I think the conclusion wasn't that drug dealers make an average of $5/hour but that the typical drug dealer makes that amount. Median salary rather than mean. Obviously there are several fabulously wealthy drug dealers; it's just that there are scores of footsoldiers who make very little.
Maybe it is my background in natural science speaking, but I don't see Truth as something you reach.
True, you may never be able to reach capital-T Truth. But there are plenty of case where there is a true, there is a false, and the difference is clear.
So, to use a scientific example, a given atomic model is not True -- it is an educated approximation of truth. But if I say that today's leading atomic model was posited by Oprah Winfrey, that's untrue in a very different way -- i.e. it's bullshit.
In many instances, there is a disagreement about what is fact, and here talking about whether truth comes from authority is relevant. But let's take the Alexander Hamilton piece mentioned. Any talk of authority and hierarchy is pointless when you're dealing with so many out-and-out mistakes (let's give two different dates for one event!) and obviously incompetent pieces of writing.
How does something gain value? There are a few ways, but the best way for something that's readily available to gain value is to manufacture scarcity.
In general, yeah, I agree. But how exactly are RIAA members manufacturing scarcity when it comes to music? Obviously they're not making the music they have the rights to scarce. You seem to be arguing that they conspire to make music they don't have the rights to -- i.e. indie music -- scarce. I don't agree. Obviously, they're not great pals with non-RIAA labels, but every record store I've ever been in has sold at least some discs from minor labels, and most largish towns have a store that sells mostly minor-labels records -- the product is available. Yes, RIAA artists get tons more promotion, but this is a direct result of larger promotional budgets -- spending more money on advertising than your competitors is not anticompetitive. Yes, commercial radio plays almost exclusively major-label music, but most markets have college/indepedent stations, and commercial radio isn't the RIAA's fault -- it's the result of radio conglomerates and the indie promoters they've spawned, a system which requires big bucks, and which the RIAA can't really be faulted for spending.
The primary reason they want to make mp3 sharing illegal has nothing to do with suppressing indie or "manufacturing scarcity". It is quite simply that they think, correctly or incorrectly, that it's making them lose money. The logic goes like this: Bob downloaded this new album off Audiogalaxy -> had Bob purchased the album, we'd have gained $8 -> if Audiogalaxy were shut down, that $8 would be ours! Flawed or not, that's the argument. Yes, Audiogalaxy was a great source for obscure music, and yes, Audiogalaxy led to me discovering tons of new bands, both minor- and major-label. But that doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of the music traded on Audiogalaxy belonged to the major labels, and suppressing it was a straightforward, if shortsighted, protection of their own business interests.
It's nice to paint the RIAA as the ultimate demon thug, and while they've been less than enlightened when it comes to technology, I don't think they've done anything your average trade group wouldn't when it comes to competing with non-member labels. Tossed-off attacks on N-Sync notwithstanding (interjection: there is such a thing as personal taste, and lip-synching or not, it IS possible that people don't share your keeping-it-real, rockist aesthetic and actually LIKE their music!), the RIAA hasn't being making anything scarce.
Being buddhist and reciting the p.o.a.... is that much worse than being christian and being indoctrinated with the views being pushed by Health Ed classes these days?
Yes. The Pledge is, well, just that: to recite it is to specifically assert one's belief in a specifically Judeochristian deity. Health Ed classes require nothing even remotely approaching this.
By "Health Ed", I assume you mean instruction about the factual basics of sex and methods of preventing pregnancy/STDs. Among the differences between this and reciting the Pledge:
Sex ed really has nothing to do with Christianity. Those who are offended are social conservatives of pretty much any religion.
The Pledge specifically acknowledges a single deity; anyone who does not believe in this deity will therefore by definition not agree with the Pledge. Sex Ed makes no reference to any religious belief.
Sex Ed is instruction; facts (facts selected with an agenda, certainly, but then most are) are taught. The Pledge is an affirmation of belief -- reciting it has nothing to do with learning. No class that I know of requires recital of "I pledge allegiance to the condom and the promiscuous sex it allows."
As far as the this-is-our-heritage argument goes: first, simply because something was accepted once is no reason it should be accepted now. Second, the argument against the Pledge is not based on any modern secular theory which you'd doubtless sneer at: it is a solid Constitutional argument, and the judges' decision was based on long-standing legal tests based upon a standard reading of the Constitution. Now, tell me, which is more important to America's heritage: a sentence penned by a Socialist then adopted and modified in that decade of enlightened tolerance, the 50s, or the Constitution?
Yeah, that would be silly. And no operating system I know does it.
The Windows HTML parser is in DLLs mixed with other OS functions, and it's closely integrated with the file manager/shell (Explorer--though more recent versions of IE run in a separate process from Explorer), but it has always run in user space.
the many useful features in Mozilla 1.0 (tabbed browsing, anti-popup features, speed, stability, and security) mean that IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon.
I disagree. Mozilla has the chance to become better than IE, but so far they've just been playing catch-up. Let's see:
tabbed browsing: You're right - this is a very nice feature and one of the main reasons I use mozilla. But Opera's had this for ages, and one feature just isn't enough to make droves of people switch.
anti-popup features: will not be in Netscape, the consumer version of Mozilla. Even in Mozilla, they're relatively hidden, and simple addons are available to do the same for IE. People would love this if it were easily and prominently available, but they're not going to go seek it out.
speed: on modern computers, rendering speed is mostly irrelevant -- even if Mozilla renders nested tables 50% faster than IE, that's still less than a second's difference in real-world cases, and I don't care. On the points where I do care -- startup speed, interface speed/responsiveness, complex DHTML -- IE is almost always faster.
stability: Mozilla 1.0 crashes considerably more frequently than IE6, for me at least. Neither is particularly unstable, but in my experience Mozilla certainly isn't more stable.
security: Not something your average person cares about. Also: yes, certainly, Mozilla seems to have fewer security bugs so far. But how often have IE (not Outlook, IE the browser) security bugs been widely used to cause actual harm? Pretty much never -- this isn't a major worry for most users.
Have you tried Mozilla or Open Office? They're quite easy to use.
Ouch, bad examples. 90% of Mozilla is by Netscape; 90% of OpenOffice is by Sun. Both have benefitted from significant usability studies funded by their respective driving corporations. Both were spun off from prior closed-source products. Hardly your open-source poster children.
Says who? IE6/Windows and IE5/Mac both support all of CSS1, and I believe also DOM0 and DOM1. There are a few bugs in the support, but then again Mozilla is hardly bug-free.
When Mozilla started, its standards-compliance was miles ahead of IE's. Since then, though, IE has caught up, and its overall standards support isn't very different from Mozilla's. Of course, IE also supports all kinds of extensions and "features" and invalid code that Mozilla doesn't, but it does also support W3C standards.
The problem is that there is a shitload of utility and cgi perl that will be broken if the perl on the server is upgraded.
No there won't. One of the great things about Perl 6 is that there will be source filters -- it can work with many different language syntaxes. If you want to write using Perl6 syntax, you will have to mark your script accordingly, with a 'use perl6;' or something. By default, perl 6 will assume that you're using perl 5 syntax, and seamlessly translate the code for you -- no compatability problems. (See the Lingua::Romana::Perligata CPAN module for an example of what can be done already.)
lest we begin down the road to rumor and speculation
My apologies if that's sarcasm and I'm just not getting it today, but if it isn't sarcasm then it's definitely unintentional irony. We have not begun down the road to rumor and speculation, we've reached Rumor City! Nobody has posted any real piece of evidence that the software does anything other than what both Macromedia and common sense indicate it does. At this point, any doubt is simply rumor and speculation.
Right! Needless to say, they have an enormous vested interest in taking pictures of you, and so it's preposterous to think that just because they include camera access as a clearly-marked, off-by-default feature they wouldn't nefariously try to enable access remotely. But why would they stop there? Obviously, they can also execute arbitrary code on your computer. And, also needless to say, they are as I type this running code on your computer to steal all your credit card numbers, record your breathing, and enslave you to Macromedia.
I mean, really, the evidence is overwhelming. Are they so arrogant that they didn't believe we'd figure th--help--losing--breath--mind--swimming MACROMED IA IS GOOD. I LOVE BIG BROTHER.>>>>
But a group is not a company... let's examine a [Debian] web server, running Apache.
From debian.org:
Copyright 1997-2002 SPI
From the linked SPI (Software in the Public Interest) page:
SPI was incorporated...
From apache.org:
Formerly known as the Apache Group, the Foundation has been incorporated...
In other words, just about any sufficiently large open-source project has been incorporated. True, many of these are non-profit corporations, but the law makes little distinction among for-profit and non-profit in terms of liability. (And after all, Debian is, as a non-profit, the exception for distributions. Red Hat, Mandrake, Corel, Suse, etc. are all for-profit companies, just as accountable for their code as any Microsoft.)
By your patronising and incorrect argument, a software maker is liable for any security-related bugs in the code they make. This isn't the case, however, because when someone buys Microsoft -- or just about anyone's -- software, they sign a license which absolves Microsoft of responsibility for bugs or problems. Presumably, Boeing customers sign a rather less restrictive agreement.
Of course, it's entirely possible to argue that Microsoft shouldn't be able to do that, that software writers should have to guarantee their software. If you did this, thereby rending void the "no guarantees" clause in the GPL and other open-source licenses, the authors of BIND, sendmail, Linux, Apache, etc. would currently be in either jail or debt.
Just about every major network program has had security holes. This is, unfortunately, hard to avoid. Some MS products are particularly prone to them, but MS doesn't have a monopoly on this. And the particular bug that Klez exploits was patched over a year ago. For those that argue that an e-mail client with scripting is stupid... well, I agree with you, and Microsoft has started disabling it in new versions. But the bug Klez exploits is in MIME handling--unrelated. Mail worms suck, yes, but this one is not due to any gross MS incompetence.
People will take gov't-funded GPL software and improve it
That's exactly the point. People, individual people, will take the software and work on it. For-profit corporations, for the most part, will not: their only income source from GPLed software is support (& other related services), and only some categories of software result in a viable income from support.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with people working on software; there's nothing wrong with objecting to something that you, as an individual, wrote being used to enrich a company's coffers. But this isn't individuals we're talking about; this is academia, where the lion's share of the world's research takes place. And in academia the standard procedure when something is discovered or created or whatever is to publish it and release it into the public domain. If some university researchers discover, say, a particularly absorbent compound, would they publish it but add the disclaimer that they will only allow it to be synthesized in individuals' basements and that it can't be used for any commercial products? Certainly not -- they would publish the result, and leave its applications open to all. Academic research is the foundation of most of any technology-related industry, and keeping industry away from the research will seriously harm the industry.
Most GPLed software is superior to closed source software
Yes, this is tangential, but, wow, is this slashdot dogma now? It's just so patently untrue... Yes, there are a few GPLed programs that are the best of their kind. But how many? It stands to reason that superior software would be, if not the most popular, at least quite popular. I can think of very few non-niche software categories dominated by GPL software, and all the ones I can think of are on the server side. (Even on the server side, I can think of more categories dominated by non-GPL open-source software than by GPL software -- see Apache and Perl, for example.) And if you want to see inferior GPL software, you need only browse sourceforge to see piles of crappy, semi-functional code (as well, of course, as some great software). This is not to criticize the GPL as a license for individually-developed software or to say that the GPL is shitty -- it's just that it's entirely blind not to recognize that GPLed software is still a minority of both software in general and quality software.
I've heard this said many, many times, and yet it's just completely untrue. I'm convinced that nobody here actually follows current pop music.
Here are the current top 10 Billboard artists:
Ashanti
Celine Dion
Tweet
Compilation: Now 9
Soundtrack: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
R. Kelly & Jay-Z
Avant
Soundtrack: Scorpion King
Pink
Of that, what's bubblegum? Now 9 might include some, I don't know, though I think those CDs tend to be high on lite-rock. Pink incorporates quite a bit of dance-pop, but this album at least certainly isn't pure bubblegum. Most of the popular music currently is actually hip-hop/rap/soul/R the rest is nu-metal (Scorpion King), adult contemporary dreck (Dion), or wonderful roots music (O Brother). Now, I'm not claiming that all, or indeed much, of this chart is wonderful (I think I already demonstrated my hatred of Celine, for instance) but it sure ain't bubblegum, and some of it is decent and innovative. And, needless to say, there's tons of music which is being released every day on major and indie labels -- and much of it is great. (The Billboard Top Ten has rarely been a haven for the kind of music that critics and music snobs like, anyway.)
Except of course it can't be quite that simple. I'm pretty sure that there's no builtin usurpBrowser method in JavaScript, and this supposedly works in both IE and Netscape/Moz. Even if one browser did have a nonstandard feature or hole that allowed this, there is simply no way to change the toolbar in IE and Mozilla via HTML/JavaScript. So in order to actually change your browser's interface, a site has to get you to run some code. It's possible that by "no downloading" the low-on-details article means that you wouldn't have to download and run an executable; the software could be installed via ActiveX (IE) or signed Java (Moz), both of which require the user to at least click Yes.
It's also possible -- and this is what I suspect -- that this doesn't actually change your browser but instead pops up a toolbarless window and fakes a toolbar with some gifs. This isn't entirely new; interface-lookalike elements have been common in banners for a while (I've seen quite a few fake-dialog-box popups). Annoying, certainly, and not likely to endear me to the company using it, but it shouldn't be any harder to get rid of (or filter!) than a standard, already-pretty-annoying popup.
Oh, and the "friends don't let friends use browsers susceptible to this" in the writeup: even more stupid and reactionary than usual! We have no idea what technology it is that makes browsers susceptible to this; no doubt michael just noticed "IE" in the article and brought out the "attack! attack!" reflex. In any case, the article says that Mozilla is just as "susceptible" as IE... apparently friends don't let friends use either of the browsers that make up ~90% of slashdot's traffic.
I have a 350k Ogg of Prisoner of Society by The Living End that takes up 9.07mb on my hdd and the same song as a 320k MP3 takes up 10.5mb!
Huh? That makes no sense. Presumably the k numbers you quote are bitrates (kbps). What those numbers signify is how much space a second (or any given amount of time) of audio takes up. That is, a 320kbps file takes up the same amount of space whether it's MP3 or Ogg or AVI.
Of course, the quality isn't necessarily the same. But these compression formats (MP3 and Ogg, at least) are psychoacoustic -- compression is based on what whoever created the format thinks humans will and won't notice. So there's no way of mathematically comparing quality between formats.
It's true that (if I remember correctly) listening tests have generally shown Ogg to have better quality than MP3 at the same bitrate. But I encoded all my CDs to ~150kbps MP3s, and I can't tell the difference between the MP3 and the CD. So, yeah, if I reencoded all my CDs to Ogg, I could probably encode them at ~120kbps and get the same quality. But with hard drives as big and cheap as they are, really, who cares? Ogg is better than MP3, but just isn't superior enough.
First, the parallel is not exact. Yes, Iran was hated, but the US was neither oppressed nor endangered because of Iran.
Second, I'd bet you that some people -- some idiots -- did smirk and clap when the plane was shot down. Of course, the vast majority would never do anything that awful--just like in Palestine, where the vast majority did not celebrate. Don't believe everything you see on CNN.
Well, if we're trading in overblown stereotypes, then call me when poor Americans no longer have to choose between food and (necessary medical) drugs. Call me when every American can go see a doctor when necessary without having to dig through their wallets. Call me when the US stops spending twice as much per capita on health care than Canada and yet still having a lower life expectancy.
You know, if Canada was proposing a crown ISP, then you would have a point. But they're not: they're building infrastructure. Content filters would only become an issue, then, if the Canadian government passed laws requiring all ISPs to use them, and this just isn't going to happen. (Canada tends to be much less puritanical than the States, and there hasn't been much political anything concerning filtering.)
The government plans to make broadband access available to all, not to give it away for free.
But, to phrase your argument different: If I were a poor person in Canada I would be outraged that I was forced to pay for highways for everyone in the country when I couldn't even come close to affording a car for myself!
Nobody could prosecute you for having curtains on your windows, just as I doubt that anyone could prosecute you simply for running Freenet.
Obviously, though, you could be prosecuted for having a meth lab. Just as you could be prosecuted for keeping all the equipment for a meth lab in your house and deliberately letting others use this equipment. That's exactly what Freenet's doing: you're opening up your computer for others to use to transmit data. In other words, you become an accessory to crime.
Put differently, you won't be prosecuted for running Freenet. You'll be prosecuted when your Freenet transmits illegal data, as is inevitable given Freenet's design.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the conclusion wasn't that drug dealers make an average of $5/hour but that the typical drug dealer makes that amount. Median salary rather than mean. Obviously there are several fabulously wealthy drug dealers; it's just that there are scores of footsoldiers who make very little.
So overtaking drug earnings is still big news.
Maybe it is my background in natural science speaking, but I don't see Truth as something you reach.
True, you may never be able to reach capital-T Truth. But there are plenty of case where there is a true, there is a false, and the difference is clear.
So, to use a scientific example, a given atomic model is not True -- it is an educated approximation of truth. But if I say that today's leading atomic model was posited by Oprah Winfrey, that's untrue in a very different way -- i.e. it's bullshit.
In many instances, there is a disagreement about what is fact, and here talking about whether truth comes from authority is relevant. But let's take the Alexander Hamilton piece mentioned. Any talk of authority and hierarchy is pointless when you're dealing with so many out-and-out mistakes (let's give two different dates for one event!) and obviously incompetent pieces of writing.
In general, yeah, I agree. But how exactly are RIAA members manufacturing scarcity when it comes to music? Obviously they're not making the music they have the rights to scarce. You seem to be arguing that they conspire to make music they don't have the rights to -- i.e. indie music -- scarce. I don't agree. Obviously, they're not great pals with non-RIAA labels, but every record store I've ever been in has sold at least some discs from minor labels, and most largish towns have a store that sells mostly minor-labels records -- the product is available. Yes, RIAA artists get tons more promotion, but this is a direct result of larger promotional budgets -- spending more money on advertising than your competitors is not anticompetitive. Yes, commercial radio plays almost exclusively major-label music, but most markets have college/indepedent stations, and commercial radio isn't the RIAA's fault -- it's the result of radio conglomerates and the indie promoters they've spawned, a system which requires big bucks, and which the RIAA can't really be faulted for spending.
The primary reason they want to make mp3 sharing illegal has nothing to do with suppressing indie or "manufacturing scarcity". It is quite simply that they think, correctly or incorrectly, that it's making them lose money. The logic goes like this: Bob downloaded this new album off Audiogalaxy -> had Bob purchased the album, we'd have gained $8 -> if Audiogalaxy were shut down, that $8 would be ours! Flawed or not, that's the argument. Yes, Audiogalaxy was a great source for obscure music, and yes, Audiogalaxy led to me discovering tons of new bands, both minor- and major-label. But that doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of the music traded on Audiogalaxy belonged to the major labels, and suppressing it was a straightforward, if shortsighted, protection of their own business interests.
It's nice to paint the RIAA as the ultimate demon thug, and while they've been less than enlightened when it comes to technology, I don't think they've done anything your average trade group wouldn't when it comes to competing with non-member labels. Tossed-off attacks on N-Sync notwithstanding (interjection: there is such a thing as personal taste, and lip-synching or not, it IS possible that people don't share your keeping-it-real, rockist aesthetic and actually LIKE their music!), the RIAA hasn't being making anything scarce.
Yes. The Pledge is, well, just that: to recite it is to specifically assert one's belief in a specifically Judeochristian deity. Health Ed classes require nothing even remotely approaching this.
By "Health Ed", I assume you mean instruction about the factual basics of sex and methods of preventing pregnancy/STDs. Among the differences between this and reciting the Pledge:
As far as the this-is-our-heritage argument goes: first, simply because something was accepted once is no reason it should be accepted now. Second, the argument against the Pledge is not based on any modern secular theory which you'd doubtless sneer at: it is a solid Constitutional argument, and the judges' decision was based on long-standing legal tests based upon a standard reading of the Constitution. Now, tell me, which is more important to America's heritage: a sentence penned by a Socialist then adopted and modified in that decade of enlightened tolerance, the 50s, or the Constitution?
Yes. Quite simple, really.
Yeah, that would be silly. And no operating system I know does it.
The Windows HTML parser is in DLLs mixed with other OS functions, and it's closely integrated with the file manager/shell (Explorer--though more recent versions of IE run in a separate process from Explorer), but it has always run in user space.
I disagree. Mozilla has the chance to become better than IE, but so far they've just been playing catch-up. Let's see:
tabbed browsing: You're right - this is a very nice feature and one of the main reasons I use mozilla. But Opera's had this for ages, and one feature just isn't enough to make droves of people switch.
anti-popup features: will not be in Netscape, the consumer version of Mozilla. Even in Mozilla, they're relatively hidden, and simple addons are available to do the same for IE. People would love this if it were easily and prominently available, but they're not going to go seek it out.
speed: on modern computers, rendering speed is mostly irrelevant -- even if Mozilla renders nested tables 50% faster than IE, that's still less than a second's difference in real-world cases, and I don't care. On the points where I do care -- startup speed, interface speed/responsiveness, complex DHTML -- IE is almost always faster.
stability: Mozilla 1.0 crashes considerably more frequently than IE6, for me at least. Neither is particularly unstable, but in my experience Mozilla certainly isn't more stable.
security: Not something your average person cares about. Also: yes, certainly, Mozilla seems to have fewer security bugs so far. But how often have IE (not Outlook, IE the browser) security bugs been widely used to cause actual harm? Pretty much never -- this isn't a major worry for most users.
Ouch, bad examples. 90% of Mozilla is by Netscape; 90% of OpenOffice is by Sun. Both have benefitted from significant usability studies funded by their respective driving corporations. Both were spun off from prior closed-source products. Hardly your open-source poster children.
MS has not implemented them
Says who? IE6/Windows and IE5/Mac both support all of CSS1, and I believe also DOM0 and DOM1. There are a few bugs in the support, but then again Mozilla is hardly bug-free.
When Mozilla started, its standards-compliance was miles ahead of IE's. Since then, though, IE has caught up, and its overall standards support isn't very different from Mozilla's. Of course, IE also supports all kinds of extensions and "features" and invalid code that Mozilla doesn't, but it does also support W3C standards.
No there won't. One of the great things about Perl 6 is that there will be source filters -- it can work with many different language syntaxes. If you want to write using Perl6 syntax, you will have to mark your script accordingly, with a 'use perl6;' or something. By default, perl 6 will assume that you're using perl 5 syntax, and seamlessly translate the code for you -- no compatability problems. (See the Lingua::Romana::Perligata CPAN module for an example of what can be done already.)
My apologies if that's sarcasm and I'm just not getting it today, but if it isn't sarcasm then it's definitely unintentional irony. We have not begun down the road to rumor and speculation, we've reached Rumor City! Nobody has posted any real piece of evidence that the software does anything other than what both Macromedia and common sense indicate it does. At this point, any doubt is simply rumor and speculation.
Right! Needless to say, they have an enormous vested interest in taking pictures of you, and so it's preposterous to think that just because they include camera access as a clearly-marked, off-by-default feature they wouldn't nefariously try to enable access remotely. But why would they stop there? Obviously, they can also execute arbitrary code on your computer. And, also needless to say, they are as I type this running code on your computer to steal all your credit card numbers, record your breathing, and enslave you to Macromedia.
D IA IS GOOD. I LOVE BIG BROTHER.>>>>
I mean, really, the evidence is overwhelming. Are they so arrogant that they didn't believe we'd figure th--help--losing--breath--mind--swimming
MACROME
From debian.org:
From the linked SPI (Software in the Public Interest) page:
From apache.org:
In other words, just about any sufficiently large open-source project has been incorporated. True, many of these are non-profit corporations, but the law makes little distinction among for-profit and non-profit in terms of liability. (And after all, Debian is, as a non-profit, the exception for distributions. Red Hat, Mandrake, Corel, Suse, etc. are all for-profit companies, just as accountable for their code as any Microsoft.)
Um, troll, no.
By your patronising and incorrect argument, a software maker is liable for any security-related bugs in the code they make. This isn't the case, however, because when someone buys Microsoft -- or just about anyone's -- software, they sign a license which absolves Microsoft of responsibility for bugs or problems. Presumably, Boeing customers sign a rather less restrictive agreement.
Of course, it's entirely possible to argue that Microsoft shouldn't be able to do that, that software writers should have to guarantee their software. If you did this, thereby rending void the "no guarantees" clause in the GPL and other open-source licenses, the authors of BIND, sendmail, Linux, Apache, etc. would currently be in either jail or debt.
Just about every major network program has had security holes. This is, unfortunately, hard to avoid. Some MS products are particularly prone to them, but MS doesn't have a monopoly on this. And the particular bug that Klez exploits was patched over a year ago. For those that argue that an e-mail client with scripting is stupid... well, I agree with you, and Microsoft has started disabling it in new versions. But the bug Klez exploits is in MIME handling--unrelated. Mail worms suck, yes, but this one is not due to any gross MS incompetence.
That's exactly the point. People, individual people, will take the software and work on it. For-profit corporations, for the most part, will not: their only income source from GPLed software is support (& other related services), and only some categories of software result in a viable income from support.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with people working on software; there's nothing wrong with objecting to something that you, as an individual, wrote being used to enrich a company's coffers. But this isn't individuals we're talking about; this is academia, where the lion's share of the world's research takes place. And in academia the standard procedure when something is discovered or created or whatever is to publish it and release it into the public domain. If some university researchers discover, say, a particularly absorbent compound, would they publish it but add the disclaimer that they will only allow it to be synthesized in individuals' basements and that it can't be used for any commercial products? Certainly not -- they would publish the result, and leave its applications open to all. Academic research is the foundation of most of any technology-related industry, and keeping industry away from the research will seriously harm the industry.
Most GPLed software is superior to closed source software
Yes, this is tangential, but, wow, is this slashdot dogma now? It's just so patently untrue... Yes, there are a few GPLed programs that are the best of their kind. But how many? It stands to reason that superior software would be, if not the most popular, at least quite popular. I can think of very few non-niche software categories dominated by GPL software, and all the ones I can think of are on the server side. (Even on the server side, I can think of more categories dominated by non-GPL open-source software than by GPL software -- see Apache and Perl, for example.) And if you want to see inferior GPL software, you need only browse sourceforge to see piles of crappy, semi-functional code (as well, of course, as some great software). This is not to criticize the GPL as a license for individually-developed software or to say that the GPL is shitty -- it's just that it's entirely blind not to recognize that GPLed software is still a minority of both software in general and quality software.
I've heard this said many, many times, and yet it's just completely untrue. I'm convinced that nobody here actually follows current pop music.
Here are the current top 10 Billboard artists:
Ashanti
Celine Dion
Tweet
Compilation: Now 9
Soundtrack: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
R. Kelly & Jay-Z
Avant
Soundtrack: Scorpion King
Pink
Of that, what's bubblegum? Now 9 might include some, I don't know, though I think those CDs tend to be high on lite-rock. Pink incorporates quite a bit of dance-pop, but this album at least certainly isn't pure bubblegum. Most of the popular music currently is actually hip-hop/rap/soul/R the rest is nu-metal (Scorpion King), adult contemporary dreck (Dion), or wonderful roots music (O Brother). Now, I'm not claiming that all, or indeed much, of this chart is wonderful (I think I already demonstrated my hatred of Celine, for instance) but it sure ain't bubblegum, and some of it is decent and innovative. And, needless to say, there's tons of music which is being released every day on major and indie labels -- and much of it is great. (The Billboard Top Ten has rarely been a haven for the kind of music that critics and music snobs like, anyway.)
Except of course it can't be quite that simple. I'm pretty sure that there's no builtin usurpBrowser method in JavaScript, and this supposedly works in both IE and Netscape/Moz. Even if one browser did have a nonstandard feature or hole that allowed this, there is simply no way to change the toolbar in IE and Mozilla via HTML/JavaScript. So in order to actually change your browser's interface, a site has to get you to run some code. It's possible that by "no downloading" the low-on-details article means that you wouldn't have to download and run an executable; the software could be installed via ActiveX (IE) or signed Java (Moz), both of which require the user to at least click Yes.
It's also possible -- and this is what I suspect -- that this doesn't actually change your browser but instead pops up a toolbarless window and fakes a toolbar with some gifs. This isn't entirely new; interface-lookalike elements have been common in banners for a while (I've seen quite a few fake-dialog-box popups). Annoying, certainly, and not likely to endear me to the company using it, but it shouldn't be any harder to get rid of (or filter!) than a standard, already-pretty-annoying popup.
Oh, and the "friends don't let friends use browsers susceptible to this" in the writeup: even more stupid and reactionary than usual! We have no idea what technology it is that makes browsers susceptible to this; no doubt michael just noticed "IE" in the article and brought out the "attack! attack!" reflex. In any case, the article says that Mozilla is just as "susceptible" as IE... apparently friends don't let friends use either of the browsers that make up ~90% of slashdot's traffic.
Huh? That makes no sense. Presumably the k numbers you quote are bitrates (kbps). What those numbers signify is how much space a second (or any given amount of time) of audio takes up. That is, a 320kbps file takes up the same amount of space whether it's MP3 or Ogg or AVI.
Of course, the quality isn't necessarily the same. But these compression formats (MP3 and Ogg, at least) are psychoacoustic -- compression is based on what whoever created the format thinks humans will and won't notice. So there's no way of mathematically comparing quality between formats.
It's true that (if I remember correctly) listening tests have generally shown Ogg to have better quality than MP3 at the same bitrate. But I encoded all my CDs to ~150kbps MP3s, and I can't tell the difference between the MP3 and the CD. So, yeah, if I reencoded all my CDs to Ogg, I could probably encode them at ~120kbps and get the same quality. But with hard drives as big and cheap as they are, really, who cares? Ogg is better than MP3, but just isn't superior enough.
First, the parallel is not exact. Yes, Iran was hated, but the US was neither oppressed nor endangered because of Iran.
Second, I'd bet you that some people -- some idiots -- did smirk and clap when the plane was shot down. Of course, the vast majority would never do anything that awful--just like in Palestine, where the vast majority did not celebrate. Don't believe everything you see on CNN.
We call them "laws". And -- guess what? -- they apply to private companies too!
Well, if we're trading in overblown stereotypes, then call me when poor Americans no longer have to choose between food and (necessary medical) drugs. Call me when every American can go see a doctor when necessary without having to dig through their wallets. Call me when the US stops spending twice as much per capita on health care than Canada and yet still having a lower life expectancy.
I won't be waiting by the phone.
What can't your ISP do whatever they want with your internet connection -- sniff, monitor, log, terminate? They do own it, after all.
You know, if Canada was proposing a crown ISP, then you would have a point. But they're not: they're building infrastructure. Content filters would only become an issue, then, if the Canadian government passed laws requiring all ISPs to use them, and this just isn't going to happen. (Canada tends to be much less puritanical than the States, and there hasn't been much political anything concerning filtering.)
The government plans to make broadband access available to all, not to give it away for free.
But, to phrase your argument different: If I were a poor person in Canada I would be outraged that I was forced to pay for highways for everyone in the country when I couldn't even come close to affording a car for myself!
Nobody could prosecute you for having curtains on your windows, just as I doubt that anyone could prosecute you simply for running Freenet.
Obviously, though, you could be prosecuted for having a meth lab. Just as you could be prosecuted for keeping all the equipment for a meth lab in your house and deliberately letting others use this equipment. That's exactly what Freenet's doing: you're opening up your computer for others to use to transmit data. In other words, you become an accessory to crime.
Put differently, you won't be prosecuted for running Freenet. You'll be prosecuted when your Freenet transmits illegal data, as is inevitable given Freenet's design.