If you scanned it, or kept one of the illegal uploads as a template, then you hurt the people who didn't get paid for the copy.
Hurt them? If you make an unauthorized copy, you have merely failed to benefit them. Despite the efforts of the content industry to equate the two, there actually is a difference in both degree and kind between taking twenty dollars out of your pocket and simply not giving you twenty dollars.
Based on my own experience, I would argue that there is a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge and desire to do battle against would-be adversaries.
Same here; I got into computing, at least in part, to help people, not harm them. But even if I had any interest in working for the state security apparatus, their insistence on seeing everything in terms of "battle" is a major turn-off. Securing systems is not in any way like battle, nor is compromising your opponent's systems. Their very phrasing tells me that the people doing the hiring haven't got the faintest clue about what they're hiring for, so it wouldn't be a very appealing job opening even in an entirely benign field of work.
Jumping from a nearly stationary start at 100,000 feet is a very different proposition than reentering the atmosphere at orbital speed. Objects don't burn up just because they're falling through the atmosphere; they burn up because they're entering the atmosphere at very high speeds. I forget the exact value -- LEO isn't my specialty -- but objects in low Earth orbit are traveling somewhere north of 14,000 mph. (Meteors coming in from interplanetary space have even faster velocities measured in km/sec.) A high altitude jump like this may give us some useful data, but it does very little to pave the way for an individual descent from orbit.
I think that in this case, it's free as in Jägermeister.
There are a number of reasons why that's a terrible idea. Remind me to tell you some time about that night in Augsburg back in 1986. I hear they still won't let Americans stay in that hotel.
The shape of the mouse provides support to your hand and allows it to fully rest most of the time.
While I'm not interested in having a virtual mouse, I will note that I don't rest my hand on my mouse. Only my fingertips touch the mouse, and my wrist rests on the surface of my desk. I have no idea how normal that is -- I would assume that there's probably wide variation in mouse grips from person to person.
I actually thought about this once, not that I have any illusions about being able to do it; it was just a Gedankenexperiment. My conclusion was that if the Second Law was eliminated, the odds are good that somewhere in the universe some process would enter a feedback loop, producing ever more energy at an ever accelerating rate, and the first we'd know about it would be when the shock wave washed over us at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
The universe as it stands may be a raw deal, but most imaginable tweaks to the laws of physics make it even worse.
The current debate over global warming is not unlike the debate over evolution, which is to say, there really isn't any rational debate, only people whose vested interests are threatened by the conclusions of science who are desperately grasping at straws to deny settled facts. In the case of evolution, the vested interest is an emotional attachment to long-discredited Bronze Age superstitions, while climate change deniers feel their (unsustainable) wealth and convenience are threatened by the growing recognition that those things cannot go on unchanged without risking our continued existence. As a result, each new fact added to the edifice of evolutionary theory, as with climate theory, leads to a perverse demand that science fill in the ever shrinking gaps. In the case of evolution-deniers, the gaps are now so small that they have been reduced to all but demanding a running video record of speciation. Climate change deniers have a little more wiggle room, the risk of global warming having been recognized for only sixty or so years now, but even they have been reduced to positing the existence of a global conspiracy of climatologists to rule the world.
It would be funny if the threats we faced were not both urgent and existential.
For future reference, suggestions are better received when they come with funding to write them, even if the pay is very modest.
From the user's point of view, that same modest chunk of change could be better spent by just buying a polished piece of commercial software. Neither free-as-in-beer nor free-as-in-speech are worth very much when you have a job to do. Photoshop isn't exactly cheap, but it's a good deal cheaper than spending a lot of time struggling to get GIMP to do what Photoshop can do easily.
Programmers in general, and FOSS programmers in particular, are slow to recognize that software isn't about us -- it's about the users.
Thanks to shows like CSI and confidence in science, we want DNA samples, hair, urine, and a billion other things -- and believe that their presence somehow proves or disproves guilt.
For what it's worth, prosecutors are complaining that due to shows like CSI, juries are more reluctant to accept conventional circumstantial evidence, so it might not be quite that simple.
Of course, having seen lots of stupid jury decisions going both ways, I'm not sure that I'd actually want a jury trial if I was ever accused of a serious crime.
If this ends up being applied to device drivers, it could be great news for the hard working FOSS coders working on drivers for graphics cards and other hardware under Linux and the other open OSes.
And then he'll announce his new software construction method that can be done by ordinary people with a short period of training for 1/5th what computer programmers make. It works great, but it's boring and repetitive and never creative. It delivers software in a predictable amount of time with a predictable budget and reasonable (also predictable) quality. And the development costs less than half of conventional approaches.
Nobody expects the Daily Kos to be accurate. It would be like trusting Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or anything ever aired on "Air America" before it went bankrupt.
On matters of fact, they're pretty scrupulous, especially when it comes to owning up to their own mistakes, like hiring R2K.
On matters of opinion and ideology, well, it's a political blog. What exactly is an "accurate" opinion?
While I didn't even try to replace Vincenty's formula yet (but it might be possible) my solution improves on the others because they all require a lot of trigonometry functions (cos, sin, etc..). On the simplest of those, you have to call 6 trig functions, while with my method I only need 1 (so far) to achieve the same end result as the haversine's formula.
Careful there. Some time ago, I came up with a series of equations for calculating various properties of star polygons. I thought I was very clever for having done so because, unlike numerous esteemed authors on the subject, I managed to do it without any trigonometry.
Or so I thought.
Fortunately, in the process of brushing up on trig to check my results, I (re)discovered that trigonometric functions are just shorthand for relationships (i.e., ratios) between the sides and angles of triangles. My "trig-free" equations didn't dispense with trigonometric functions, they just dispensed with the shorthand.
On one hand, it's kind of cool to rediscover stuff like this as a confirmation that you are on the right track. On the other hand, it's embarrassing when what you have rediscovered is, in fact, something you should already have known if you had paid a little more attention in high school math. If I were you, I'd look up the definitions of the trigonometric functions -- Wikipedia will do -- and see if you haven't simply duplicated them. If you have, then lesson learned. If not, and you actually have discovered something new, more power to you!
For god's sake, the whole "I was walking down the street and happened to intercept unecrypted wifi" argument is utterly ridiculous.
It's more like, "I was walking down the street and happened to overhear the residents yelling loudly from their porches." If you happen to be walking down the street with a wifi-capable device, you might capture some data, too.
Look, if you're beaming unencrypted data through my body, it has ceased to be your private concern. It may be impolite for me to look at that data, just as it would be impolite for me to listen to your loud argument with your spouse on your front porch, but there's a wide gulf between impolite and illicit.
If anyone else drove a fleet of vans around intercepting wifi, people on Slashdot would be going nuts, but because it's the cool company, all is forgiven.
Google creeps the hell out of me. Between their collection of information from email and web searches and their entry into the medical records business, they do plenty of things that represent a genuine threat to privacy. Capturing fragments of unencrypted broadcasts, on the other hand, doesn't particularly worry me. I encrypt my network for a reason, and that reason has a lot more to do with the government and my immediate neighbors than it does Google.
...consider that organizations can lose their trademarks if they don't actively defend them against even vague and doubtful potential infringements. If they let this case slip without issuing a token C&D, it could be cited later by an actual competitor as grounds for permitting their own infringement.
That's not to say that the law isn't stupid, but the proper target for complaints about the stupidity of the law is your local congresscritter, not the lawyers who are just dealing with the laws as they are. These lawyers are just writing letters, not trolling for DUI cases on the sides of city buses.
I'd have modded the parent +1 Insightful, but the truth is that it wasn't actually insightful; it was obvious. If you are broadcasting an unencrypted signal beyond your property line, you are doing just that: broadcasting your data to everyone in range. Complaining when someone actually receives that broadcast is a bit like putting a billboard in your front yard and complaining when people look at it. There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy in this situation, especially when there is no way to tell the difference between an access point left unsecured because of ignorance and one left unsecured for the express purpose of sharing the connection.
All we have here are a bunch of state attorneys general preying on the ignorance of the general public to prosecute Google for reading public messages in order to boost their reelection prospects. Some of them might have started with honest intentions out of their own ignorance, but they've all had enough time at this point to learn the bare basics of WiFi. It would have been nice if Google had taken greater care in its actions, but even if they had intentionally captured every last byte they could suck out of the air, there would have been no wrongdoing.
I recently acquired a desktop after several years of using a laptop exclusively. Frankly, I can't see doing without either of them. But I'm also not a "typical" user: the desktop serves mainly to do heavy number-crunching tasks using software I wrote for the purpose, as well as serving as an anchor for a 10TB drive array to hold all the data. The average user can probably get by just fine with a laptop, possibly with a docking station.
That said, there are and probably always will be applications for which desktop PCs are the best choice, particularly those where mobility is irrelevant and/or you need all the computing power you can get. The only thing that has really changed over the years is that Moore's Law has brought laptops up to the point that they are more than adequate (and affordable) for most common applications. When it comes to raw power, Moore's Law is trumped by the laws of thermodynamics, and a larger format becomes necessary to avoid overheating. Whether you need that power depends on what you're doing.
Would this also lead to your own personal device that an employer pays a portion of the bill to also give them rights to view your records?
It certainly gives them a foot in the door. Personally, I'd rather eat the expense myself than risk privacy intrusions from some of the companies I've worked for. Alternatively, one might get a separate prepaid phone for work use so that one's personal phone is off-limits.
And not just any coupon for ink. It'll be an 8x10 solid black rectangle -- overprinted with cyan, magenta, and yellow, of course -- with a tiny paragraph in white letters praising the deep, rich blacks the printer is capable of producing. To get to the actual coupon, which will be on the second page, you'll have to buy fresh ink cartridges so the document can finish printing. Naturally, the coupon will also be small and composed of white text on another 8x10 overprinted black rectangle, along with a second promotional message extolling the printer's ability to reliably churn out image after image.
If anyone from the HP marketing department is reading this, I'm available for any openings you might have. Just give me the address of your web-accessible printer, and I'll send you my resume. In eight inch high Helvetica UltraBlack, one letter per page. As a token of my sincerity. You'd better include a fax number, too, just in case you run out of ink.
Among the general public, the number of people who care one way or another is probably quite limited.
In an environment like this, Apple takes a lot of heat because its behavior is quite hostile to popular (among Slashdotters) ideas of openness and DIY tinkering. Nor is that limited to Apple; Sony's recent unilateral elimination of the option to install alternate operating systems on the PS3 took a lot of flak, and Microsoft's shenanigans regarding document formats attracted a lot of hostile attention, too. Apple isn't being singled out; it's being criticized for the same bad behavior that evokes criticism when practiced by other companies.
Those are the rational objections. There's a much deeper, more emotional one, too. The attitude of many Apple fans that less technical knowledge is actually a good thing -- not that "it just works" and so technical knowledge is not required, but that it's actually not worth having in the first place -- is bound to rub a self-selected technical population the wrong way. Particularly so when they make a point of flaunting that attitude here, as opposed to the overwhelming number of web media outlets where Apple is praised to the very heavens and such views are welcomed. Apple culture is not just exclusivist and belittling of outsiders, it insists on being the center of attention as well, not unlike the aforementioned residents of ostentatious developments. Case in point, the original story that spawned this thread is that one obscure application was accepted into the Apple app store.
Okay, let's follow this analogy out. If Apple is a grocer, then the iPhone and iPad are like refrigerators for the goods you purchase at the Apple grocery. Funny thing, though -- I can put products from any grocery I want into my refrigerator. Obviously, the iPhone/iPad are brand-specific refrigerators, something that doesn't actually exist in the real world.
This is what we call a reductio ad absurdum or, in modern parlance, calling bullshit.
What Apple is really like is one of those totalitarian homeowners' associations in an expensive condominium development. You bought the condo, but if you want to change anything about it, you have to pick from a list of approved changes and pay the association to have one of their hand-picked contractors do it for you.
Some people like living in those developments despite the restrictions because there's a certain amount of prestige -- mostly among other residents -- involved in paying way too much for a tiny space that you don't actually control. And like iPhone/iPad owners, the residents of such developments are baffled that everyone else doesn't want to live there, too.
Slashdot Mirror
How did J.C. Penney get on the hit list? Have they updated their line of polyester slacks to include spam filtering in addition to stain resistance?
If you scanned it, or kept one of the illegal uploads as a template, then you hurt the people who didn't get paid for the copy.
Hurt them? If you make an unauthorized copy, you have merely failed to benefit them. Despite the efforts of the content industry to equate the two, there actually is a difference in both degree and kind between taking twenty dollars out of your pocket and simply not giving you twenty dollars.
Based on my own experience, I would argue that there is a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge and desire to do battle against would-be adversaries.
Same here; I got into computing, at least in part, to help people, not harm them. But even if I had any interest in working for the state security apparatus, their insistence on seeing everything in terms of "battle" is a major turn-off. Securing systems is not in any way like battle, nor is compromising your opponent's systems. Their very phrasing tells me that the people doing the hiring haven't got the faintest clue about what they're hiring for, so it wouldn't be a very appealing job opening even in an entirely benign field of work.
Jumping from a nearly stationary start at 100,000 feet is a very different proposition than reentering the atmosphere at orbital speed. Objects don't burn up just because they're falling through the atmosphere; they burn up because they're entering the atmosphere at very high speeds. I forget the exact value -- LEO isn't my specialty -- but objects in low Earth orbit are traveling somewhere north of 14,000 mph. (Meteors coming in from interplanetary space have even faster velocities measured in km/sec.) A high altitude jump like this may give us some useful data, but it does very little to pave the way for an individual descent from orbit.
I think that in this case, it's free as in Jägermeister.
There are a number of reasons why that's a terrible idea. Remind me to tell you some time about that night in Augsburg back in 1986. I hear they still won't let Americans stay in that hotel.
The shape of the mouse provides support to your hand and allows it to fully rest most of the time.
While I'm not interested in having a virtual mouse, I will note that I don't rest my hand on my mouse. Only my fingertips touch the mouse, and my wrist rests on the surface of my desk. I have no idea how normal that is -- I would assume that there's probably wide variation in mouse grips from person to person.
I actually thought about this once, not that I have any illusions about being able to do it; it was just a Gedankenexperiment. My conclusion was that if the Second Law was eliminated, the odds are good that somewhere in the universe some process would enter a feedback loop, producing ever more energy at an ever accelerating rate, and the first we'd know about it would be when the shock wave washed over us at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
The universe as it stands may be a raw deal, but most imaginable tweaks to the laws of physics make it even worse.
The current debate over global warming is not unlike the debate over evolution, which is to say, there really isn't any rational debate, only people whose vested interests are threatened by the conclusions of science who are desperately grasping at straws to deny settled facts. In the case of evolution, the vested interest is an emotional attachment to long-discredited Bronze Age superstitions, while climate change deniers feel their (unsustainable) wealth and convenience are threatened by the growing recognition that those things cannot go on unchanged without risking our continued existence. As a result, each new fact added to the edifice of evolutionary theory, as with climate theory, leads to a perverse demand that science fill in the ever shrinking gaps. In the case of evolution-deniers, the gaps are now so small that they have been reduced to all but demanding a running video record of speciation. Climate change deniers have a little more wiggle room, the risk of global warming having been recognized for only sixty or so years now, but even they have been reduced to positing the existence of a global conspiracy of climatologists to rule the world.
It would be funny if the threats we faced were not both urgent and existential.
For future reference, suggestions are better received when they come with funding to write them, even if the pay is very modest.
From the user's point of view, that same modest chunk of change could be better spent by just buying a polished piece of commercial software. Neither free-as-in-beer nor free-as-in-speech are worth very much when you have a job to do. Photoshop isn't exactly cheap, but it's a good deal cheaper than spending a lot of time struggling to get GIMP to do what Photoshop can do easily.
Programmers in general, and FOSS programmers in particular, are slow to recognize that software isn't about us -- it's about the users.
Thanks to shows like CSI and confidence in science, we want DNA samples, hair, urine, and a billion other things -- and believe that their presence somehow proves or disproves guilt.
For what it's worth, prosecutors are complaining that due to shows like CSI, juries are more reluctant to accept conventional circumstantial evidence, so it might not be quite that simple.
Of course, having seen lots of stupid jury decisions going both ways, I'm not sure that I'd actually want a jury trial if I was ever accused of a serious crime.
If this ends up being applied to device drivers, it could be great news for the hard working FOSS coders working on drivers for graphics cards and other hardware under Linux and the other open OSes.
And then he'll announce his new software construction method that can be done by ordinary people with a short period of training for 1/5th what computer programmers make. It works great, but it's boring and repetitive and never creative. It delivers software in a predictable amount of time with a predictable budget and reasonable (also predictable) quality. And the development costs less than half of conventional approaches.
What, you mean Knuth works where I do?
Nobody expects the Daily Kos to be accurate. It would be like trusting Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or anything ever aired on "Air America" before it went bankrupt.
On matters of fact, they're pretty scrupulous, especially when it comes to owning up to their own mistakes, like hiring R2K.
On matters of opinion and ideology, well, it's a political blog. What exactly is an "accurate" opinion?
While I didn't even try to replace Vincenty's formula yet (but it might be possible) my solution improves on the others because they all require a lot of trigonometry functions (cos, sin, etc..). On the simplest of those, you have to call 6 trig functions, while with my method I only need 1 (so far) to achieve the same end result as the haversine's formula.
Careful there. Some time ago, I came up with a series of equations for calculating various properties of star polygons. I thought I was very clever for having done so because, unlike numerous esteemed authors on the subject, I managed to do it without any trigonometry.
Or so I thought.
Fortunately, in the process of brushing up on trig to check my results, I (re)discovered that trigonometric functions are just shorthand for relationships (i.e., ratios) between the sides and angles of triangles. My "trig-free" equations didn't dispense with trigonometric functions, they just dispensed with the shorthand.
On one hand, it's kind of cool to rediscover stuff like this as a confirmation that you are on the right track. On the other hand, it's embarrassing when what you have rediscovered is, in fact, something you should already have known if you had paid a little more attention in high school math. If I were you, I'd look up the definitions of the trigonometric functions -- Wikipedia will do -- and see if you haven't simply duplicated them. If you have, then lesson learned. If not, and you actually have discovered something new, more power to you!
Mod parent up. Not only did he clarify the point I was missing, he did it politely.
For god's sake, the whole "I was walking down the street and happened to intercept unecrypted wifi" argument is utterly ridiculous.
It's more like, "I was walking down the street and happened to overhear the residents yelling loudly from their porches." If you happen to be walking down the street with a wifi-capable device, you might capture some data, too.
Look, if you're beaming unencrypted data through my body, it has ceased to be your private concern. It may be impolite for me to look at that data, just as it would be impolite for me to listen to your loud argument with your spouse on your front porch, but there's a wide gulf between impolite and illicit.
If anyone else drove a fleet of vans around intercepting wifi, people on Slashdot would be going nuts, but because it's the cool company, all is forgiven.
Google creeps the hell out of me. Between their collection of information from email and web searches and their entry into the medical records business, they do plenty of things that represent a genuine threat to privacy. Capturing fragments of unencrypted broadcasts, on the other hand, doesn't particularly worry me. I encrypt my network for a reason, and that reason has a lot more to do with the government and my immediate neighbors than it does Google.
...consider that organizations can lose their trademarks if they don't actively defend them against even vague and doubtful potential infringements. If they let this case slip without issuing a token C&D, it could be cited later by an actual competitor as grounds for permitting their own infringement.
That's not to say that the law isn't stupid, but the proper target for complaints about the stupidity of the law is your local congresscritter, not the lawyers who are just dealing with the laws as they are. These lawyers are just writing letters, not trolling for DUI cases on the sides of city buses.
I'd have modded the parent +1 Insightful, but the truth is that it wasn't actually insightful; it was obvious. If you are broadcasting an unencrypted signal beyond your property line, you are doing just that: broadcasting your data to everyone in range. Complaining when someone actually receives that broadcast is a bit like putting a billboard in your front yard and complaining when people look at it. There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy in this situation, especially when there is no way to tell the difference between an access point left unsecured because of ignorance and one left unsecured for the express purpose of sharing the connection.
All we have here are a bunch of state attorneys general preying on the ignorance of the general public to prosecute Google for reading public messages in order to boost their reelection prospects. Some of them might have started with honest intentions out of their own ignorance, but they've all had enough time at this point to learn the bare basics of WiFi. It would have been nice if Google had taken greater care in its actions, but even if they had intentionally captured every last byte they could suck out of the air, there would have been no wrongdoing.
I recently acquired a desktop after several years of using a laptop exclusively. Frankly, I can't see doing without either of them. But I'm also not a "typical" user: the desktop serves mainly to do heavy number-crunching tasks using software I wrote for the purpose, as well as serving as an anchor for a 10TB drive array to hold all the data. The average user can probably get by just fine with a laptop, possibly with a docking station.
That said, there are and probably always will be applications for which desktop PCs are the best choice, particularly those where mobility is irrelevant and/or you need all the computing power you can get. The only thing that has really changed over the years is that Moore's Law has brought laptops up to the point that they are more than adequate (and affordable) for most common applications. When it comes to raw power, Moore's Law is trumped by the laws of thermodynamics, and a larger format becomes necessary to avoid overheating. Whether you need that power depends on what you're doing.
The wheel is reinvented in computer science every so often.
With the web, it's reinvented veeeeeeerrrryyyy slowly. At this rate, it'll pass Windows 3.1 in about fifteen years.
...fuck a whole bunch of you superstitious savages.
Would this also lead to your own personal device that an employer pays a portion of the bill to also give them rights to view your records?
It certainly gives them a foot in the door. Personally, I'd rather eat the expense myself than risk privacy intrusions from some of the companies I've worked for. Alternatively, one might get a separate prepaid phone for work use so that one's personal phone is off-limits.
The first planned spam is a coupon for ink.
And not just any coupon for ink. It'll be an 8x10 solid black rectangle -- overprinted with cyan, magenta, and yellow, of course -- with a tiny paragraph in white letters praising the deep, rich blacks the printer is capable of producing. To get to the actual coupon, which will be on the second page, you'll have to buy fresh ink cartridges so the document can finish printing. Naturally, the coupon will also be small and composed of white text on another 8x10 overprinted black rectangle, along with a second promotional message extolling the printer's ability to reliably churn out image after image.
If anyone from the HP marketing department is reading this, I'm available for any openings you might have. Just give me the address of your web-accessible printer, and I'll send you my resume. In eight inch high Helvetica UltraBlack, one letter per page. As a token of my sincerity. You'd better include a fax number, too, just in case you run out of ink.
It cuts both ways, you know.
Among the general public, the number of people who care one way or another is probably quite limited.
In an environment like this, Apple takes a lot of heat because its behavior is quite hostile to popular (among Slashdotters) ideas of openness and DIY tinkering. Nor is that limited to Apple; Sony's recent unilateral elimination of the option to install alternate operating systems on the PS3 took a lot of flak, and Microsoft's shenanigans regarding document formats attracted a lot of hostile attention, too. Apple isn't being singled out; it's being criticized for the same bad behavior that evokes criticism when practiced by other companies.
Those are the rational objections. There's a much deeper, more emotional one, too. The attitude of many Apple fans that less technical knowledge is actually a good thing -- not that "it just works" and so technical knowledge is not required, but that it's actually not worth having in the first place -- is bound to rub a self-selected technical population the wrong way. Particularly so when they make a point of flaunting that attitude here, as opposed to the overwhelming number of web media outlets where Apple is praised to the very heavens and such views are welcomed. Apple culture is not just exclusivist and belittling of outsiders, it insists on being the center of attention as well, not unlike the aforementioned residents of ostentatious developments. Case in point, the original story that spawned this thread is that one obscure application was accepted into the Apple app store.
Okay, let's follow this analogy out. If Apple is a grocer, then the iPhone and iPad are like refrigerators for the goods you purchase at the Apple grocery. Funny thing, though -- I can put products from any grocery I want into my refrigerator. Obviously, the iPhone/iPad are brand-specific refrigerators, something that doesn't actually exist in the real world.
This is what we call a reductio ad absurdum or, in modern parlance, calling bullshit.
What Apple is really like is one of those totalitarian homeowners' associations in an expensive condominium development. You bought the condo, but if you want to change anything about it, you have to pick from a list of approved changes and pay the association to have one of their hand-picked contractors do it for you.
Some people like living in those developments despite the restrictions because there's a certain amount of prestige -- mostly among other residents -- involved in paying way too much for a tiny space that you don't actually control. And like iPhone/iPad owners, the residents of such developments are baffled that everyone else doesn't want to live there, too.