The problem is simple: Users post their personal info on profiles stored in a central server. Thus, it is the entity that controls the server that has control over the user's personal info, and not the user themselves.
The solution is very simple as well: Users should also be the ones storing their own personal info and profiles. People who own their own personal webpage do this. Since, however, not everyone is able to keep a computer connected 24/7, we could devise a p2p protocol for social networking. Profiles would be stored primarily on the user's computer, and disseminated in a p2p fashion among other computers on the same social network, and any modification or deletion of the source profile would then be automatically copied to the p2p swarm. While I can imagine users abusing this system (eg trying to cache deleted profiles without permission etc), I hope that a p2p protocol utilising clever techniques could guarantee more privacy and protection than modern social networking sites.
Exactly: Something anyone *on the network* can read. Come to USENET and become part of the community, and it's okay to read anything. But copying anything without permission and getting it *out of the network* (ie out of the originating community) on CD-ROMs and Websites is like *getting* value from the USENET community without *giving* anything back.
I do recognise of course that archiving may be useful in many ocassions, but I would prefer OPT-IN archiving rather than the indiscriminate copying outside the bounds of the USENET community that occurred and continues to occur.
Similarly on this case, a public IRC channel is a channel where everyone is allowed to *join in* and become part of a community. But this company seeks to *extract* value from IRC channels and expose their communities *outside IRC* on the Web without even asking and actually obfuscating their logger to make it difficult to avoid it. This is *bad*.
If they're asleep, why don't they log out? Like a normal person?
A normal person tries to use their time constructivelly. Why spend time every day logging in and out when you can just log in once and have the client ready when you wake up? It saves time, among many other reasons.
why is it amoral to publish logs of a fucking PUBLIC chat
Because IRC channels are supposed to be used by the people who are joined in. If we wanted to say things in public we would do so on the WWW (or the USENET, which unfortunately used to be private but at some point companies started doing the exact same thing and in effect it became public, even though it shouldn't be).
A channel is not public unless it says so. If the topic or the rules say that you are welcome to publish logs, please do so... if not then you must assume that everything is private and even covered by copyright (not that I agree with copyright law)
log conversations to a private log without their permission
Many channels have rules against logging or against making logs public. So even if users do this, they are violating the rules and if caught they are going to be banned for life.
Does anyone really consider a public IRC channel to be a private place?
Yes. A channel is available only to people who choose to join in. IRC allows unruly or unwanted people to be kicked out or banned for life (and in this case the IRSeek bots are difficult to get rid of so they are intruders). The whole infrastructure is designed to limit conversations only among a small set of people. If we wanted to make it public, we would say it on the WWW.
Users who keep logs aren't supposed to make them public without asking.
In some places nicks are equated with real names. I know many people by their IRC handle. Some people even use their real name on IRC (I do).
and we know that actual people do keep logs of us.
It's against the terms of use of many channels and bad etiquette to publish logs without asking. Only in a few situations it is okay to publish something if you anonymise the nicks.
As an IRC user I dislike IRSeek's business model and practices very much. Discussions on IRC channels are by definition available only to the people who join in, and making any log available without asking is bad etiquette and in most places it is against the terms of use. If we wanted to make our discussions public, we would speak in a Web forum or USENET newsgroup, or we would use our own logging facility and post the logs on our webpages.
People who believe IRC is dead or don't appreciate it are obviously not worthy of being called nerds. IRC is alive and well, and it is very interesting and useful. Remember that there are many IRC servers across the globe and many channels in them, just as there are many USENET newsgroups. If one network or channel is touched by the Eternal September, go to another server and at some point you *will* find interesting people.
As a user and contributor (and donor) of Wikipedia I prefer GFDL. Not that I don't like CC. But my first preference is GFDL, and CC is my second preference, that's all. Oh, and I actually dislike the idea of "any future versions" even in GFDL/GPL although I do see practical advantages. However, I also see practical advantages in GFDL-CC compatibility, as now many people will be able to mix Wikipedia content with CC-only content which is a good thing. What would be a BAD thing would be a total CC switch by Wikipedia and the departure from GFDL.
So, I essentially do welcome this compatibility but only marginally... In fact I don't want to see the Wikipedia community getting away from the FSF and the GNU's focus on idealism and purity. I'm an FSF Contributing Member as well, so maybe I'm just a bit biased, but that's just how I feel. Perhaps the future will prove that the GFDL-CC compatibility is more good than bad.
What I don't understand, however, is why it's the Wikimedia or a group of admins who get to choose licences, and not let the users themselves one-by-one do it. Wiki articles emerge after a series of edit wars and vandalisms, and yet they are readable and useful. Meaningfull and useful articles emerge even when large groups of trolls try to bring chaos. What if each wiki article had its own licence decided by the initial contributor? Trolls would surely use this to bring more chaos, and users with no knowledge would also do stupid things, but in the end I believe that useful articles would still emerge, and the licence would be the choice of the community as a whole rather than a few people with lots of social capital or prominence in the wiki community.
I believe a wiki must be built by its users rather than by a core admin team... that's the spirit of the wiki. So, why on earth should the admins force users to either accept a predefined licence or not contribute? This idea led me to allow my users on my wiki to choose the licence of their choice for the pages they create. Yeah I know at some point we will have a crazy mix of incompatible licences, but it is up to the users and their collective intelligence to decide how to use the feature of licensing choices. In the end I believe users as a community will make intelligent choices. That's the spirit of the swarm intelligence, after all, which is also the field of my academic research for my Master's... Give users some guidance, some rules of behaviour, apply the minimally possible central administration and let them free to do as they like.
I'd welcome the idea of letting users decide the licence they would like to be implemented in Wikipedia as well. Perhaps this could help more people to understand what licences are, and also see themselves how unreasonable the current copyright laws are, so perhaps more citizens could start demanding their representatives to start thinking about copyright reform or its total eradication... in my opinion copyright could be replaced by laws built on top of moral rights of authors where everyone is allowed to copy anything but only if the original author is prominently cited and credited. The more ordinary citizens get exposed to the silliness of copyright, the more they will demand changes from their governments.
Wikipedia could start doing that right now very easily. It just needs to remove the site-wide GFDL notice or add an "except where otherwise indicated" note after it, and then apply individual copyright notices on each article that is not GFDL. Of course, to maintain the freedom and the spirit of copyleft, Wikipedia and other wikis willing to use this approach could accept only a specific set of licences that meet certain criteria. For example, articles could be allowed to be either under the GFDL, the CC-By-SA, or the Free Art Licence, or any lcience in the spirit of DFSG, etc..
No it must not, the agency has a moral obligation to support what is true ie science. Science (hard science at least) is not opinion, it's proven fact. When you land a spacecraft on the Moon you prove that there are rocks in space, you don't just opine on their existence. Neutrality does not imply that one is expected to give equal status to unfalsifiable claims. ID and creationism should never reach the brains of students through taxpayer's money.
If governments start using the school bureaucratic apparatus to teach what I believe are byproducts of malfunctioning brains then this will mean that our societies will have entered a new dark age. The last dark age existed for more than 1500 years, so if you allow this to happen again then you will share responsibility for causing your children and future descendants to suffer in a mad society.
My understanding is that, for a $1 iTunes download, the breakdown looks something like this:
$.75 - Label
$.20 - Apple
$.05 - Artist
Supposedly when money changes hands, it's either a donation or a mutual transfer of value (company gives value in terms of services, client gives value in terms of money). I can clearly see that the artist provides lots of value so they do deserve to get lots of money. I can also see that Apple also provides some value for the platform, albeit not as much as the artist's. But I honestly fail to see what kind of value the label offers in the modern marketplace. I can understand that labels were useful before the Internet, but in the modern era a good artist could earn their money just by selling their stuff online and getting paid through PayPal (or preferably a smaller similar service). So, my best understanding is that labels have an obsolete business model, and offer no real value in the marketplace anymore. Giving money to someone who does not earn their business by offering real value or is in no real need for it (donation) is an act contrary to the basis of the free market. When you give money to someone who provides no value and it's not a donation, you are actively damaging the economy. The consumer also shares responsibility for the overall effectiveness of the free market: Consumers must understand who offers true value in the marketplace and only buy from them. If consumers buy from companies and people that do not offer real value, then they encourage this practice more and in the end this damages the economy and the well-being of all the humanity. According to my understanding, businesses that offer no real value resort to government-granted monopolies or sponsor laws that enable them to continue trolling the marketplace, and this is bad for genuine entrepreneurs who wish to offer real value.
I use Debian GNU\Linux both on my personal and my business machines. I download new releases through BitTorrent. I also use BitTorrent for downloading other GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora, always from the official trackers. Then I leave BitTorrent active for months to contribute back to the community by offering part of my ADSL upstream.
If my ISP sabotages my BitTorrent traffic, this means that it also affects my business as I would have to wait more for new GNU/Linux DVDs to download. Imagine setting up a new PC for development and having to wait a lot because a manager thought that BitTorrent can only be used for mp3z etc... Ridiculous. Just because some people use it for something big media companies don't like doesn't mean that everyone including the legitimate users should be made to suffer.
how bad the spam filtering is in Evolution (after months of training).
I use server-side spam control with spamassassin at SMTP time with exim4 using IMAP. It works great, and the server-side spamcheck has the advantage that I can be spam-free from every different PC/laptop/PDA I use to access my mail.
So this means that we now have to take care where we place the cellphone. Where can it cause the less lethal damage in case it goes mad? In the shirtpocket near your heart or down under near your... you know. I guess the decision has to do with which organ on your body you value most. Sounds like a neat idea for a slashdot poll.
Perhaps Google cares about its users as a whole but not as individuals.
Which actually makes sense for them if we assume that they are in business for the money and that if users as a whole leave then they will lose ad revenue, but an individual alone has little effect on their balance sheet. Is Google in only for the money? I don't know... but most businesses are because they are composed of many different individuals each one having different ideas about ethics, thus causing the business as a whole to act on more-or-less universally accepted goals, and this is usually profit as most if not all people on the planet prefer having their pockets full of money rather than air. Is running a business solely on profit bad or good? Well, I think it's better to take other ethical issues into consideration when doing business and not just count your success by your balance sheet's totals.
With every laptop I get, I upgrade the disk to 7200RPM and I keep the CPU underclocked at 300MHz or 1GHz. Works perfectly. Less noise, less heat, less power-hungry... and never or rarely feel the need for more speed.
Just wanted to add that Toshiba's subnotebook keyboard has the PgUp/PgDn keys next to the arrow keys, and Acer's big keyboard is also like this, so one has other options than Sony when they want less moving with their fingers.
I prefer hitting Fn-Left/RightArrow for Home/End and Fn-Up/DownArrow for PageUp/PageDown - less moving around for my fingers.
I actually don't, and is one of the reasons I try to stay away from Sony laptops and subnotebooks. The Sony keyboard (of the Fn-PgUp variety) is actually a big disadvantage for the way I use the machines.
While using Fn on an office desk may not seem too hard, it becomes very difficult when you use your laptop or subnotebook in unorthodox situations, eg while you walk using one hand to keep the laptop and the other to type, etc.
Personally I believe the best keyboard is IBM's classic ThinkPad keyboard.
The reason you put the username@hotmail.com is because there is also msn.com msn.ca for the ISP subscribers... hotmail.com hotmail.co.uk etc etc
So perhaps they should make it aware of the URL the user types in the browser... if I visit by typing msn.com and I login with the @msn.com email, but if I type hotmail.co.uk then my mail login will be @hotmail.co.uk
You wouldn't write an email without being subjected to Clippy's continued demands for attention by jumping all over your screen screaming "click on me! click on me!!"
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is simple: Users post their personal info on profiles stored in a central server. Thus, it is the entity that controls the server that has control over the user's personal info, and not the user themselves.
The solution is very simple as well: Users should also be the ones storing their own personal info and profiles. People who own their own personal webpage do this. Since, however, not everyone is able to keep a computer connected 24/7, we could devise a p2p protocol for social networking. Profiles would be stored primarily on the user's computer, and disseminated in a p2p fashion among other computers on the same social network, and any modification or deletion of the source profile would then be automatically copied to the p2p swarm. While I can imagine users abusing this system (eg trying to cache deleted profiles without permission etc), I hope that a p2p protocol utilising clever techniques could guarantee more privacy and protection than modern social networking sites.
Exactly: Something anyone *on the network* can read. Come to USENET and become part of the community, and it's okay to read anything. But copying anything without permission and getting it *out of the network* (ie out of the originating community) on CD-ROMs and Websites is like *getting* value from the USENET community without *giving* anything back.
I do recognise of course that archiving may be useful in many ocassions, but I would prefer OPT-IN archiving rather than the indiscriminate copying outside the bounds of the USENET community that occurred and continues to occur.
Similarly on this case, a public IRC channel is a channel where everyone is allowed to *join in* and become part of a community. But this company seeks to *extract* value from IRC channels and expose their communities *outside IRC* on the Web without even asking and actually obfuscating their logger to make it difficult to avoid it. This is *bad*.
A normal person tries to use their time constructivelly. Why spend time every day logging in and out when you can just log in once and have the client ready when you wake up? It saves time, among many other reasons.
Because IRC channels are supposed to be used by the people who are joined in. If we wanted to say things in public we would do so on the WWW (or the USENET, which unfortunately used to be private but at some point companies started doing the exact same thing and in effect it became public, even though it shouldn't be).
A channel is not public unless it says so. If the topic or the rules say that you are welcome to publish logs, please do so... if not then you must assume that everything is private and even covered by copyright (not that I agree with copyright law)
Many channels have rules against logging or against making logs public. So even if users do this, they are violating the rules and if caught they are going to be banned for life.
Yes. A channel is available only to people who choose to join in. IRC allows unruly or unwanted people to be kicked out or banned for life (and in this case the IRSeek bots are difficult to get rid of so they are intruders). The whole infrastructure is designed to limit conversations only among a small set of people. If we wanted to make it public, we would say it on the WWW.
Users who keep logs aren't supposed to make them public without asking.
In some places nicks are equated with real names. I know many people by their IRC handle. Some people even use their real name on IRC (I do).
and we know that actual people do keep logs of us.It's against the terms of use of many channels and bad etiquette to publish logs without asking. Only in a few situations it is okay to publish something if you anonymise the nicks.
As an IRC user I dislike IRSeek's business model and practices very much. Discussions on IRC channels are by definition available only to the people who join in, and making any log available without asking is bad etiquette and in most places it is against the terms of use. If we wanted to make our discussions public, we would speak in a Web forum or USENET newsgroup, or we would use our own logging facility and post the logs on our webpages.
People who believe IRC is dead or don't appreciate it are obviously not worthy of being called nerds. IRC is alive and well, and it is very interesting and useful. Remember that there are many IRC servers across the globe and many channels in them, just as there are many USENET newsgroups. If one network or channel is touched by the Eternal September, go to another server and at some point you *will* find interesting people.
As a user and contributor (and donor) of Wikipedia I prefer GFDL. Not that I don't like CC. But my first preference is GFDL, and CC is my second preference, that's all. Oh, and I actually dislike the idea of "any future versions" even in GFDL/GPL although I do see practical advantages. However, I also see practical advantages in GFDL-CC compatibility, as now many people will be able to mix Wikipedia content with CC-only content which is a good thing. What would be a BAD thing would be a total CC switch by Wikipedia and the departure from GFDL.
So, I essentially do welcome this compatibility but only marginally... In fact I don't want to see the Wikipedia community getting away from the FSF and the GNU's focus on idealism and purity. I'm an FSF Contributing Member as well, so maybe I'm just a bit biased, but that's just how I feel. Perhaps the future will prove that the GFDL-CC compatibility is more good than bad.
What I don't understand, however, is why it's the Wikimedia or a group of admins who get to choose licences, and not let the users themselves one-by-one do it. Wiki articles emerge after a series of edit wars and vandalisms, and yet they are readable and useful. Meaningfull and useful articles emerge even when large groups of trolls try to bring chaos. What if each wiki article had its own licence decided by the initial contributor? Trolls would surely use this to bring more chaos, and users with no knowledge would also do stupid things, but in the end I believe that useful articles would still emerge, and the licence would be the choice of the community as a whole rather than a few people with lots of social capital or prominence in the wiki community.
I believe a wiki must be built by its users rather than by a core admin team... that's the spirit of the wiki. So, why on earth should the admins force users to either accept a predefined licence or not contribute? This idea led me to allow my users on my wiki to choose the licence of their choice for the pages they create. Yeah I know at some point we will have a crazy mix of incompatible licences, but it is up to the users and their collective intelligence to decide how to use the feature of licensing choices. In the end I believe users as a community will make intelligent choices. That's the spirit of the swarm intelligence, after all, which is also the field of my academic research for my Master's... Give users some guidance, some rules of behaviour, apply the minimally possible central administration and let them free to do as they like.
I'd welcome the idea of letting users decide the licence they would like to be implemented in Wikipedia as well. Perhaps this could help more people to understand what licences are, and also see themselves how unreasonable the current copyright laws are, so perhaps more citizens could start demanding their representatives to start thinking about copyright reform or its total eradication... in my opinion copyright could be replaced by laws built on top of moral rights of authors where everyone is allowed to copy anything but only if the original author is prominently cited and credited. The more ordinary citizens get exposed to the silliness of copyright, the more they will demand changes from their governments.
Wikipedia could start doing that right now very easily. It just needs to remove the site-wide GFDL notice or add an "except where otherwise indicated" note after it, and then apply individual copyright notices on each article that is not GFDL. Of course, to maintain the freedom and the spirit of copyleft, Wikipedia and other wikis willing to use this approach could accept only a specific set of licences that meet certain criteria. For example, articles could be allowed to be either under the GFDL, the CC-By-SA, or the Free Art Licence, or any lcience in the spirit of DFSG, etc..
No it must not, the agency has a moral obligation to support what is true ie science. Science (hard science at least) is not opinion, it's proven fact. When you land a spacecraft on the Moon you prove that there are rocks in space, you don't just opine on their existence. Neutrality does not imply that one is expected to give equal status to unfalsifiable claims. ID and creationism should never reach the brains of students through taxpayer's money.
If governments start using the school bureaucratic apparatus to teach what I believe are byproducts of malfunctioning brains then this will mean that our societies will have entered a new dark age. The last dark age existed for more than 1500 years, so if you allow this to happen again then you will share responsibility for causing your children and future descendants to suffer in a mad society.
Supposedly when money changes hands, it's either a donation or a mutual transfer of value (company gives value in terms of services, client gives value in terms of money). I can clearly see that the artist provides lots of value so they do deserve to get lots of money. I can also see that Apple also provides some value for the platform, albeit not as much as the artist's. But I honestly fail to see what kind of value the label offers in the modern marketplace. I can understand that labels were useful before the Internet, but in the modern era a good artist could earn their money just by selling their stuff online and getting paid through PayPal (or preferably a smaller similar service). So, my best understanding is that labels have an obsolete business model, and offer no real value in the marketplace anymore. Giving money to someone who does not earn their business by offering real value or is in no real need for it (donation) is an act contrary to the basis of the free market. When you give money to someone who provides no value and it's not a donation, you are actively damaging the economy. The consumer also shares responsibility for the overall effectiveness of the free market: Consumers must understand who offers true value in the marketplace and only buy from them. If consumers buy from companies and people that do not offer real value, then they encourage this practice more and in the end this damages the economy and the well-being of all the humanity. According to my understanding, businesses that offer no real value resort to government-granted monopolies or sponsor laws that enable them to continue trolling the marketplace, and this is bad for genuine entrepreneurs who wish to offer real value.
I use Debian GNU\Linux both on my personal and my business machines. I download new releases through BitTorrent. I also use BitTorrent for downloading other GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora, always from the official trackers. Then I leave BitTorrent active for months to contribute back to the community by offering part of my ADSL upstream.
If my ISP sabotages my BitTorrent traffic, this means that it also affects my business as I would have to wait more for new GNU/Linux DVDs to download. Imagine setting up a new PC for development and having to wait a lot because a manager thought that BitTorrent can only be used for mp3z etc... Ridiculous. Just because some people use it for something big media companies don't like doesn't mean that everyone including the legitimate users should be made to suffer.
I use server-side spam control with spamassassin at SMTP time with exim4 using IMAP. It works great, and the server-side spamcheck has the advantage that I can be spam-free from every different PC/laptop/PDA I use to access my mail.
So this means that we now have to take care where we place the cellphone. Where can it cause the less lethal damage in case it goes mad? In the shirtpocket near your heart or down under near your... you know. I guess the decision has to do with which organ on your body you value most. Sounds like a neat idea for a slashdot poll.
Which actually makes sense for them if we assume that they are in business for the money and that if users as a whole leave then they will lose ad revenue, but an individual alone has little effect on their balance sheet. Is Google in only for the money? I don't know... but most businesses are because they are composed of many different individuals each one having different ideas about ethics, thus causing the business as a whole to act on more-or-less universally accepted goals, and this is usually profit as most if not all people on the planet prefer having their pockets full of money rather than air. Is running a business solely on profit bad or good? Well, I think it's better to take other ethical issues into consideration when doing business and not just count your success by your balance sheet's totals.
that's a feature!
This is a problem when you market yourself as a technician-implementor rather than advisor-consultant.
With every laptop I get, I upgrade the disk to 7200RPM and I keep the CPU underclocked at 300MHz or 1GHz. Works perfectly. Less noise, less heat, less power-hungry... and never or rarely feel the need for more speed.
There is absolutely no relation between how much you spend on R&D and the quality of the research coming out.
I cannot remember anything innovative MS has done.
Just wanted to add that Toshiba's subnotebook keyboard has the PgUp/PgDn keys next to the arrow keys, and Acer's big keyboard is also like this, so one has other options than Sony when they want less moving with their fingers.
I actually don't, and is one of the reasons I try to stay away from Sony laptops and subnotebooks. The Sony keyboard (of the Fn-PgUp variety) is actually a big disadvantage for the way I use the machines.
While using Fn on an office desk may not seem too hard, it becomes very difficult when you use your laptop or subnotebook in unorthodox situations, eg while you walk using one hand to keep the laptop and the other to type, etc.
Personally I believe the best keyboard is IBM's classic ThinkPad keyboard.
what a duo
Now we use LiIon on laptops and the worse that can happen is a local fire.
Fast forward in the future... will laptop users need to fear of vanishing all their city if their supplier sold them a bad nuclear battery?
There's a positive side as well: Perhaps with nuclear batteries, manufacturers will be forced to be more proactive to avoid manufacturing errors.
So perhaps they should make it aware of the URL the user types in the browser... if I visit by typing msn.com and I login with the @msn.com email, but if I type hotmail.co.uk then my mail login will be @hotmail.co.uk
You wouldn't write an email without being subjected to Clippy's continued demands for attention by jumping all over your screen screaming "click on me! click on me!!"