"Hm, it says very little about what the company is going to live off... My guess would be the usual (=banner ads), since it says right there in the account usage policy that the account is free..."
That or someone's large pocketbook.
"Also, I find the conceptual limitation to photos somewhat interesting, as well."
That can be a bit intimidating at first.
"An image is an image is an image, I thought."
The better question that you have to ask is what is the difference between a sufficiently enhaced or chaged photo and an image?
"Well, it probably makes sense from a PR perspective, anyways."
That I really don't get.
"So, good luck, I guess!;^)"
Yeah any tool that is free and allows for greater expression and utility is usually a good thing.
"You speak as though copying GPL'ed code is a bad thing. Isn't that the whole point?"
I think the poster is refering to the fact that little actual engineering or coding would be going on because there are an implied few people actually doing anything for FreeBSD. Unfounded but that's what's implied.
"The hardware wasn't designed to run under linux. Specifically, if the driver doesn't catch an interrupt and poke a value back into memory every 100 or so frames the system will blow a bit on it's EPROM and refuse to run anymore. This was implimented by the MPAA to prevent "piracy" under linux. It's part of their new scheme called ConsumerInaction (CI). By making sure the customer is incapable of viewing the DVDs they purchased, the MPAA can ensure nobody will pirate any of their releases. However, these guys are working on a decoder that'll work with the new CI-compliant machines... "
Is there any evidence that you can really shortcircuit any hardware just by running linux? Hardly doubtful.
"It's not just a matter of being out of print. It's a matter of being out of copyright. They aren't the same thing. The Grey Lensman books are out of print but still copyright. Just not being available doesn't make it ok to blindly copy and distribute a work."
Then pray tell how does an intelligent person get a copy of it?
"How it all works or Ignoring that Cognitave Dissonance "
I really don't think we need to see you senior thesis for your degree in philosophy just yet ok? Using artful language dosn't make your case any better than if you were swearing.
"You may notice a large number of posts made on Slashdot concering Napster, or similar programs such as Gnutella or FreeNet."
Well what do you expect from an article about those topics? The price of sugar in Pakistan? Anything in those threads not about those topics (or even having a large number) of them is automatically considered offtopic and demoderated as such. When you and your friends are talking about that new Bently you got because you were bored one day you don't just suddently start talking about circus clowns do you? That's what I mean.
"Often these will be posted under "Your Rights Online" (YRO), in order to show how the use of Napster affects your "rights"."
That's because for the last oh about ~20 years principles of "fair use" were in effect and companies (who by the way have no god given right to make laws for me or,even legitimately ask for new laws) are trying to change these for selfish gain so they don't have to suffer anything that the average person has to deal with.
"You may wonder what the hell programs whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright laws is doing on a conservative (yes, I mean it) site such as Slashdot."
Back it up. As I understand the American interpretation of liberal it is everything that slashdot stands for essentially:
1. no great love for religion or religious dogma 2. distrust of extreme concentrated authority 3. communal cooperation (usual conservative stance calls for isolation and "standing on your own two feet"). 4. because of 2/3 massive concentrations of power ecconomically (corporations) are usually distrusted. 5. freedom of choice without regard to previously held beliefs.
These are what most of the people on slashdot believe (and the editor's as well). None of these things are even remotely conservative. Unless the definition of conservative changes.
"Let me explain to you."
Shh.. quite kids Mr. AC is going to speak
"In the back of their minds, most Slashdot readers ("Slashbots")..."
ooh calling people mindless drones good call
"...know that they simply don't want to pay for anything which they can get illegally for free."
Hmm ok so you are saying that for example if I want a new computer and see one in a store window I am (because I post to slashdot) going to steal it right? After all I am a "Slashbot" and have no free thought of my own.
Also your statement is an exceedingly arrogant one. I must make some basic assumptions:
1. Your income is above the national computed average released from government ecconomic analysis and the Treasury.
2. You are comfortably suited in your present position and feel that in fact you are rather unassialable in your position for quite some time.
3. Distrust the evil "rabble" that threaten your supremacy.
There are some people who commit crimes when the need arises and some that commit crimes because there are crimes to be commited in some manner. This is a rather generalized manner to look at things. For example I don't download mp3's because I don't listen to music that much, my computer can't play the music, and I don't have an extra 20Gb of information avaible to store them, nor the bandwidth to legally/illegally transfer them. But I still believe in the concept of napster. Why because someday, somehow I will win and be able to get what I want through some means which are going to be entirely ethical. Labeling people because some of them do something stupid is not a good practice. Well some wealthy people have cheated, robbed, commited fraud, securities violations, etc. Then because you are rich you are automatically evil. Right?
"Most people are exactly the same way. Napster et al allows them to get music for free, so they use it."
While it is true that some people can get free things people can get free things in real life. Did you realize that for example if I know the right people I could conceivably clean up quite nicely at for example a loading dock? If the officials concerned with say security and such are on my side and quitly switch off the security system and then allow me to steal say thousands of dollars worth of goods. This is entirely possible wheather or not there are laws that strike fear into me if someone finds out.
The fact is every system is corrupt and unless there is a foolproof method of reading thoughts in someone's inner mind it's impossible to prevent in any system.
"They know that this is copyright violation, which is a bad thing to do."
copyright violations are often many and difficult to trace. Unless you know copyright law you most likely have violated some copyright in some manner. Knowing layman interpretations of the law dosn't cut it. You have to know the whole damn thing unless you want to break some laws.
"This brings them feelings of guilt which they want to do away with."
Criminals eventually will not care about "guilt". Using simple logic I can say that for example if I wasn't going to buy the CD anyway (I am broke) then they aren't loosing anything. See how easy was that? I doubt many people who are doing the "illegal trading" have feelings of guilt.
"How do they do this?"
Damn I thought that was a rhetorical question.
"They rationalize it away."
same as you are for letting people screw the consumer with artificially high prices but I digress
"It's the copyright laws that are wrong, not them."
An unjust law is still unjust despite the fact that the person is a "criminal" under the law. Martin Luther King was in fact a "criminal" under various laws what about him. Or Ghandi, or Harriet Tubman, all these people were "criminals" but they risked their humanity and risked death to do something a little nobler.
"DCMA needs to be rewritten."
I think so. When a small group of people tries to change policy for the rest of humanity then that is unjust.
"The MPAA needs to be destroyed."
Again a group of people who uses pressure and fear to prevent certain types of media from being shown to the outside world. Same with current abilities of ISPs and others to make publishing content prohibitively expensive for the average man. They just take away the presses.
"It's an expression of free speech."
Correct. Free speech is very important and essentially what Napster does. Thanks for playing.
"And those greedy record companies take all the money anyway."
Yup people who are lazy indolent bums who never did any creative thing in their lives are getting most of the money from the endeavours of the artists. This is an unfortunate pattern because it seems throught history middlemen have tried to screw people on both ends of the spectrum from the very poor to the very rich. Eventually the Middlemen become the rich and try to prevent other middlemen from screwing them but to no avail.
"Never mind that with pirate mp3s the artist never sees any money anyway."
There are no hard numbers for the number of people who would not buy music if it were for mp3's. As I said it costs mucho $$$ to actually get all these mp3's add this to all the other things that people do with computers and you have one hell of an expensive solution to a problem. People will always buy CDs because computers and the related technology will never catch up affordably to what people who are really in to music will ever want.
"This way, they are sticking it to "the Man", who exists to make life difficult for 31337 Linux users like themselves."
Uhh.. Mr. Dummy do you even realize that Napster (the official program) was developed for Winblows users first and foremost and not for the "31337 Linux users" as you claim?
I have never heard of (at least in my popular surroundings the phrase "the Man" used. I think this is an outgrowth of the concept or embodyment of Uncle Sam from the 19th century.
"Yes, it is flimsy, and yes, it allows them to take the moral high ground by robbing hard-working artists."
Do you even understand what is going on? Those hardworking artists make the most of their money on concerts. Any artist that is not making money doing concerts is usually some small band that probably sold only 3 CDs to their friends. They really have nothing to loose by letting others around the world hear their music.
"Yes, many will say that modern popular music is all horrible anyway,..."
I would say most of it just sucks and is really cheasy anyway. People are being shaped and moulded by the compannies so that they can become totally eliminated as a factor and have their opinion reduced to ashes.
"...and that their favorite music is the only worthwhile type,..."
exactly how is this new to any group of people with similar interests, look at history.
"...but then go on to slam others for being "elitist" in any discussion in which Gnome or KDE is mentioned."
What the hell do Gnome or KDE have to do with anything. The only thing I get out of debates about these things is that linux has essentially no advantage over windows except that there is open (and hence free code) and that there are more apps that I like.
Linux bloat is almost reached windows proportions. Loading almost any of the new window managers will make your computer that much, more inefficient. People want "pretty pictures" and frankly my budget can't affod their wonderout conception of what is good and not. I like pretty astetically pleasing things too but come on. Being forced to upgrade my computer because nothing runs faster than molasses dosn't strike me as fair or equitable. And running unupdated software that no one supports and that no one cares about is not an option. Hell I could have stayed with DOS if I had wanted that option. Believe you me nothing is less suported noadays than pure dos environments, even less with win16 because no one really cares about that one either.
"And what about the Corel Linux beta?"
yeah what about them
"Didn't that violate the GPL by attaching a boilerplate disclaimer saying that only people over 18 years old could download it?"
That's patently absurd in the extreme unless there is porn distributed with the OS there is no legal claim that would easily work.
"And remember the cries of the Slashbots..."
wow never get off that elitist kick do you
"...that Corel should be sued, destroyed. boycotted, etc.?"
When you violate the terms of a fairly open and equitable little liscence that tries to make sure that the code will always have value and not become useless and nonsupported people get a little reactionary.
"All because Corel who was helping out the Linux community mistakenly added a certain clause to their beta, which violated the GPL."
I don't know where you work but usually there is something called a legal department that is supposed not to make little boo boos with things like this. Also remember never offend the audience you are trying to sell to.
"As you can see, the "community" is quick to cry foul when the copyrights on their software is violated, even by companies with good intentions."
A liscence is different than a copyright please get this destinction in your head. I also don't recally that there is any liscence on CDs saying I can't keep copies for myself on alternative media or say give copies to someone who already bought one but say it got destroyed.
"Our copyright good, yours bad."
No more like our liscence good, yours bad but whatever.
"It's called "hypocrisy"..."
man I am going to have to look that one up
"...and if you read Slashdot enough, you'll have to get used to it."
Interesting that people refuse to actually associate names and the like with what they post. AC posts usually come off as rather elitist because the person wants to appear godlike and not in touch with the common man. You want to insulate yourself from the world and all that is in it. You don't like the people even enough to let them know who you are. Also an attempt to avoid criticism.
"Now ask yourself exactly why ther is coverage of Napster on a site obstensibly devoted to Free Software."
because it's called News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. Napster matters.
Also it's just not about freesoftware but there are a lot of people who are affiliated with free software who post comments.
"Napster is proprietary as hell."
Agreed.
"Those protocol specs had to be reverse engineered."
Also agreed.
"Isn't proprietary software bad?"
In some instinces yes indeed it is.
"Isn't all free software superior?"
No but theoretically it can be.
"Isn't "open sourcing" a piece of software the best way to improve it? "
Yes. I will however not go over in depth why this is the case this is already quite long.
"These are all bleatings of the party lines."
And yours are not? Seems like you really want to staus quo quite badly. You almost remind me of people who lived back when my dad and his father were young. Stubborn, pigheaded, and wouldn't see change if it bit them in the butt.
"Here, we consider proprietary software Evil until Rob Malda tells us otherwise,..."
Rob malda is a technical editor. If I go here for news and find that Rob malda (or almost anyone) tells me that a piece of software has all these good points I might consider getting it. I have bought software before and I would like to see more reviews about it.
"or it gets ported to Linux."
Naturally most people left the windows desktop because the OS was expensive, the system was unstable, and the apps were crap. Not solely because they could get access to source code. I can't code worth a damn and the source dosn't make much sence to me. Therefore I have to use linux the only way I can for access to better applications.
"Then it becomes a special class of proprietary software which somehow becomes better than the rest."
To the community of computer users who use it yes. Windows software dosn't make people who use linux excited most of the time because you can't run it. It's the same reason why Quake III and the like don't get me excited. Namely because I am not rich enough to affort a machine to run it or a network connection to play it, or even the game itself. It just dosn't speak to me.
"Napster is one example."
like I have said napster matters because it's more of a social issue but it still dosn't run on linux only on win32 platforms.
"WordPerfect is another."
Wordperfect for years has been a stable of businesses who have not gone the MS way. People want an alternative to MS. And to be perfectly frank it's a good word processor.
"Somehow, they are able to ignore this seemingly large discrepency by claiming that these companies are "helping" the "community"."
Because my dear Watson they are if you look at the community in question. Linux community. People who write software for linux make it a better choice and make it better all around.
"The only one being helped is Andover.Net who gets to sell ads to these people after giving them free publicity on the most popular "Linux" site of them all. "
I don't give a damn. I never have clicked through and bought a damn thing from any banner add. The few times I have clicked through to anything it mostly wasn't on this site. Furthermore I have really no interest in this. Further still if you really think and looked at the articles about filtering cookies, blocking banner ads that slashdot has had in the past (I have text archives I can prove this). Many of the actual core slashdot clientielle are in fact not interested in ads in any way.
"Stop lying to yourselves. "
Stop being bigoted, lieing, and generally acting as an arch conservative who only wants to keep the rabble away from him ok?
If it's not sold or held in a firm copyright then you can't say it's theft.
Until there are massive databases of music that a particular company or individual can legitimately say is his/hers then it's not theft. If I write a book and then I die or no one bothers to do anything at all with the copyright in question then it's fair game.
If you don't believe this look at project gutenberg. All sorts of old out of print books that I would almost dare you to find a printed version of one of them in any bookstore. The writers are dead, the copyright gone, no way for anyone who (ethically) was concerned with the production of the thing. So you aren't hurting anyone nor are you violating the law.
"I for one have to say that I prefer to play Q3:A against Females. They tend to be better trashtalkers with less lame gibberish, better players on average, and generally more fun to play with/against. All of the guys I play Q3:A against come off as screaming, hormone enhanced, adolescent losers. Hmmm... of course so do most of the guys I run into in real life.... Heck, my Wife beats the hell out of me at Tekken and any Racing game you can name.... "
Well way to go associating men with being savages. That's going to win you a lot of respect.
Theories about expected development of the moon and it's eventual claim: 1. yeah for now people are lazy and don't want to actually do anything to explore space but that dosn't mean it's not going to happen. 2. governments are usually powerful and mean when they get mad 3. governments usually have guns or their equivelent 4. ever played "king of the mountain" as a kid that's how governments play with territory 5. As a consequence of all of the above whoever has the strongest government and gets there first will usually be the winner.
About the Florida gag isn't the fact that the land isn't arable or easily improved the reason it's useless or is it because it's in a protected "wetland" area?
The redeaming qualities of Beavis and Butthead?
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I can't say as I can make a really good comment on the series as a whole but it seemed some things were readily aparent: 1. It's cable and so consequently ratings dont' matter as much 2. It teaches people to be shiftless, lazy, and drones of the media conglomerates 3. I had heard some bad thing about the show and didn't beleive them at first however soon I realized they were far and above too kind. 4. Beavis and Butthead make Homer Simpson look like Einstein.
take these for what you will and perhaps offer some well thought out counter examples.
What exactly is the "parrot sketch"?
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Is this something I should be aware of as a human? I would look at this but my computer isn't good enough here to do multimedia. Anyone have a trnscript?
Well if you like legos without all the commercial hype you can look at some of the more generic brands. I have had myself and brothers and sisters playing with generic legos for quite a while. Does anyone else remember the little howto books that came from some of the "other" companies or perhaps from the early lego work? You had a book with 100+ diagrams that determined how to build all kinds of gadgets. Although they do have that now it's kind of limiting what you can say do with a piece of plastic shaped like the hull of a ship.
What exactly is VTV and what are robot movies?
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I haven't the foggiest in any way.
Isn't an "escourt service" a new name for..
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expensive rent a whore? I mean not to be terribly rude or anything but isn't that like claiming that the Maffia isn't a criminal organization but just an ethnic Italian centric gentleman's club? Something about slashdot endorsing things like this is rather fishy.
I had a really wild idea. For quickies or perhaps once per day there can be stories that didn't make it for their own article. Or perhaps stories that are related to another story that should be posted along side of the standard ones. What pray tell is defined as a quickie? How are they chosen? Voting could be rather nice for a quckie category.
"Support is already there. In Xfree86, you can either directly configure your screen's DPI, or you can indirectly specify it by using a combination of mode definition and physical screen size (using the DisplaySize declaration). "
I thought that they had 75 and 100 dpi why is 72 so important/critical?
""...output in native Linux format...""
"Ah, but that's the beauty. Linux doesn't have a native format. A Linux machine can be used to generate just about any openly-defined output format you would like, such as PostScript. Almost any image format is also supported. The genius of open formats is that, by using them, your service bureau can use the platform of its choice and you don't have to care. "
The gimp has it's own internal format for gimp use if that's what you mean. I don't see the use in having another thing that a browser can't read and needs me to start up a very, very large memory hog (I had to increase my swap size just for gimp use).
Also is it just me or are there very, few methods to access postscript. If it's such a standard why are there not more ways to say print a postscript file in any word processor? I know there's ghostscript but I think that's a little klugy and such. There is good support in the browser for pdf but not postscript on the majority of public machines that I have seen.
"The Gimp may make many things possible, but it will never prevail until it makes many things easy."
Ahh however it dosn't work if you want to offer thousand of wizband features. Even the most "easy to use" software program will have problems getting people to understand how it operates.
"Mr Taco, in case you have not noticed, your site has become overrun by trolls. The signal to noise ratio has been declining for months and now stands at about 1-1. "
And irrevelent posts too:)
"Slashdot.org used to be a quality news site with meaningful, relavent information. Now it is nothing but a trash hole filled with yesterday's news. I belive the "golden age of slashdot" ended because of two events: "
Ohh the golden age of slashdot huh? If you look at history there are good times and there are bad times. Never look at one bad time and make judgement on the good.
"The merger with Andover.net/VA Linux and The implementation of moderation. "
Any objective critical analysis of this? Proof.
" When you sold your site to andover.net, many people feared the worst: Taco had sold out. Initially, things were handled well and there was no obvious change in the management of the site. As time went on, however, many changes occured, mostly bad. "
Maybe taco was going broke trying to pay for all the FPers and others who were wasting massive ammounts of bandwidth on his ISDN plus he was working quite hard. But I guess that dosn't mean a damn thing to you does it.
"For example, the topics now posted to slashdot are old and meaningless. Further, important events are often never writen about seemingly because your parent company is looking over your shoulder. In the past few months, the stock prices of the big Linux companies(especially VA Linux) have tanked. This is news worthy of a topic. "
Strictly speaking there have been few editorials or news articles published by unbiased news outlets that have done analysis of stock issues. I don't own one share of stock of any sort so why should it bother me?
"More disturbingly, you seem to cover up events which do not reflect well on VA and your site. A few days ago when slashdot was down for half a day, there was no reason given. When people asked, you marked them down as flamebait or off topic. In the old days, if slashdot were down for even 30 minutes, you would post an explanation. Did you forget this time? "
Quite literally why do technical difficulties rank so highly on your scale of thinking? Everyone has a few problems or they have difficulty in getting them solved.
Also do you really think that with how slow slashdot becomes at times that his original setup would have worked well at all? Just think about that for a moment. There is probably several million dollars worth of equipment outlays a year on slashdot I don't think many private individuals can say the same.
"Now to moderation which is turning out to be the nail in your coffin. You claim that moderation is not censorship but merely a filter that relevant information must pass through. Frankly, that is bullshit. Many on-topic posts are moderated down simply because they disagree with open source dogma or are critical of Linux and VA. In many cases, if the downward moderated post were to say the exact same thing about another company(Microsoft), they would be moderated up. "
Scores are meaningless if you just set your preferences to a value of -1. Everything is fine again and the world is sunny. I can see all the shit and all of the art all at once and never have to care about it at all.
This is back to a usenet philosophy. Many people (a great deal of them syadmins and people with fixed budgets with metered access to the net) want to try to get all the content they want at the lowest cost (time, money, sanity, take your pick).
I have routinely attempted to read all of slashdot's comments and have found it a rather formadible challenge to say the least.
"Now registered members of your site can view at any threshold they want to, but the default view for non-members is > -1. By moderating these anti-Linux posts down, you are preventing them from being viewed by the masses. Thus, you have commited an act of censorship. "
Last time I checked you can change the threshold when viewing comments. This does allow for access to all data not some.
"The trolls don't like being censored. To prevent this, they simply post many messages so that they all can not be moderated down. If you were to get rid of moderation, there would still be the occasional troll, but you would not see mass spam. The message, however unpopular or inane, would get through the first time. "
I don't know about that. Slashdot has seen a large increase in traffic since moderation took affect. Can you be sure now as your once were?
Also why should I care that whinny trolls are getting pissed? You know they simply could have comments deleted if enough people didn't like them in the first place. Then they wouldn't be there.
"Another problem is your moderators' lack of humor. Many times I have rolled on the floor laughing at a post marked down to -1. So what if someone makes fun of your mom? Personally, I find many of the "hot grits" posts to be funny. Most should not be moderated down. "
The ability of the moderators to moderate has been tempered with the mass opinion of said moderations via meta-moderation that each and every registered slashdotter can participate in every 24 hour period. Works nicely if you think that the moderators (I have been one a number of times) are humorless.
What I think is that information is primary. Humor is secondary in life. That is what being a programmer is all about. Basically sitting in a chair and becomming a slave to information. If you don't like this then do something else (I am contemplating this. Maybe a stint in the Peace corps or something). Damnit this isn't Jimmy's Wacky/Laugh shack at http://www.giggle.com or something this is an informational site. I can get lists of yo-momma and red neck jokes at other sites. At slashdot I want news and nothing but news.
"I'm only going to say this once to you, Mr Taco: Slashdot is going to die unless changes are made. Here is the way to fix slashdot: Take it private. Being owned by a large corporation is influencing your reporting. You must find a way to "buy back" slashdot from VA if you want to stay in business. "
Taco I think if you recall has total and complete editorial control over slashdot. Andover is just handing him some money and saying "Please don't call us bad names ok?". From a personal note I doubt that creating a slashdot site with the traffic this receives and actually be able to afford it. Come on I dare you. I bet malda would let you have access to the traffic load for maybe 1 day 2 tops. I think that after the firemen have finally put out the fire that was your computer cluster and your ISP has finally stopped being bombarded with massive traffic you will come to your senses.
Considering for what he sold slashdot for. Buying it back might be a little steep.
Look I know your pissed but calm down. If you can do something similar with less fuss then do it. I am waiting. Most of the slashdot clones are in fact crappy and receive far, far, far, far less trafic (you could probably run them off a 300bps modem with room to play quake III arena to spare).
""The United States Government has long been the leader in efforts to limit the development and dissemination of encryption. For the past twenty years, the US has attempted to suppress development of encryption through manipulating standards, recommending legislation, and imposing export controls. In the past several years, as electronic commerce has become an important aspect of the American economy, the US government has begun backing away from these efforts, which have not been successful and had generated considerable controversy and opposition. ""
"Well, that's the story for the US. By the looks of things.. all things considered, they should be a "green light" in about 2 years. For crypto. The rest of our privacy laws are woefully lacking. In this respect, I consider the progress the EU and it's member nation's to be making substantial progress - moreso than the US. For a country that prides itself on technical and economic superiority, it comes as a mild shock that we haven't been more quick to adopt EU-like specifications to encourage e-commerce on a wider scale. "
Starting out a business is a rather risky and IMNSHO a very bad idea considering that about 80% of small businesses fail in their first 2 years of operation. Give me a full belly and a constant pay check to ulcers, panic attacks, and poverty thank you very much.
Maybe we don't have a large quantity of eCommerce is because people don't trust the system, don't want credit cards, don't want to risk everything creating some massive web site where you are just another face in the crowd. All the people I have ever known who even bothered with that much risk usually are not doing that spectularly well and are in fact suffering various side ailments because of it. Incidentally all of the so called businesses that I have seen that were operated by individuals instead of large companies failed rather quickly.
"I guess though there are some parts of our government which are more interested in "national security" than economic prosperity. All and all, an excellent paper, and one I'll definately be referring to when I set my web server(s) up in the near future. "
That's nice. I don't suppose I will ever have need of such a thing. Massive risk is not in my blood and not something I take pride in at all. Over all I think that playing it safe is the best thing.
Could someone please tell me what data I have (that say any other "evil" company or goverment has that I haven't already given them?). Still even in most other countries the majority of the population have no need of such thing. Isn't there a way that for example one can specifically make a route for data to pass along that cannot be tapped? I think that there can be it's just that nobody has bothered in the least.
The United States is just protecting the rich and the powerful. Most of your average citizens don't know about or care that much about cryptography or eCommerce administration. I would also hazard that less than say 1% of slashdotters actually have anything that would need that level of security.
I have no network (cheap bastards at the phone company), no massive pile of "intellectual property" and don't do any financial transfers unless they are through groups like banks. Guess who's fault it is if the banks get robbed or theft occurs? Not mine. The bank is responsible.
""what are you as a marketing person doing reading 'news for nerds' ?""
"I am a marketing nerd. I target the geek community. I cannot really say much more on the subject, but Andover and Slashdot have been working on ways of improving clickthrough rates. Check these sids out: sid=slashdotmarketing and sid=howto This should give you some idea why I am here... "
Unfortunately years of watching commercials, seeing banner ads, billboards and the like has desensitized me to marketing in most forms. What then?
I have never clicked on any banner ads in the last 6 months anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hm, it says very little about what the company is going to live off... My guess would be the usual (=banner ads), since it says right there in the account usage policy that the account is free..."
;^)"
That or someone's large pocketbook.
"Also, I find the conceptual limitation to
photos somewhat interesting, as well."
That can be a bit intimidating at first.
"An image is an image is an image, I thought."
The better question that you have to ask is what is the difference between a sufficiently enhaced or chaged photo and an image?
"Well, it probably makes sense from a PR perspective, anyways."
That I really don't get.
"So, good luck, I guess!
Yeah any tool that is free and allows for greater expression and utility is usually a good thing.
"You speak as though copying GPL'ed code is a bad thing. Isn't that the whole point?"
I think the poster is refering to the fact that little actual engineering or coding would be going on because there are an implied few people actually doing anything for FreeBSD. Unfounded but that's what's implied.
"The hardware wasn't designed to run under linux. Specifically, if the driver doesn't catch an interrupt and poke a value back into memory every 100 or so frames the system will blow a bit on it's EPROM and refuse to run anymore.
This was implimented by the MPAA to prevent "piracy" under linux. It's part of their new scheme called ConsumerInaction (CI). By making sure the customer is incapable of viewing the DVDs they purchased, the MPAA can ensure
nobody will pirate any of their releases. However, these guys are working on a decoder that'll work with the new CI-compliant machines... "
Is there any evidence that you can really shortcircuit any hardware just by running linux? Hardly doubtful.
I think this is sarcasm but I am not sure.
"It's not just a matter of being out of print. It's a matter of being out of copyright. They aren't the same thing. The Grey Lensman books are out of print but still copyright. Just not being available doesn't make it ok to blindly copy and distribute
a work."
Then pray tell how does an intelligent person get a copy of it?
"How it all works
,even legitimately ask for new laws) are trying to change these for selfish gain so they don't have to suffer anything that the average person has to deal with.
or Ignoring that Cognitave Dissonance "
I really don't think we need to see you senior thesis for your degree in philosophy just yet ok?
Using artful language dosn't make your case any better than if you were swearing.
"You may notice a large number of posts made on Slashdot concering Napster, or similar programs such as Gnutella or FreeNet."
Well what do you expect from an article about those topics? The price of sugar in Pakistan? Anything in those threads not about those topics (or even having a large number) of them is automatically considered offtopic and demoderated as such. When you and your friends are talking about that new Bently you got because you were bored one day you don't just suddently start talking about circus clowns do you? That's what I mean.
"Often these will be posted under "Your Rights Online" (YRO), in order to show how the use of Napster
affects your "rights"."
That's because for the last oh about ~20 years principles of "fair use" were in effect and companies (who by the way have no god given right to make laws for me or
"You may wonder what the hell programs whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright laws is doing on a conservative (yes, I mean it) site such as Slashdot."
Back it up. As I understand the American interpretation of liberal it is everything that slashdot stands for essentially:
1. no great love for religion or religious dogma
2. distrust of extreme concentrated authority
3. communal cooperation (usual conservative stance calls for isolation and "standing on your own two feet").
4. because of 2/3 massive concentrations of power ecconomically (corporations) are usually distrusted.
5. freedom of choice without regard to previously held beliefs.
These are what most of the people on slashdot believe (and the editor's as well). None of these things are even remotely conservative. Unless the definition of conservative changes.
"Let me explain to you."
Shh.. quite kids Mr. AC is going to speak
"In the back of their minds, most Slashdot readers ("Slashbots")..."
ooh calling people mindless drones good call
"...know that they simply don't want to pay for anything which they can get illegally for free."
Hmm ok so you are saying that for example if I want a new computer and see one in a store window I am (because I post to slashdot) going to steal it right? After all I am a "Slashbot" and have no free thought of my own.
Also your statement is an exceedingly arrogant one. I must make some basic assumptions:
1. Your income is above the national computed average released from government ecconomic analysis and the Treasury.
2. You are comfortably suited in your present position and feel that in fact you are rather unassialable in your position for quite some time.
3. Distrust the evil "rabble" that threaten your supremacy.
There are some people who commit crimes when the need arises and some that commit crimes because there are crimes to be commited in some manner.
This is a rather generalized manner to look at things. For example I don't download mp3's because I don't listen to music that much, my computer can't play the music, and I don't have an extra 20Gb of information avaible to store them, nor the bandwidth to legally/illegally transfer them. But I still believe in the concept of napster. Why because someday, somehow I will win and be able to get what I want through some means which are going to be entirely ethical. Labeling people because some of them do something stupid is not a good practice. Well some wealthy people have cheated, robbed, commited fraud, securities violations, etc. Then because you are rich you are automatically evil. Right?
"Most people are exactly the same way. Napster et al allows them to get music for free, so they use it."
While it is true that some people can get free things people can get free things in real life. Did you realize that for example if I know the right people I could conceivably clean up quite nicely at for example a loading dock? If the officials concerned with say security and such are on my side and quitly switch off the security system and then allow me to steal say thousands of dollars worth of goods. This is entirely possible wheather or not there are laws that strike fear into me if someone finds out.
The fact is every system is corrupt and unless there is a foolproof method of reading thoughts in someone's inner mind it's impossible to prevent in any system.
"They know that this is copyright violation, which is a bad thing to do."
copyright violations are often many and difficult to trace. Unless you know copyright law you most likely have violated some copyright in some manner. Knowing layman interpretations of the law dosn't cut it. You have to know the whole damn thing unless you want to break some laws.
"This brings them feelings of guilt which they want to do away with."
Criminals eventually will not care about "guilt". Using simple logic I can say that for example if I wasn't going to buy the CD anyway (I am broke) then they aren't loosing anything. See how easy was that? I doubt many people who are doing the "illegal trading" have feelings of guilt.
"How do they do this?"
Damn I thought that was a rhetorical question.
"They rationalize it away."
same as you are for letting people screw the consumer with artificially high prices but I digress
"It's the copyright laws that are wrong, not them."
An unjust law is still unjust despite the fact that the person is a "criminal" under the law. Martin Luther King was in fact a "criminal" under various laws what about him. Or Ghandi, or Harriet Tubman, all these people were "criminals" but they risked their humanity and risked death to do something a little nobler.
"DCMA needs to be rewritten."
I think so. When a small group of people tries to change policy for the rest of humanity then that is unjust.
"The MPAA needs to be destroyed."
Again a group of people who uses pressure and fear to prevent certain types of media from being shown to the outside world. Same with current abilities of ISPs and others to make publishing content prohibitively expensive for the average man. They just take away the presses.
"It's an expression of free speech."
Correct. Free speech is very important and essentially what Napster does. Thanks for playing.
"And those greedy record companies take all the money anyway."
Yup people who are lazy indolent bums who never did any creative thing in their lives are getting most of the money from the endeavours of the artists. This is an unfortunate pattern because it seems throught history middlemen have tried to screw people on both ends of the spectrum from the very poor to the very rich. Eventually the Middlemen become the rich and try to prevent other middlemen from screwing them but to no avail.
"Never mind that with pirate mp3s the artist never sees any money anyway."
There are no hard numbers for the number of people who would not buy music if it were for mp3's. As I said it costs mucho $$$ to actually get all these mp3's add this to all the other things that people do with computers and you have one hell of an expensive solution to a problem. People will always buy CDs because computers and the related technology will never catch up affordably to what people who are really in to music will ever want.
"This way, they are sticking it to "the Man", who exists to make life difficult for 31337 Linux users like themselves."
Uhh.. Mr. Dummy do you even realize that Napster (the official program) was developed for Winblows users first and foremost and not for the "31337 Linux users" as you claim?
I have never heard of (at least in my popular surroundings the phrase "the Man" used. I think this is an outgrowth of the concept or embodyment of Uncle Sam from the 19th century.
"Yes, it is flimsy, and yes, it allows them to take the moral high ground by robbing hard-working artists."
Do you even understand what is going on? Those hardworking artists make the most of their money on concerts. Any artist that is not making money doing concerts is usually some small band that probably sold only 3 CDs to their friends. They really have nothing to loose by letting others around the world hear their music.
"Yes, many will say that modern popular music is all horrible anyway,..."
I would say most of it just sucks and is really cheasy anyway. People are being shaped and moulded by the compannies so that they can become totally eliminated as a factor and have their opinion reduced to ashes.
"...and that their favorite music is the only worthwhile type,..."
exactly how is this new to any group of people with similar interests, look at history.
"...but then go on to slam others for being "elitist" in any discussion in which Gnome or KDE is mentioned."
What the hell do Gnome or KDE have to do with anything. The only thing I get out of debates about these things is that linux has essentially no advantage over windows except that there is open (and hence free code) and that there are more apps that I like.
Linux bloat is almost reached windows proportions. Loading almost any of the new window managers will make your computer that much, more inefficient. People want "pretty pictures" and frankly my budget can't affod their wonderout conception of what is good and not. I like pretty astetically pleasing things too but come on. Being forced to upgrade my computer because nothing runs faster than molasses dosn't strike me as fair or equitable. And running unupdated software that no one supports and that no one cares about is not an option. Hell I could have stayed with DOS if I had wanted that option. Believe you me nothing is less suported noadays than pure dos environments, even less with win16 because no one really cares about that one either.
"And what about the Corel Linux beta?"
yeah what about them
"Didn't that violate the GPL by attaching a boilerplate disclaimer saying that only people over 18 years old could download it?"
That's patently absurd in the extreme unless there is porn distributed with the OS there is no legal claim that would easily work.
"And remember the cries of the Slashbots..."
wow never get off that elitist kick do you
"...that Corel should be sued, destroyed. boycotted, etc.?"
When you violate the terms of a fairly open and equitable little liscence that tries to make sure that the code will always have value and not become useless and nonsupported people get a little reactionary.
"All because Corel who was helping out the Linux community mistakenly added a certain clause to their beta, which violated the GPL."
I don't know where you work but usually there is something called a legal department that is supposed not to make little boo boos with things like this. Also remember never offend the audience you are trying to sell to.
"As you can see, the "community" is quick to cry foul when the copyrights on their software is violated, even by companies with good intentions."
A liscence is different than a copyright please get this destinction in your head. I also don't recally that there is any liscence on CDs saying I can't keep copies for myself on alternative media or say give copies to someone who already bought one but say it got destroyed.
"Our copyright good, yours bad."
No more like our liscence good, yours bad but whatever.
"It's called "hypocrisy"..."
man I am going to have to look that one up
"...and if you read Slashdot enough, you'll have to get used to it."
Interesting that people refuse to actually associate names and the like with what they post. AC posts usually come off as rather elitist because the person wants to appear godlike and not in touch with the common man. You want to insulate yourself from the world and all that is in it. You don't like the people even enough to let them know who you are. Also an attempt to avoid criticism.
"Now ask yourself exactly why ther is coverage of Napster on a site obstensibly devoted to Free Software."
because it's called News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. Napster matters.
Also it's just not about freesoftware but there are a lot of people who are affiliated with free software who post comments.
"Napster is proprietary as hell."
Agreed.
"Those protocol specs had to be reverse engineered."
Also agreed.
"Isn't proprietary software bad?"
In some instinces yes indeed it is.
"Isn't all free software superior?"
No but theoretically it can be.
"Isn't "open sourcing" a piece of software the best way to improve it? "
Yes. I will however not go over in depth why this is the case this is already quite long.
"These are all bleatings of the party lines."
And yours are not? Seems like you really want to staus quo quite badly. You almost remind me of people who lived back when my dad and his father were young. Stubborn, pigheaded, and wouldn't see change if it bit them in the butt.
"Here, we consider proprietary software Evil until Rob Malda tells us otherwise,..."
Rob malda is a technical editor. If I go here for news and find that Rob malda (or almost anyone) tells me that a piece of software has all these good points I might consider getting it. I have bought software before and I would like to see more reviews about it.
"or it gets ported to Linux."
Naturally most people left the windows desktop because the OS was expensive, the system was unstable, and the apps were crap. Not solely because they could get access to source code. I can't code worth a damn and the source dosn't make much sence to me. Therefore I have to use linux the only way I can for access to better applications.
"Then it becomes a special class of proprietary software which somehow becomes better than the rest."
To the community of computer users who use it yes. Windows software dosn't make people who use linux excited most of the time because you can't run it. It's the same reason why Quake III and the like don't get me excited. Namely because I am not rich enough to affort a machine to run it or a network connection to play it, or even the game itself. It just dosn't speak to me.
"Napster is one example."
like I have said napster matters because it's more of a social issue but it still dosn't run on linux only on win32 platforms.
"WordPerfect is another."
Wordperfect for years has been a stable of businesses who have not gone the MS way. People want an alternative to MS. And to be perfectly frank it's a good word processor.
"Somehow, they are able to ignore this seemingly large discrepency by claiming that these companies are "helping" the "community"."
Because my dear Watson they are if you look at the community in question. Linux community. People who write software for linux make it a better choice and make it better all around.
"The only one being helped is Andover.Net who gets to sell ads to these people after giving them free publicity on the most popular "Linux" site of them all. "
I don't give a damn. I never have clicked through and bought a damn thing from any banner add. The few times I have clicked through to anything it mostly wasn't on this site. Furthermore I have really no interest in this. Further still if you really think and looked at the articles about filtering cookies, blocking banner ads that slashdot has had in the past (I have text archives I can prove this). Many of the actual core slashdot clientielle are in fact not interested in ads in any way.
"Stop lying to yourselves. "
Stop being bigoted, lieing, and generally acting as an arch conservative who only wants to keep the rabble away from him ok?
"Yes, this is still theft."
If it's not sold or held in a firm copyright then you can't say it's theft.
Until there are massive databases of music that a particular company or individual can legitimately say is his/hers then it's not theft. If I write a book and then I die or no one bothers to do anything at all with the copyright in question then it's fair game.
If you don't believe this look at project gutenberg. All sorts of old out of print books that I would almost dare you to find a printed version of one of them in any bookstore. The writers are dead, the copyright gone, no way for anyone who (ethically) was concerned with the production of the thing. So you aren't hurting anyone nor are you violating the law.
"I for one have to say that I prefer to play Q3:A against Females. They tend to be better trashtalkers with less lame gibberish, better players on average, and generally more fun to play with/against. All of the guys I play Q3:A against
come off as screaming, hormone enhanced, adolescent losers.
Hmmm... of course so do most of the guys I run into in real life....
Heck, my Wife beats the hell out of me at Tekken and any Racing game you can name.... "
Well way to go associating men with being savages. That's going to win you a lot of respect.
"Maybe this will correct some of the imbalance in net content."
//
Could you elaborate about this said "imbalence"? I don't believe there is one.
synopsis? do robots dance and sing?
he's a British commedian but I haven't heard of the "parot sketch" no.
HA, HA!
Theories about expected development of the moon and it's eventual claim:
1. yeah for now people are lazy and don't want to actually do anything to explore space but that dosn't mean it's not going to happen.
2. governments are usually powerful and mean when they get mad
3. governments usually have guns or their equivelent
4. ever played "king of the mountain" as a kid that's how governments play with territory
5. As a consequence of all of the above whoever has the strongest government and gets there first will usually be the winner.
About the Florida gag isn't the fact that the land isn't arable or easily improved the reason it's useless or is it because it's in a protected "wetland" area?
I can't say as I can make a really good comment on the series as a whole but it seemed some things were readily aparent:
1. It's cable and so consequently ratings dont' matter as much
2. It teaches people to be shiftless, lazy, and drones of the media conglomerates
3. I had heard some bad thing about the show and didn't beleive them at first however soon I realized they were far and above too kind.
4. Beavis and Butthead make Homer Simpson look like Einstein.
take these for what you will and perhaps offer some well thought out counter examples.
Is this something I should be aware of as a human?
I would look at this but my computer isn't good enough here to do multimedia.
Anyone have a trnscript?
Well if you like legos without all the commercial hype you can look at some of the more generic brands.
I have had myself and brothers and sisters playing with generic legos for quite a while.
Does anyone else remember the little howto books that came from some of the "other" companies or perhaps from the early lego work? You had a book with 100+ diagrams that determined how to build all kinds of gadgets.
Although they do have that now it's kind of limiting what you can say do with a piece of plastic shaped like the hull of a ship.
I haven't the foggiest in any way.
expensive rent a whore? I mean not to be terribly rude or anything but isn't that like claiming that the Maffia isn't a criminal organization but just an ethnic Italian centric gentleman's club?
Something about slashdot endorsing things like this is rather fishy.
I had a really wild idea. For quickies or perhaps once per day there can be stories that didn't make it for their own article. Or perhaps stories that are related to another story that should be posted along side of the standard ones.
What pray tell is defined as a quickie? How are they chosen? Voting could be rather nice for a quckie category.
""Until Linux has ... 72 dpi screen resolution.""
"Support is already there. In Xfree86, you can either directly configure your screen's DPI, or you can indirectly specify it by using a combination of mode definition and physical screen size (using the DisplaySize declaration). "
I thought that they had 75 and 100 dpi why is 72 so important/critical?
""...output in native Linux format...""
"Ah, but that's the beauty. Linux doesn't have a native format. A Linux machine can be used to generate just about any openly-defined output format you would like, such as PostScript. Almost any image format is also supported. The
genius of open formats is that, by using them, your service bureau can use the platform of its choice and you don't have to care.
"
The gimp has it's own internal format for gimp use if that's what you mean. I don't see the use in having another thing that a browser can't read and needs me to start up a very, very large memory hog (I had to increase my swap size just for gimp use).
Also is it just me or are there very, few methods to access postscript. If it's such a standard why are there not more ways to say print a postscript file in any word processor? I know there's ghostscript but I think that's a little klugy and such. There is good support in the browser for pdf but not postscript on the majority of public machines that I have seen.
"The Gimp may make many things possible, but it will never prevail until it makes many things easy."
Ahh however it dosn't work if you want to offer thousand of wizband features. Even the most "easy to use" software program will have problems getting people to understand how it operates.
"Mr Taco, in case you have not noticed, your site has become overrun by trolls. The signal to noise ratio has been declining for months and now stands at about 1-1. "
:)
And irrevelent posts too
"Slashdot.org used to be a quality news site with meaningful, relavent information. Now it is nothing but a trash hole filled with yesterday's news. I belive the "golden age of slashdot" ended because of two events: "
Ohh the golden age of slashdot huh? If you look at history there are good times and there are bad times. Never look at one bad time and make judgement on the good.
"The merger with Andover.net/VA Linux and
The implementation of moderation. "
Any objective critical analysis of this? Proof.
"
When you sold your site to andover.net, many people feared the worst: Taco had sold out. Initially, things were handled well and there was no obvious change in the management of the site. As time went on, however, many changes
occured, mostly bad. "
Maybe taco was going broke trying to pay for all the FPers and others who were wasting massive ammounts of bandwidth on his ISDN plus he was working quite hard. But I guess that dosn't mean a damn thing to you does it.
"For example, the topics now posted to slashdot are old and meaningless. Further, important events are often never writen about seemingly because your parent company is looking over your shoulder. In the past few months, the stock
prices of the big Linux companies(especially VA Linux) have tanked. This is news worthy of a topic. "
Strictly speaking there have been few editorials or news articles published by unbiased news outlets that have done analysis of stock issues. I don't own one share of stock of any sort so why should it bother me?
"More disturbingly, you seem to cover up events which do not reflect well on VA and your site. A few days ago when slashdot was down for half a day, there was no reason given. When people asked, you marked them down as
flamebait or off topic. In the old days, if slashdot were down for even 30 minutes, you would post an explanation. Did you forget this time? "
Quite literally why do technical difficulties rank so highly on your scale of thinking? Everyone has a few problems or they have difficulty in getting them solved.
Also do you really think that with how slow slashdot becomes at times that his original setup would have worked well at all? Just think about that for a moment. There is probably several million dollars worth of equipment outlays a year on slashdot I don't think many private individuals can say the same.
"Now to moderation which is turning out to be the nail in your coffin. You claim that moderation is not censorship but merely a filter that relevant information must pass through. Frankly, that is bullshit. Many on-topic posts are
moderated down simply because they disagree with open source dogma or are critical of Linux and VA. In many cases, if the downward moderated post were to say the exact same thing about another company(Microsoft), they would
be moderated up. "
Scores are meaningless if you just set your preferences to a value of -1. Everything is fine again and the world is sunny. I can see all the shit and all of the art all at once and never have to care about it at all.
This is back to a usenet philosophy. Many people (a great deal of them syadmins and people with fixed budgets with metered access to the net) want to try to get all the content they want at the lowest cost (time, money, sanity, take your pick).
I have routinely attempted to read all of slashdot's comments and have found it a rather formadible challenge to say the least.
"Now registered members of your site can view at any threshold they want to, but the default view for non-members is > -1. By moderating these anti-Linux posts down, you are preventing them from being viewed by the masses.
Thus, you have commited an act of censorship. "
Last time I checked you can change the threshold when viewing comments. This does allow for access to all data not some.
"The trolls don't like being censored. To prevent this, they simply post many messages so that they all can not be moderated down. If you were to get rid of moderation, there would still be the occasional troll, but you would not see
mass spam. The message, however unpopular or inane, would get through the first time. "
I don't know about that. Slashdot has seen a large increase in traffic since moderation took affect. Can you be sure now as your once were?
Also why should I care that whinny trolls are getting pissed? You know they simply could have comments deleted if enough people didn't like them in the first place. Then they wouldn't be there.
"Another problem is your moderators' lack of humor. Many times I have rolled on the floor laughing at a post marked down to -1. So what if someone makes fun of your mom? Personally, I find many of the "hot grits" posts to be
funny. Most should not be moderated down. "
The ability of the moderators to moderate has been tempered with the mass opinion of said moderations via meta-moderation that each and every registered slashdotter can participate in every 24 hour period. Works nicely if you think that the moderators (I have been one a number of times) are humorless.
What I think is that information is primary. Humor is secondary in life. That is what being a programmer is all about. Basically sitting in a chair and becomming a slave to information. If you don't like this then do something else (I am contemplating this. Maybe a stint in the Peace corps or something). Damnit this isn't Jimmy's Wacky/Laugh shack at http://www.giggle.com or something this is an informational site. I can get lists of yo-momma and red neck jokes at other sites. At slashdot I want news and nothing but news.
"I'm only going to say this once to you, Mr Taco: Slashdot is going to die unless changes are made. Here is the way to fix slashdot: Take it private. Being owned by a large corporation is influencing your reporting. You must find a
way to "buy back" slashdot from VA if you want to stay in business. "
Taco I think if you recall has total and complete editorial control over slashdot. Andover is just handing him some money and saying "Please don't call us bad names ok?". From a personal note I doubt that creating a slashdot site with the traffic this receives and actually be able to afford it. Come on I dare you. I bet malda would let you have access to the traffic load for maybe 1 day 2 tops. I think that after the firemen have finally put out the fire that was your computer cluster and your ISP has finally stopped being bombarded with massive traffic you will come to your senses.
Considering for what he sold slashdot for. Buying it back might be a little steep.
Look I know your pissed but calm down. If you can do something similar with less fuss then do it. I am waiting. Most of the slashdot clones are in fact crappy and receive far, far, far, far less trafic (you could probably run them off a 300bps modem with room to play quake III arena to spare).
very well then duly noted
Just experimenting
""The United States Government has long been the leader in efforts to limit the development and dissemination of encryption. For the past twenty years, the US has attempted to suppress development of encryption through
manipulating standards, recommending legislation, and imposing export controls. In the past several years, as electronic commerce has become an important aspect of the American economy, the US government has begun backing
away from these efforts, which have not been successful and had generated considerable controversy and opposition. ""
"Well, that's the story for the US. By the looks of things.. all things considered, they should be a "green light" in about 2 years. For crypto. The rest of our privacy laws are woefully lacking. In this respect, I consider the progress the
EU and it's member nation's to be making substantial progress - moreso than the US. For a country that prides itself on technical and economic superiority, it comes as a mild shock that we haven't been more quick to adopt EU-like
specifications to encourage e-commerce on a wider scale. "
Starting out a business is a rather risky and IMNSHO a very bad idea considering that about 80% of small businesses fail in their first 2 years of operation. Give me a full belly and a constant pay check to ulcers, panic attacks, and poverty thank you very much.
Maybe we don't have a large quantity of eCommerce is because people don't trust the system, don't want credit cards, don't want to risk everything creating some massive web site where you are just another face in the crowd. All the people I have ever known who even bothered with that much risk usually are not doing that spectularly well and are in fact suffering various side ailments because of it. Incidentally all of the so called businesses that I have seen that were operated by individuals instead of large companies failed rather quickly.
"I guess though there are some parts of our government which are more interested in "national security" than economic prosperity. All and all, an excellent paper, and one I'll definately be referring to when I set my web server(s) up in
the near future. "
That's nice. I don't suppose I will ever have need of such a thing. Massive risk is not in my blood and not something I take pride in at all. Over all I think that playing it safe is the best thing.
Could someone please tell me what data I have (that say any other "evil" company or goverment has that I haven't already given them?). Still even in most other countries the majority of the population have no need of such thing. Isn't there a way that for example one can specifically make a route for data to pass along that cannot be tapped? I think that there can be it's just that nobody has bothered in the least.
The United States is just protecting the rich and the powerful. Most of your average citizens don't know about or care that much about cryptography or eCommerce administration. I would also hazard that less than say 1% of slashdotters actually have anything that would need that level of security.
I have no network (cheap bastards at the phone company), no massive pile of "intellectual property" and don't do any financial transfers unless they are through groups like banks. Guess who's fault it is if the banks get robbed or theft occurs? Not mine. The bank is responsible.
""what are you as a marketing person doing reading 'news for nerds' ?""
"I am a marketing nerd. I target the geek community. I cannot really say much more on the subject, but Andover and Slashdot have been working on ways of improving clickthrough rates. Check these sids out: sid=slashdotmarketing
and sid=howto This should give you some idea why I am here...
"
Unfortunately years of watching commercials, seeing banner ads, billboards and the like has desensitized me to marketing in most forms. What then?
I have never clicked on any banner ads in the last 6 months anyway.
just a thought