
When I need Windows (for development purposes) I run it in KVM. I don't have to install nearly as much software duplicating what I already have in Linux because Linux is still running.
That's because OOo is a flaming pile of shit. High in the running for least inspired, most crufty, most flaky computer program I've ever used. Every version I've used has sucked in different ways, in approximately equal magnitude, so I don't really know what's lost if it's never updated again.
You don't like the way the developer advertises his app. I don't like the fact that Apple decides for him how he can do it.
Why do people that don't own iPhones care? Because we don't want to own iPhones. We would rather that closed ecosystems lose mindshare and fail so we aren't economically compelled to write software for them.
The iPhone OS is right for a phone with a tiny screen. If you have a bigger screen and want to use it for more computer-like things you'll want an OS that gives you more power. The original Eee PC had a stripped-down UI; how many people kept it and how many replaced it with something more flexible (whether Windows or a normal Linux WM)?
Oh, yeah, you'll also want the freedom to install any software you want, including stuff that Apple, in arbitrary fashion, would deny you.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think as as society we're at any risk of putting animals at the same level of humans because we have laws against abusing animals (or certain cute ones at least). Nowhere in banning animal cruelty are animals legally raised to the level of humans. It simply recognizes them as sentient creatures that can be harmed. I think that's fair. Using your example of corporations, even if corporations did not have as many rights as they do, you'd still be punished for property crimes against a corporation as you would for such crimes against a person. Because even corporations with limited power can own property.
I disagree with a registry because I don't think we should punish people without having a well thought-out set of rights for the accused and convicted, and a set of punishments that fit crimes, as in our criminal justice system generally (to whatever degree that's true). Registries are abused by prosecutors today and there aren't really effective checks against that.
I guess the point of the registry would be that pet stores and humane societies would be able to check prospective owners against the list. In that sense we have "traffic violation registries" in that our driving records are kept and used by, for example, insurance companies.
As with sex offender registries, there is lots of potential for abuse by heavy-handed prosecutors trying to rack up impressive conviction and registry stats. From what I've read about sex offender registries, the concept of these sorts of registries is not mature or well-vetted. Until protections for the accused are strongly built into the system as is the case with the normal criminal justice system I can't in all honesty support registries for anything. And I guess that includes traffic records.
This is generally a good point. Many common programming errors aren't handled any better in managed environments than native ones.
Interestingly enough, I've worked on a C++ app with a "CPU leak" bug. Some versions of wxWidgets on Linux (such as 2.8.10, which is the current stable release and packaged by many distros) have a bug where certain apps will eat CPU this way if left open but unfocused and idle. Audacity is one such app -- I'm an Audacity developer and none of us could figure out a way to work around the problem.
The point isn't that the business model is illegitimate. The point is that implementing effective DRM in open-source software is practically more difficult than doing it in closed-source. I'm not really sure how they plan on stopping someone from re-compiling Moonlight with patches to save the video to the hard drive.
Such a thing probably violates some patent license, so no reputable distro would package it directly. But if its use became widespread there would be lots of pressure on Microsoft to disallow F/OSS implementations, to come up with DRM extensions that couldn't be used. And then it would become impossible to run many Silverlight apps on Linux at all.
Really, in theory, the same is true of closed-source software. Assembly hackers disassemble and reverse-engineer closed-source apps all the time in order to break their DRM. It's just harder to do, takes longer, and few people are qualified to do it. Eventually "Trusted Computing" is the answer (for some value of "answer") I guess.
It's not government vs. corporations that determines the capability for abuse. It's the degree to which people have choices.
Most people have no reasonable choice to walk away from their employer's health insurance plan. People with lots of money can go out-of-network, pay cash, buy individual insurance, etc., but most people only have one realistic option. Which is why it truly is devastating when an insurer denies coverage. When an insurer decides a condition was "pre-existing" after you've already received treatment (which seems absurd to me -- if an insurer wants to deny you coverage for something they should tell you before you sign up with them so you can make an informed decision to look elsewhere).
So the answer, of course, isn't the status quo, and it's clearly not a government takeover. It's decoupling your health insurance from your employer. Give people real choice. Allow individual insurance to work (a major reason that it doesn't is that employer insurance is heavily subsidized by the government).
Maybe he hasn't. I have. That's not what it says. The movie has a great sense of urgency for precisely that reason: when we start seeing dramatic things close to home it will be too late.
Oddly enough I have witnessed a computer download a virus right before my eyes when that really wasn't what I wanted. I was using some cheesy mail program that came with Windows 95 (that was dumb) and I tried to right-click a spammy message to delete it... it opened the message, executed the script, and 15 minutes later I was reformatting the HD.
Honestly, I have always opened accounts at big corporate banks because I'm in a phase in my life where I'm moving and traveling a lot, and there's a better chance a big bank will have branches and ATMs the next place I go. When I'm more settled I'll probably prefer something more local.
I assume you don't think a human at Slashdot HQ should moderate all posts before they appear. Your argument seems plausible to me when I think about how it affects a video site like YouTube, but when it comes to text comments it seems draconian.
I can understand a legal framework under which YouTube is fine and one under which every video puts it at great risk. Hell, a country could decide that the "publisher" is responsible for unmoderated forum/mailing list/newsgroup posts. The only thing wrong with doing that is that it's impractical; so much of the Internet is "post first, moderate later", that they'd leave many providers of useful services little option but to block all Italian IPs.
Perhaps that's the answer. Imagine that all mailing lists, forums, and newsgroups just stopped serving Italy. It's the logical end result of their policies. Italy would lose out of so much of the useful Internet that they'd have little choice but to go along.
This is one of those things that's only an issue because Apple's store is the only way to get content.
Clearly Apple has a right to choose what goes in their store. I don't have an iPhone but I'd be pretty annoyed if I had to scroll through "apps" that aren't even really apps to get what I was looking for.
But, then, if Apple's store wasn't the only store in town they could keep very high standards and let other stores sell image/points collections and other bullshit.
I wound up installing Kubuntu after my Gentoo machine died. I found that as often as not the solutions on an UbuntuForums search are outdated or even wrong. Even when a thread contains the right answer you have to extract it from all the wrong answers that are surely there. But, then again, I only really search for things I can't figure out myself, or when I know how to do something but want to make sure to do it in a way such that my changes won't get blown away by an update. Maybe for easy stuff it's a decent resource.
Yeah, really. I'm pretty sure 29c/CD is more than I paid total for the last spindle of CDs I bought here in the US.
A media levy would suck for me. I don't P2P and I burn my own music onto those discs.
Ultimately a media levy taxes the wrong thing. People consuming pirated material in large volumes don't use limited-write media like CD-Rs. They use MP3 players with hard drives they can write very many times. I'm sure there's a levy on those as well, but I bet those users pay proportionally far less.
So I guess I like neither the US nor Canadian ways of trying to deal with piracy. Where I probably disagree with most on Slashdot is that I'm perfectly OK with music labels suing file sharers for as much as they can get -- as long as they can properly prove who did it (in many cases their evidence and procedures have been sketchy, which is obviously not OK). Putative damages exist for a reason, and I have no sympathy for anyone caught by the RIAA that's actually guilty.
There are lots of reasons to want good F/OSS graphics drivers. For example: the binary ATI graphics driver doesn't work with on kernels with the realtime-preempt patches, which seem to help JACK-related stuff considerably. I don't think Nvidia's binary drivers do either. F/OSS drivers can be a lot more flexible in this regard. Intel's graphics driver works, for example.
Large companies can have lots of domains and lots of IP addresses. They can deliver ad video from the same domains and IP addresses they deliver content from. Flash is a single point that I can block. I can use Flashblock on Firefox, I can have browsers that can't find the Flash plugin, etc. Really, most types of ads don't bother me much other than the Flash ads.
There are non-flash floating mouse-over ads that are being used already. Those are, AFAIK, tough to block. HTML5 will make it possible to do more without Flash. It's probably a good thing overall that more is possible in HTML, but it will be harder to block ads.
I can use Hulu just fine on 64-bit Linux with 64-bit Flash plugin. Sometimes I get error messages that go away when I refresh the page.
Really, it's much better if advertisers use Flash. It's very easy to block.
But usually a DoS is about preventing the server from responding to a request from any client. It sounds like he hacked the clients... all of them. I'm sure it was fun, but is that a DoS? A client with better security would not have been affected.
I always think of DoS meaning flooding a system with requests, causing all resources to be used, thus nobody can get service.
It seems like this guy just found a "Halt and Catch Fire" instruction and an overly trusting security policy. Which may have been a first something, but not really a DoS, right? Or am I missing something?
At least they didn't sue him. Some Chicago mega-landlord (forget which) sued a tenant for complaining on Twitter.
Does it matter if you're countersued in Iceland if you just don't go there?
If someone sued me for libel in the UK I wouldn't bother responding -- I've never been there and don't plan on going, so there's really not much their government can do short of trying to get me extradited (seems unlikely for a civil case). As far as the "peasants" are concerned, unless those peasants need to do business in Iceland it probably won't affect them.
Dual-booting is a real pain if you need to actually do work on two different OSes. Especially between Windows and Linux. It's likely you'll have files you need on both systems, so... what filesystem are you going to use for that? FAT?
I can understand dual-booting in a couple situations. First, if you're considering switching, say, to Linux, but you're not sure. And, second, if you're going to use the secondary OS for something isolated like games.
When I need Windows (for development purposes) I run it in KVM. I don't have to install nearly as much software duplicating what I already have in Linux because Linux is still running.
That's because OOo is a flaming pile of shit. High in the running for least inspired, most crufty, most flaky computer program I've ever used. Every version I've used has sucked in different ways, in approximately equal magnitude, so I don't really know what's lost if it's never updated again.
You don't like the way the developer advertises his app. I don't like the fact that Apple decides for him how he can do it.
Why do people that don't own iPhones care? Because we don't want to own iPhones. We would rather that closed ecosystems lose mindshare and fail so we aren't economically compelled to write software for them.
The iPhone OS is right for a phone with a tiny screen. If you have a bigger screen and want to use it for more computer-like things you'll want an OS that gives you more power. The original Eee PC had a stripped-down UI; how many people kept it and how many replaced it with something more flexible (whether Windows or a normal Linux WM)?
Oh, yeah, you'll also want the freedom to install any software you want, including stuff that Apple, in arbitrary fashion, would deny you.
Steve Jobs said that... about Netbooks? I would have guessed he was talking about the iPad.