Seriously, if nothing changed except for not having to deal with those big-ass cables (and those sticky-plug power cables), any hassle for moving to SATA is fine by me. Although the article did say that the drives would no longer shair bandwidth; this to me implies that each drive you want to plug in must plug in to a port on the motherboard (or HD controller card). So if you want to plug in 4 drives, it has to have 4 ports? Now IDE controllers usually have two ports, one for each IDE chain, allowing up to 4 drives. Granted the SATA ports will be much smaller, so maybe they'll do us a favor and cram 8 of 'em on there.
As far as USB 2.0 goes, well, I don't have any USB devices yet, so I guess I really don't care at this point.
I'm sure I've said several idiotic things here, so anyone who's more of an expert in these matters, please smack me around a bit.
You're missing it. what you have are ethics (the principles you use to guide your own actions). Morals really are the principles that a society generally accepts as standard behavior. Morals are kind of a contract between you and the other members of your society (i won't kill you and you won't kill me and we both benefit).
I had to take an ethics class in college, and there I learned that morals regard what is (absolutely) right and wrong, and ethics regard a proper code of conduct in a given field (e.g. medical ethics, business ethics). However I think that "ethics" and "morals" as we define them often get confused, and I'm not sure that either my definition or yours is the "correct" one. This seems like one of those cases where everyone's definitions are a little different. I know what you mean, however, and I think you're right, mostly, although I don't think I'd call the common social contract "morals". But it's really just splitting hairs at that point.
Which words refer to what aside, as long as we agree that there are separate entities thus:
- Things that society in general agrees are right and wrong - Things that you personally think are right and wrong
...then regardless of what words we use for them, we can probably agree on something.:) But if we do take your definition, then I guess what I meant was that according to MY ethics, it's wrong for someone else to force THEIR ethics on anyone.
They definitely exist, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not. But cross them at your own peril.
No kidding:)
The problem arises when a minority group claims that its principles are moral (i.e. they apply to all of society) when they aren't in fact shared by the majority. Abortion is an obvious example - the majority feel that abortion under some circumstances is ok (the set of circumstances varies of course).
This sort of thing (draping yourself in the mantle of morality) seems to happen a lot more now than in the past. I don't know why.
From what I can tell of history, people have always done this. There's just more people now.:) It sort of became more visible in the 90's because of the rise of the Christian Right (at least in America, which is where I'm assuming you are, though I probably shouldn't). The "family values" meme started infecting everyone, and they're still using it to bash people over the head with. (The difference between Democrats and Republicans: Democrats want the government to run everything except morality, and the Republicans want the government to run nothing except morality.)
Morality is entirely subjective -- unless you accept the existence of an absolute moral lawgiver like God (which I don't), then the only morality that means anything to you is the one that you follow. If I have a set of morals and I am the ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WITH THOSE MORALS, that does NOT mean that they are not morals. Obviously if I have morals I think everyone should have the same morals -- but I also think it's wrong for me to FORCE them to follow my morals. These are not mutually exclusive ideas; what you're saying is that if someone has morals, they are morally obligated (!) to force their morals on everyone else, which is not the case. What if my morals preclude me from telling anyone about my morals?
...for them to make their sites workable for the lowest common denominator, they would. It is not, so they do not. Don't get righteous, this is just greed as usual. I'm not saying it's a good thing--I certainly wish they were more adaptive--but keep in mind that it takes a lot of extra effort to make sure that a site works for the blind, with Lynx, with Netscape, with IE, with Opera... not to mention all the different versions of those browsers that all do things differently.
Couldn't this whole problem be obviated by having ISPs modify their routers not to allow packets out that don't have a legal source address? If you're FlashTechComNet, and your entire network is under the address (say) 127.0.x.x, then if you just make your routers drop outgoing packets that have source addresses not in that netmask, doesn't that prevent this kind of thing? Obviously you can still try and flood someone, but you're going to have to be using IPs from that subnet, which makes you much easier to catch.
Actually, by endorsing Napster, you have given the RIAA's lawyers the legal right to physically sodomize your entire family. This is a little-known provision of the DMCA...
it seems that Northwest is violating neither the letter nor the spirit of the law. I don't see why this is a problem; if you are suspected of committing a crime, it is perfectly within bounds for prosecuting parties to acquire warrants to search articles that might be involved in the crime.
I'd hate to see another knee-jerk privacy reaction to this article when there's not really anything here to be concerned about.
If you're interested in asteroid mining and space habitation (specifically, a good deal of research and writing that's been done on the subject), check out PERMANENT, the Projects to Employ Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near Term. They've got a great deal of information on proposed ideas as well as research that's already been done into this field.
Here's another thing I fear... if, as proposed, they try to come within a mile of the asteroid with NEAR -- something that has never been attempted before -- and they crash, people will again bitch as NASA for failing. *sigh*
The main difference between cybersquatting and brokering is that squatting typically pertains to cases where you buy a name (like, say, ford.com) and then attempt to extort large amounts of money from Ford Motor Company to buy it from you.
Brokering, on the other hand, typically refers to buying more generic names, like business.com, monkeys.com, giantdildo.com, and so on, and then selling them to whoever wants them.
There's a distinct difference here; and I think as long as your company doesn't own something like paramountpictures.com (in which case they might try to extort money from Paramount Pictures), but rather owns something like agrobusiness.com, then it's no big deal. The easiest way to get rid of it is, as others have already said, an auction. Start the bidding at what you paid for it, plus the cost of the time it takes to do the auction, so that at least you're not losing money on the deal. But don't try to extort people; it may not be illegal but I at least consider it immoral.
I remember reading an article in the New York times around ten years ago, talking about how holographic storage was going go be the Next Big Thing. They talked about 1-cm cubes holding a gigabyte (GASP!) of storage. Of course, this was when a 65 MB 5-1/4" hard drive was large. Hopefully we'll eventually see some actual holo storage technology in common use... eventually. I'd hate for this technology to become yet another of those things we always hear about but never get to have.
Assuming we lose the case and have no legal recourse to legally use our own property, we can always hire some spammers to e-mail the DeCSS code to every person in the world. Let's see them quash it then!
Other Ways To Fuck With These Assholes:
Convert the source code into English. It's not source code, it's free speech!
Anonymously E-mail copies of the source to every e-mail address at mpaa.org, fox.com, paramount.com, disney.com, etc., then sue them for possessing it. (Hey, if linking to it is illegal, then having it must be!)
Make our own DVD player, except instead of including the CSS system, encrypt DeCSS with our own encryption and include that instead. If the CCA reverse-engineers our software, sue them under the DMCA. If they try to sue us for not having a license, countersue against their monopoly and antitrust practices.
If they're going to accuse us of piracy, then, well, I'll be damned if I'm going to be accused of something I'm not doing. Therefore we must flood the world with cheap ripoffs of every DVD that's ever released.
Of course, this is assuming we have no other recourse. Hey, doesn't the DMCA say that I can now be legally shot to death by Jack Valenti personally for saying this?
"If you think about this reasonably, the answer is that if the government does not have a reasonable basis to contend that something really dangerous [is in the encrypted files], and merely does not know what is in the files and can't decode them, then they should hand them over," he said.
Just like the authorities need a warrant to search your house, they should also need a warrant to require you to decrypt your data. Of course, in order to get a warrant, you need probable cause that there is something to seize/search. Just because data is encrypted, and just because it's the data of a convicted felon, has NO BEARING on whether the data is of any criminal relevance.
But on further review, it's not as bad as it seems. Yes, it sucks if people steal your code and use it in closed-source software, and there's not really any way to prove that they did.
But now assume that this has happened, and let's look at what we have:
1) An open-source piece of software (yours)
vs.
2) A closed-source piece of software (theirs)
YOUR software is open-source, so it will continue to be better quality than theirs.
THEIR software is closed-source, and we all know the problems inherent in that.
So the problem is really only a moral one. Yes, it's lame that they're stealing your code, but they're not going to profit from it as much as it would seem. I don't think there's a whole lot to worry about. And, you can take solace in the fact that if people are stealing well-written GPL code, the average quality of software is increasing, which is a good thing!
So the point is, essentially, that you don't need to try and protect your code, because it doesn't make any difference whether people steal it or not, if it's already GPLed.
The hope for great future things that I always feel when reading stories such as this is always countered by the realistic view that we aren't suddenly one day going to have a whole bunch of neat nano stuff. As the science progresses, the technology will trickle out the way it always has. Well, sometimes it's more of a flood than a trickle.
Still, the possibilities for nano are great indeed. Immensely strong materials that are incredibly lightweight; molecular-level perfect reconstruction of physical injuries; individually repairing aged cells so that they are young again, allowing effective immortality; exponential improvements in computer technology; and just about anything else you can think of.
Of course this is all tempered by the fact that nano will also be used for harm, and evil, just as any other technology has; and the potential for tragedy is also great. Some mad scientist could invent a self-replicating, airborne nanobot that will spread over the entire planet and kill every living cell it finds. I certainly hope that this doesn't happen, but it is a possibility.
I can forsee a couple of problems with it, however:
1. It takes time and money to actually go through the process of doing patents; if we're going to have a Free Patent Foundation (so to speak), someone's going to have to be doing all the work for this, and since patent licensing fees would presumably not work as a revenue source...:)
2. In order to really have this be effective, we would need to patent a *LOT* of things. Even if we patented everything we could think of, there would still undoubtedly be things we'd miss, that some opportunist (as he put it) would take advantage of; but this would definitely reduce the number of stupid patents owned by greedy companies. However, multiply #2 x #1 and we've got lots and lots of patents, taking up lots and lots of time and money.
3. In theory, since the patents would all be "open", meaning they are totally unrestricted in their use by anyone, then we might still have boneheads like Amazon.com patenting *the same thing* and ignoring our patent entirely. I would not put it past patent lawyers to figure out ways to acquire a patent on something that has already been patended, except for making minor changes that would distinguish it to the USPO. (As we've already seen, the USPO will apparently grant a patent to anyone for anything.) So later, when a legal situation comes up, Big Companies like Amazon will win in court due to superior mu$cle, even though their patent isn't really legitimate (not to mention that their case will probably be frivolous to begin with).
IANAL, so I'd appreciate anyone's clarifications on this. I'm just basing this on what little I know of patent law here in the states.
Especially about the Fitts zones and what Apple seems to have done to the taskbar. Although a lot of times it seems like Tog says things like,
5. Should not hold the trash can. (The trash can should be on the desktop, where it belongs.)
and
It has a far higher access time than the foolish location Windows uses...
and you have to wonder why, because he doesn't tell you what's going on. I always appreciate Tog's work but he shouldn't assume we know why he thinks things, especially in a field as relatively obscure as GUI design. (Most of the geeks I know, including myself, tend to adapt no matter how irritating the system, and while we do bitch about it, we also have little trouble adapting. Also, some of Tog's comments indicate that he is thinking more in terms of professional use, not everyday use by the masses. Still, he's definitely better at this than I am.)
This would clearly spell the end of pornography as an industry: anything you willed would be reality for you. Which means no more going down to the store in an overcoat for "Hot Donkey Action"!
That bugs are the result of human fallibility was implied by the statement. Software's nature comes from human hands; humans make mistakes; therefore software is buggy. I didn't think it needed to be said; I guess some people like everything spelled out for them. *shrug*
For one thing, a lot more people are working on GNU/Linux than on the BSDs combined. This will obviously find more bugs.
For another thing, the OpenBSD guys (for example) spent six months doing *NOTHING BUT SECURITY AUDITING*. This means they pretty much found every bug in the existing code. However any new code they add will be subject to just as many bugs as any other code.
For a third thing, because there are so many more people working on GNU/Linux stuff, there's more code being created, and thus more bugs.
And the reason that there are so many bugs in the first place is because that is the nature of software. Any piece of code, even slightly complex, will probably be buggy until you take the time to debug it. How many bugs do you think there are in Windows NT that haven't been found?
Furthmore, GNU/Linux users would gladly spend 100% of their time improving GNU/Linux, if that were possible -- unfortunately their brains would fry; they need sleep, food, time to relax (not having to think), and time to commit FUD against Microsoft. Not that MS doesn't deserve it.
And I didn't see any posts being holier-than-thou; they were all being funnier-than-thou.
It would be neat to have two or more ports for fuel cells on your laptop, so that you could merely swap a new one in when one of the cells runs out, and then swap the other one out later, without ever having to shut down your machine. And since they seem to be so small (one inch square by one-tenth of an inch thick?!), this seems like it might be feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety per cent of everything is crud."
Slashdot's Law: "Ninety per cent of everything is FUD."
As far as USB 2.0 goes, well, I don't have any USB devices yet, so I guess I really don't care at this point.
I'm sure I've said several idiotic things here, so anyone who's more of an expert in these matters, please smack me around a bit.
Lies.
Damn lies.
Statistics.
Benchmarks.
I had to take an ethics class in college, and there I learned that morals regard what is (absolutely) right and wrong, and ethics regard a proper code of conduct in a given field (e.g. medical ethics, business ethics). However I think that "ethics" and "morals" as we define them often get confused, and I'm not sure that either my definition or yours is the "correct" one. This seems like one of those cases where everyone's definitions are a little different. I know what you mean, however, and I think you're right, mostly, although I don't think I'd call the common social contract "morals". But it's really just splitting hairs at that point.
Which words refer to what aside, as long as we agree that there are separate entities thus:
- Things that society in general agrees are right and wrong
- Things that you personally think are right and wrong
They definitely exist, whether you choose to acknowledge them or not. But cross them at your own peril.
No kidding :)
The problem arises when a minority group claims that its principles are moral (i.e. they apply to all of society) when they aren't in fact shared by the majority. Abortion is an obvious example - the majority feel that abortion under some circumstances is ok (the set of circumstances varies of course).
This sort of thing (draping yourself in the mantle of morality) seems to happen a lot more now than in the past. I don't know why.
From what I can tell of history, people have always done this. There's just more people now. :) It sort of became more visible in the 90's because of the rise of the Christian Right (at least in America, which is where I'm assuming you are, though I probably shouldn't). The "family values" meme started infecting everyone, and they're still using it to bash people over the head with. (The difference between Democrats and Republicans: Democrats want the government to run everything except morality, and the Republicans want the government to run nothing except morality.)
Morality is entirely subjective -- unless you accept the existence of an absolute moral lawgiver like God (which I don't), then the only morality that means anything to you is the one that you follow. If I have a set of morals and I am the ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WITH THOSE MORALS, that does NOT mean that they are not morals. Obviously if I have morals I think everyone should have the same morals -- but I also think it's wrong for me to FORCE them to follow my morals. These are not mutually exclusive ideas; what you're saying is that if someone has morals, they are morally obligated (!) to force their morals on everyone else, which is not the case. What if my morals preclude me from telling anyone about my morals?
...for them to make their sites workable for the lowest common denominator, they would. It is not, so they do not. Don't get righteous, this is just greed as usual. I'm not saying it's a good thing--I certainly wish they were more adaptive--but keep in mind that it takes a lot of extra effort to make sure that a site works for the blind, with Lynx, with Netscape, with IE, with Opera... not to mention all the different versions of those browsers that all do things differently.
Couldn't this whole problem be obviated by having ISPs modify their routers not to allow packets out that don't have a legal source address? If you're FlashTechComNet, and your entire network is under the address (say) 127.0.x.x, then if you just make your routers drop outgoing packets that have source addresses not in that netmask, doesn't that prevent this kind of thing? Obviously you can still try and flood someone, but you're going to have to be using IPs from that subnet, which makes you much easier to catch.
Actually, by endorsing Napster, you have given the RIAA's lawyers the legal right to physically sodomize your entire family. This is a little-known provision of the DMCA...
I'd hate to see another knee-jerk privacy reaction to this article when there's not really anything here to be concerned about.
Here's another thing I fear... if, as proposed, they try to come within a mile of the asteroid with NEAR -- something that has never been attempted before -- and they crash, people will again bitch as NASA for failing. *sigh*
Brokering, on the other hand, typically refers to buying more generic names, like business.com, monkeys.com, giantdildo.com, and so on, and then selling them to whoever wants them.
There's a distinct difference here; and I think as long as your company doesn't own something like paramountpictures.com (in which case they might try to extort money from Paramount Pictures), but rather owns something like agrobusiness.com, then it's no big deal. The easiest way to get rid of it is, as others have already said, an auction. Start the bidding at what you paid for it, plus the cost of the time it takes to do the auction, so that at least you're not losing money on the deal. But don't try to extort people; it may not be illegal but I at least consider it immoral.
I remember reading an article in the New York times around ten years ago, talking about how holographic storage was going go be the Next Big Thing. They talked about 1-cm cubes holding a gigabyte (GASP!) of storage. Of course, this was when a 65 MB 5-1/4" hard drive was large. Hopefully we'll eventually see some actual holo storage technology in common use... eventually. I'd hate for this technology to become yet another of those things we always hear about but never get to have.
Other Ways To Fuck With These Assholes:
- Convert the source code into English. It's not source code, it's free speech!
- Anonymously E-mail copies of the source to every e-mail address at mpaa.org, fox.com, paramount.com, disney.com, etc., then sue them for possessing it. (Hey, if linking to it is illegal, then having it must be!)
- Make our own DVD player, except instead of including the CSS system, encrypt DeCSS with our own encryption and include that instead. If the CCA reverse-engineers our software, sue them under the DMCA. If they try to sue us for not having a license, countersue against their monopoly and antitrust practices.
- If they're going to accuse us of piracy, then, well, I'll be damned if I'm going to be accused of something I'm not doing. Therefore we must flood the world with cheap ripoffs of every DVD that's ever released.
Of course, this is assuming we have no other recourse. Hey, doesn't the DMCA say that I can now be legally shot to death by Jack Valenti personally for saying this?I only read it for the dirty pictures! I didn't look at the PET article! Honest!
- Bill Gates, former CEO, Microsoft
Just like the authorities need a warrant to search your house, they should also need a warrant to require you to decrypt your data. Of course, in order to get a warrant, you need probable cause that there is something to seize/search. Just because data is encrypted, and just because it's the data of a convicted felon, has NO BEARING on whether the data is of any criminal relevance.
But now assume that this has happened, and let's look at what we have:
1) An open-source piece of software (yours)
vs.
2) A closed-source piece of software (theirs)
YOUR software is open-source, so it will continue to be better quality than theirs.
THEIR software is closed-source, and we all know the problems inherent in that.
So the problem is really only a moral one. Yes, it's lame that they're stealing your code, but they're not going to profit from it as much as it would seem. I don't think there's a whole lot to worry about. And, you can take solace in the fact that if people are stealing well-written GPL code, the average quality of software is increasing, which is a good thing!
So the point is, essentially, that you don't need to try and protect your code, because it doesn't make any difference whether people steal it or not, if it's already GPLed.
Still, the possibilities for nano are great indeed. Immensely strong materials that are incredibly lightweight; molecular-level perfect reconstruction of physical injuries; individually repairing aged cells so that they are young again, allowing effective immortality; exponential improvements in computer technology; and just about anything else you can think of.
Of course this is all tempered by the fact that nano will also be used for harm, and evil, just as any other technology has; and the potential for tragedy is also great. Some mad scientist could invent a self-replicating, airborne nanobot that will spread over the entire planet and kill every living cell it finds. I certainly hope that this doesn't happen, but it is a possibility.
1. It takes time and money to actually go through the process of doing patents; if we're going to have a Free Patent Foundation (so to speak), someone's going to have to be doing all the work for this, and since patent licensing fees would presumably not work as a revenue source... :)
2. In order to really have this be effective, we would need to patent a *LOT* of things. Even if we patented everything we could think of, there would still undoubtedly be things we'd miss, that some opportunist (as he put it) would take advantage of; but this would definitely reduce the number of stupid patents owned by greedy companies. However, multiply #2 x #1 and we've got lots and lots of patents, taking up lots and lots of time and money.
3. In theory, since the patents would all be "open", meaning they are totally unrestricted in their use by anyone, then we might still have boneheads like Amazon.com patenting *the same thing* and ignoring our patent entirely. I would not put it past patent lawyers to figure out ways to acquire a patent on something that has already been patended, except for making minor changes that would distinguish it to the USPO. (As we've already seen, the USPO will apparently grant a patent to anyone for anything.) So later, when a legal situation comes up, Big Companies like Amazon will win in court due to superior mu$cle, even though their patent isn't really legitimate (not to mention that their case will probably be frivolous to begin with).
IANAL, so I'd appreciate anyone's clarifications on this. I'm just basing this on what little I know of patent law here in the states.
5. Should not hold the trash can. (The trash can should be on the desktop, where it belongs.)
and
It has a far higher access time than the foolish location Windows uses...
and you have to wonder why, because he doesn't tell you what's going on. I always appreciate Tog's work but he shouldn't assume we know why he thinks things, especially in a field as relatively obscure as GUI design. (Most of the geeks I know, including myself, tend to adapt no matter how irritating the system, and while we do bitch about it, we also have little trouble adapting. Also, some of Tog's comments indicate that he is thinking more in terms of professional use, not everyday use by the masses. Still, he's definitely better at this than I am.)
This would clearly spell the end of pornography as an industry: anything you willed would be reality for you. Which means no more going down to the store in an overcoat for "Hot Donkey Action"!
That bugs are the result of human fallibility was implied by the statement. Software's nature comes from human hands; humans make mistakes; therefore software is buggy. I didn't think it needed to be said; I guess some people like everything spelled out for them. *shrug*
For another thing, the OpenBSD guys (for example) spent six months doing *NOTHING BUT SECURITY AUDITING*. This means they pretty much found every bug in the existing code. However any new code they add will be subject to just as many bugs as any other code.
For a third thing, because there are so many more people working on GNU/Linux stuff, there's more code being created, and thus more bugs.
And the reason that there are so many bugs in the first place is because that is the nature of software. Any piece of code, even slightly complex, will probably be buggy until you take the time to debug it. How many bugs do you think there are in Windows NT that haven't been found?
Furthmore, GNU/Linux users would gladly spend 100% of their time improving GNU/Linux, if that were possible -- unfortunately their brains would fry; they need sleep, food, time to relax (not having to think), and time to commit FUD against Microsoft. Not that MS doesn't deserve it.
And I didn't see any posts being holier-than-thou; they were all being funnier-than-thou.
(/me waits for howls of laughter from Slashdot)
It would be neat to have two or more ports for fuel cells on your laptop, so that you could merely swap a new one in when one of the cells runs out, and then swap the other one out later, without ever having to shut down your machine. And since they seem to be so small (one inch square by one-tenth of an inch thick?!), this seems like it might be feasible.