Bad analogy. If I take his car that he parked on a public street, he is out a car. If I decode the signal broadcast into my house and view it, the satellite provider still has just as much signal as before, and their paying customers are not out anything. (I could argue that because I could then join in on water-cooler discussions on our favourite TV shows that it increases the value of the product they're marketing, but that's an extremely weak argument which I won't actually make.)
If you send out floppies with your software to everyone in a neighbourhood, and I reformat my floppy and use it for other purposes, that's tough tits for you. If you send out fliers that I subsequently rip up and make paper mache from, that's tough tits for you. If you broadcast something into my home uninvited, and I find a way to make use of that broadcast, that's tough tits for you.
There has to be a working business model here somewhere. I just don't think the current one is the right one. After all, it's far more trivial for the user to buy the official equipment than to build it themselves. And that's been true for many things: radios, TVs, computers, CB radios, HAM radios (I think - never looked into these). Still is true. Those who want to do it themselves? Cost of doing business, my friend. Compete with them like a grown capitalist.
But, basically you're saying 99% of the population should be screwed because 1% of the population doesn't want to pay the true cost of their mail delivery. Why should we favor that 1%? If they want cheap mail, they can move to the city. There are many extra expenses associated with living in the middle of nowhere, I don't see why higher prices for mail shouldn't be one of them.
Don't worry - you'll pay for it one way or another. If you force them to pay their share, that will just increase the costs of farming. And that will get passed back to you. Except that business currently carries the bulk of the costs of mail, whereas you carry the cost of your food. So this would improve the lot in life for businesses at the expense of residences. I'm not sure you're thinking this through.
You have a nice, fast car that can do 300km/hr. You're driving down a highway where the speed limit is 110km/hr. And you're coming up to a bend in the road during the winter where it's icy, and the safe speed around the bend is 50km/hr. Which one gets honoured?
Seriously? You have to ask? It's the lowest speed, of course. I pay for my 15Mbps bandwidth. But the guy I'm downloading from only has 1Mbps available to me. So I'm going to get 1Mbps. It's not hard. Of course, that means I have approximately 14Mbps for downloading from other site(s). Thus far, downloading from Microsoft, IBM, and various educational institutions have all been pretty fast. Heck, I even get 15+Mbps downloading over the VPN from work. It sucks when what I want is from a site with only 1Mbps. But, in general, those aren't large files anyway. It's when I'm downloading the KDE snapshots (~370MB) - that's when I want to get from someone who has a fat pipe.
I'm pretty sure they said the same thing about pumping pollution into the air, too. The volume of pollution pumped out of factories vs the volume of the atmosphere, it'd never be significant. What do you know - as more people started jumping on the bandwagon, new technology found new ways to pump out pollution. If we invest heavily in wind farms, new technology will come along to extract more energy in less land footprint.
And who says what "significant" is? Maybe the amount of energy available is barely over the cusp of self-sustainability, and extracting a couple hundred MW* completely ruins the jet stream, plunging us into droughts and famines the likes we've never seen? Or maybe the extraction of minor amounts of energy destabilises the jet stream such that it causes hurricanes in places that would never otherwise see them? Who knows? How can we know? Of course, maybe we have to be taking out huge amounts of energy to make that difference - we don't know that, either. (It's probably somewhere around 1.21 jiggawatts...) The question to me isn't whether we should or not (we should), it's what do we do to fix it if we do take too much out? If you think pumping out too much CO2 is bad, this has potential for much worse. Then again, it might be nothing. Can't tell.
* yes, W, not J. The sun is replenishing the energy in our atmosphere, so I'm assuming here that you have to take out energy above and beyond the energy added to the ecosystem by the sun on a continual basis to effect any change.
Really, I thought that anyone watching Larry go about his regular routine that the appropriate response might just be to abandon Larry-ville the same way/. seems to advocate abandoning Balmer-ville. But maybe that's just me (running IBM DB2 on Linux...)
Because the people doing real work, who knew what they were doing, were to important to be promoted into doing other things.
Re:Amusingly..
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A tar trick? At least add Z, z, or j to the commands: tar cjf - . | ssh tar xjf -. Or, simpler, try rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -l webhostuser" . myhost.org:. The bz2 compression (j option for tar) probably has better compression, but rsync compresses some things that tar can't (see rsync's man page).
Right, but before you said anything to the judge, you'd have to start with some Sponsored Statements before you could get to saying anything actually on topic, and the order of what you actually did say would be determined by a proprietary weighting algorithm that stood a good chance of putting some squatter information prior to your main point.
Getting a web page clean is a hard problem... when you accept user input in something approaching HTML format, like/. does. Or we can all be forever subjected to incomplete wiki-style markup that can only do about half of what the user wants. I find myself constantly going back to html in mediawiki to get the formating I want - whether mediawiki supports it or not, I don't know, because at some point the wiki markup gets to be just as convoluted and hard-to-read as html, so I use HTML. Other times, I know mediawiki can't do it, so we need to enter in HTML. And mediawiki is probably one of the better user-content web services out there (from a completeness perspective).
I can just see it now: php or mod_perl or CGI apps linking against WebKit or KHTML or xulrunner or whatever just to properly parse out the user input and clean it up, just so that another browser doesn't choke.
I think we're stuck with broken markup for a long while.
Now, if there were a way to "mark" a section of HTML as being "user-content" such that the parsing could be relaxed for small sections, we might get somewhere further. Then again, many lazy developers will mark their entire documents as user-content, and not fix their code.
With idiots like you running around telling her what to do, and that she was a willing actor in the play, she probably feels like shit for "allowing herself" to get involved in this in the first place, and is too embarrassed to report it. Then again, that's the reason why so many rapes go unreported in the first place. Show some damned compassion already.
The OP's main points seems to be that the money involved in porn is just too much to keep producers honest. And they ruin lives to get it. There is no doubt, as far as I can tell, that real child porn victimises children. Here the point is that often, though not always, regular porn victimises women. (Then there are those who take a further extreme view, like the Catholic Church claiming that it also victimises the viewer, and those that may be married to a viewer of porn, but I don't see that gaining much traction here.) It's something that many people - mostly producers and viewers (and, oddly, some feminists) - want to sweep under the rug. We can't let it be swept out of sight if we want a rational, complete conversation on the topic. There is a human cost here, and too many people want to ignore it.
Not all crimes require intent. "I intended to go through that intersection at a high rate of speed, officer, but I did not *intend* to kill the pedestrian." == "vehicular manslaughter". This case seems like a prime candidate for "criminal negligence causing death". The defendant, from what I've heard, did wilfully cause distress to a child whose depressive condition was known to her (seriously? a 13-year-old girl who is NOT emotionally volatile is the exception, not the rule!) that the defendant should have known faced a reasonable likelihood (which is not the same as "better than 50-50 odds") of causing the death of said child. That's pretty much criminal negligence right there.
The only thing that shoots a hole in this theory, as far as I'm aware, is the presumption that the prosecution lawyers probably know the law better than I do, especially as I'm not a lawyer, and would have gone for the easy conviction over the hard (novel) one if it really as straight forward as this.
Well, I don't know what they're doing in KwaZulu, but to try to imagine the side effects of technology 40 years ahead might be fun, but quite irrelevant to what we should do about current technology. He can speculate it trains you to be a killer, I can speculate that it's no different to watching an episode of 24.
Musing about the future tells us what we should do about current technology. Predicting the future, and in this case it's a fairly straight-forward extention of a long-term trend, tells us if we're on the Right Path, morally, ethically, and maybe even legally. What we're doing now is definitively legal, but the debate on its morality and ethics are mildly disputed, though largely to no effect (ooo, ratings on the box - it's a sales tool now). If we follow the pace of development, and the way that many companies seem determined to go, will the critics' case become stronger or weaker? Are we really heading down that slippery slope, or is that fallacy just a too convenient explanation for gaming critics?
I suppose what the author is claiming is that there is a difference between watching violence (which some critics also claim desensitise viewers - and as far as I'm aware, psychologists agree, though the effect of that desensitisation is still debatable and highly variable) and initiating or creating that violence (by manipulating the virtual characters into position and causing the virtual gun to fire or the virtual wrench to be swung or whatever). And that, as we progress technologically, the virtual worlds will be less obviously distinct from the real world (no controller, VR helmet perhaps, more photo-realistic characters, more realistic death throes).
If that future world seems likely, and we, as a society, feel that that's not where we want technology to go, ethically and morally, the author is suggesting that we stop it now, before we get there. That is how it is relevant to what we should do about current technology.
Nah. This is all about designing to handle faults you can imagine, and failing to handle faults you can't. Imagining roll-over or stalls are easy. Imagining everything that could go wrong in a wind storm, probably not so much.
s/MS/RMS/ (significant difference in meaning here!;-) )
I agree with you: I can't see how any of this makes an iota of difference to "fascist" sysadmins. Really, if you have a fascist sysadmin, you have a problem with management, which is larger than just a single machine. Either management allows your sysadmin to be fascist, or they require it of him/her. Either one is bad. Changing su doesn't make a difference here.
If there's a coup, it doesn't matter whether su allows wheel or not. If I want to coup a system with the wheel access, I'll simultaneously remove everyone (but me?) from the wheel group AND change the password. I'm not sure RMS is a genius, or just the loudest whacko supporting F/OSS. This bone-head thought makes me lean toward whacko.
If there's multiple "root" accounts (i.e., more than one user with uid=0), that doesn't change anything. A quick grep through/etc/passwd for the uid of 0, and change all their passwords (or delete them). If you want to avoid this, you need an off-machine user authentication module (e.g., LDAP), but, again, if I have root, I can just go in and disable all the other authentication modules (modify/etc/pam.conf or whatever that platform/distro uses, or maybe/etc/nsswitch.conf), while disabling all the other root accounts (change password, delete, whatever).
Seriously, once you have root shell access, no matter the source, you can own the system. Period. Until someone boots a LiveCD and resets it.
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Facebook has pictures of girls doing naked bong hits? Proof or retract!
Bad analogy. If I take his car that he parked on a public street, he is out a car. If I decode the signal broadcast into my house and view it, the satellite provider still has just as much signal as before, and their paying customers are not out anything. (I could argue that because I could then join in on water-cooler discussions on our favourite TV shows that it increases the value of the product they're marketing, but that's an extremely weak argument which I won't actually make.)
If you send out floppies with your software to everyone in a neighbourhood, and I reformat my floppy and use it for other purposes, that's tough tits for you. If you send out fliers that I subsequently rip up and make paper mache from, that's tough tits for you. If you broadcast something into my home uninvited, and I find a way to make use of that broadcast, that's tough tits for you.
There has to be a working business model here somewhere. I just don't think the current one is the right one. After all, it's far more trivial for the user to buy the official equipment than to build it themselves. And that's been true for many things: radios, TVs, computers, CB radios, HAM radios (I think - never looked into these). Still is true. Those who want to do it themselves? Cost of doing business, my friend. Compete with them like a grown capitalist.
But, basically you're saying 99% of the population should be screwed because 1% of the population doesn't want to pay the true cost of their mail delivery. Why should we favor that 1%? If they want cheap mail, they can move to the city. There are many extra expenses associated with living in the middle of nowhere, I don't see why higher prices for mail shouldn't be one of them.
Don't worry - you'll pay for it one way or another. If you force them to pay their share, that will just increase the costs of farming. And that will get passed back to you. Except that business currently carries the bulk of the costs of mail, whereas you carry the cost of your food. So this would improve the lot in life for businesses at the expense of residences. I'm not sure you're thinking this through.
You have a nice, fast car that can do 300km/hr. You're driving down a highway where the speed limit is 110km/hr. And you're coming up to a bend in the road during the winter where it's icy, and the safe speed around the bend is 50km/hr. Which one gets honoured?
Seriously? You have to ask? It's the lowest speed, of course. I pay for my 15Mbps bandwidth. But the guy I'm downloading from only has 1Mbps available to me. So I'm going to get 1Mbps. It's not hard. Of course, that means I have approximately 14Mbps for downloading from other site(s). Thus far, downloading from Microsoft, IBM, and various educational institutions have all been pretty fast. Heck, I even get 15+Mbps downloading over the VPN from work. It sucks when what I want is from a site with only 1Mbps. But, in general, those aren't large files anyway. It's when I'm downloading the KDE snapshots (~370MB) - that's when I want to get from someone who has a fat pipe.
I'm pretty sure they said the same thing about pumping pollution into the air, too. The volume of pollution pumped out of factories vs the volume of the atmosphere, it'd never be significant. What do you know - as more people started jumping on the bandwagon, new technology found new ways to pump out pollution. If we invest heavily in wind farms, new technology will come along to extract more energy in less land footprint.
And who says what "significant" is? Maybe the amount of energy available is barely over the cusp of self-sustainability, and extracting a couple hundred MW* completely ruins the jet stream, plunging us into droughts and famines the likes we've never seen? Or maybe the extraction of minor amounts of energy destabilises the jet stream such that it causes hurricanes in places that would never otherwise see them? Who knows? How can we know? Of course, maybe we have to be taking out huge amounts of energy to make that difference - we don't know that, either. (It's probably somewhere around 1.21 jiggawatts...) The question to me isn't whether we should or not (we should), it's what do we do to fix it if we do take too much out? If you think pumping out too much CO2 is bad, this has potential for much worse. Then again, it might be nothing. Can't tell.
* yes, W, not J. The sun is replenishing the energy in our atmosphere, so I'm assuming here that you have to take out energy above and beyond the energy added to the ecosystem by the sun on a continual basis to effect any change.
Really, I thought that anyone watching Larry go about his regular routine that the appropriate response might just be to abandon Larry-ville the same way /. seems to advocate abandoning Balmer-ville. But maybe that's just me (running IBM DB2 on Linux...)
Because the people doing real work, who knew what they were doing, were to important to be promoted into doing other things.
A tar trick? At least add Z, z, or j to the commands: tar cjf - . | ssh tar xjf -. Or, simpler, try rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -l webhostuser" . myhost.org:. The bz2 compression (j option for tar) probably has better compression, but rsync compresses some things that tar can't (see rsync's man page).
My urine goes to 11.
It's called copy-on-write technology. It means that 1GB+1GB+1GB+1GB will total about 1.2GB. It's advanced math.
Right, but before you said anything to the judge, you'd have to start with some Sponsored Statements before you could get to saying anything actually on topic, and the order of what you actually did say would be determined by a proprietary weighting algorithm that stood a good chance of putting some squatter information prior to your main point.
[...] there is a 30 page book where half of each page is empty
Is that so that your infraction can be written in after they want to fire you?</tinfoil-hat>
this one, why?
Getting a web page clean is a hard problem ... when you accept user input in something approaching HTML format, like /. does. Or we can all be forever subjected to incomplete wiki-style markup that can only do about half of what the user wants. I find myself constantly going back to html in mediawiki to get the formating I want - whether mediawiki supports it or not, I don't know, because at some point the wiki markup gets to be just as convoluted and hard-to-read as html, so I use HTML. Other times, I know mediawiki can't do it, so we need to enter in HTML. And mediawiki is probably one of the better user-content web services out there (from a completeness perspective).
I can just see it now: php or mod_perl or CGI apps linking against WebKit or KHTML or xulrunner or whatever just to properly parse out the user input and clean it up, just so that another browser doesn't choke.
I think we're stuck with broken markup for a long while.
Now, if there were a way to "mark" a section of HTML as being "user-content" such that the parsing could be relaxed for small sections, we might get somewhere further. Then again, many lazy developers will mark their entire documents as user-content, and not fix their code.
Rape isn't legal. And yet, we have problems getting women to report it. Colour me skeptical.
With idiots like you running around telling her what to do, and that she was a willing actor in the play, she probably feels like shit for "allowing herself" to get involved in this in the first place, and is too embarrassed to report it. Then again, that's the reason why so many rapes go unreported in the first place. Show some damned compassion already.
The OP's main points seems to be that the money involved in porn is just too much to keep producers honest. And they ruin lives to get it. There is no doubt, as far as I can tell, that real child porn victimises children. Here the point is that often, though not always, regular porn victimises women. (Then there are those who take a further extreme view, like the Catholic Church claiming that it also victimises the viewer, and those that may be married to a viewer of porn, but I don't see that gaining much traction here.) It's something that many people - mostly producers and viewers (and, oddly, some feminists) - want to sweep under the rug. We can't let it be swept out of sight if we want a rational, complete conversation on the topic. There is a human cost here, and too many people want to ignore it.
Would you mind clarifying your position? I'm finding this a bit vague. Thanks.
I think that's next year...
Not all crimes require intent. "I intended to go through that intersection at a high rate of speed, officer, but I did not *intend* to kill the pedestrian." == "vehicular manslaughter". This case seems like a prime candidate for "criminal negligence causing death". The defendant, from what I've heard, did wilfully cause distress to a child whose depressive condition was known to her (seriously? a 13-year-old girl who is NOT emotionally volatile is the exception, not the rule!) that the defendant should have known faced a reasonable likelihood (which is not the same as "better than 50-50 odds") of causing the death of said child. That's pretty much criminal negligence right there.
The only thing that shoots a hole in this theory, as far as I'm aware, is the presumption that the prosecution lawyers probably know the law better than I do, especially as I'm not a lawyer, and would have gone for the easy conviction over the hard (novel) one if it really as straight forward as this.
I see you prefer the "pansy" approach. Hopefully someone else will be sufficiently peeved to propose something a bit harsher.
You have to submit in .doc? Why not PDF? Ouch.
Well, I don't know what they're doing in KwaZulu, but to try to imagine the side effects of technology 40 years ahead might be fun, but quite irrelevant to what we should do about current technology. He can speculate it trains you to be a killer, I can speculate that it's no different to watching an episode of 24.
Musing about the future tells us what we should do about current technology. Predicting the future, and in this case it's a fairly straight-forward extention of a long-term trend, tells us if we're on the Right Path, morally, ethically, and maybe even legally. What we're doing now is definitively legal, but the debate on its morality and ethics are mildly disputed, though largely to no effect (ooo, ratings on the box - it's a sales tool now). If we follow the pace of development, and the way that many companies seem determined to go, will the critics' case become stronger or weaker? Are we really heading down that slippery slope, or is that fallacy just a too convenient explanation for gaming critics?
I suppose what the author is claiming is that there is a difference between watching violence (which some critics also claim desensitise viewers - and as far as I'm aware, psychologists agree, though the effect of that desensitisation is still debatable and highly variable) and initiating or creating that violence (by manipulating the virtual characters into position and causing the virtual gun to fire or the virtual wrench to be swung or whatever). And that, as we progress technologically, the virtual worlds will be less obviously distinct from the real world (no controller, VR helmet perhaps, more photo-realistic characters, more realistic death throes).
If that future world seems likely, and we, as a society, feel that that's not where we want technology to go, ethically and morally, the author is suggesting that we stop it now, before we get there. That is how it is relevant to what we should do about current technology.
*hic*
Nah. This is all about designing to handle faults you can imagine, and failing to handle faults you can't. Imagining roll-over or stalls are easy. Imagining everything that could go wrong in a wind storm, probably not so much.
s/MS/RMS/ (significant difference in meaning here! ;-) )
I agree with you: I can't see how any of this makes an iota of difference to "fascist" sysadmins. Really, if you have a fascist sysadmin, you have a problem with management, which is larger than just a single machine. Either management allows your sysadmin to be fascist, or they require it of him/her. Either one is bad. Changing su doesn't make a difference here.
If there's a coup, it doesn't matter whether su allows wheel or not. If I want to coup a system with the wheel access, I'll simultaneously remove everyone (but me?) from the wheel group AND change the password. I'm not sure RMS is a genius, or just the loudest whacko supporting F/OSS. This bone-head thought makes me lean toward whacko.
If there's multiple "root" accounts (i.e., more than one user with uid=0), that doesn't change anything. A quick grep through /etc/passwd for the uid of 0, and change all their passwords (or delete them). If you want to avoid this, you need an off-machine user authentication module (e.g., LDAP), but, again, if I have root, I can just go in and disable all the other authentication modules (modify /etc/pam.conf or whatever that platform/distro uses, or maybe /etc/nsswitch.conf), while disabling all the other root accounts (change password, delete, whatever).
Seriously, once you have root shell access, no matter the source, you can own the system. Period. Until someone boots a LiveCD and resets it.