I think my favorite part of that video was the grizzled abacus instructor and his persistent victims.
"Sometimes I get angry with them. Sometimes I hit them. But they keep coming. I hope they're happy."
Do you really think the average outraged teenager/citizen is going to have the time, resources, or know-how to assemble Paranoid Linux, XNet with Tor, gnupg, WiFi sniffers, security tools, etc.? Why would anyone in their right mind do that when a public, mass outlet has emerged for similar expression? Further you gain credibility by having multiple, collaborated sources, far more than some literally untraceable, anonymous internet source. One blog entry isn't noticeable or likely to get attention, 10,000 agreeing Twits definitely is.
Pragmatics aside I can't believe you're encouraging "revolutionaries" to comply with government suppression. Doesn't that defeat the point of an uprising? Maybe all the Iranians should just listen to the police, go back inside peacefully, stop telling the world what's going on and accept the latest government announcement. Maybe while they listen they can invite over one of their 100s of Linux-qualified friends to help them set up an anonymous network connection!
Twitter isn't going to save the world but it has a way better chance than anonymous Linux browsing.
You forgot an increasingly popular trend in most forums: ironic humor. Not only is it becoming increasingly (and irritatingly) difficult to differentiate between the genuinely stupid and the trolls, the addition of people "ironically" flaming everyone or trashing the forums is impossible to spot or verify since anyone accused of these things can claim they were doing so "ironically" as an ingenious, super-subtle commentary on forum "culture." Voila! By claiming to use ironic humor, anyone and everyone is now a modern day Oscar Wilde!
Why amusing? It's a perfectly logical, rational conclusion based on the available evidence. No one has ever provided any evidence or test to show that there is a supreme, omnipotent being watching over us. Nor has anyone ever provided any evidence to indicate how such a being could come into existence in the first place. The best anyone has ever offered is simply, "God/Vishnu/Chutulu/whatever has always existed." That is no evidence.
The difference that matters is that faith is, by definition, trust in things that are impossible to prove by nature. The New Testament writers made this really, really clear and the logic itself isn't hard to follow. Whether you choose to believe is one matter, trying to disprove that which was never meant to be proven is another. This is why skeptics and militant atheists can be so obnoxious sometimes with regards to religion: they're missing the point, and making themselves out to be super-intelligent when they're really just re-stating the obvious, ad-nauseum, and making a lot of noise over an issue that will never be resolved.
Religious folk are aware that there's no proof for their belief, their faith and trust in a supreme being would be useless without it.
As far as the "seeing is believing" attitude is concerned, it neglects to take into account the existence of things that humans can't perceive or understand, which is ironically narrow-minded.
I hate to be a buzzkill, but I think it's too early to start praising the success of the XOs just yet. Kids love new things, especially things that look like toys. It's no surprise that they're getting so much attention right now, especially since they just came in. Let's see a story in a few months or so about the Peruvian XOs and their educational benefits once the novelty wears off and the laptops start having problems that the kids will have to fix.
You're making the same mistake that every other quasi-Luddite does. The point of consumer robotics, at least to my understanding, isn't to fill a needed role, but to fill it more efficiently. We already had carrier pigeons, why create the Postal Service? Why bother making cars when the horse and carriage combination is cheaper, safer, more fulfilling (horses, at least), and roads are already designed for carriages? Why spend hundreds of dollars on iron differential engines when we have humans who can do the same calculations infinitely more quickly?
Of course BeerBot would take 45 seconds to get the lazy American his beer, because the technology required to perform more efficient beer-fetching isn't feasible. Yet. Just because robots are not practical now doesn't mean they won't be practical, or maybe even necessary, in the future. It's people like you who are shunting things like space exploration and quantum computing simply because it's extremely difficult at the moment. If we had listened to your ancestors we probably would have never invented the wheel. Why not walk?
After stupidly losing my OSX install discs once and formatting my Macbook, I purchased a set off Ebay for $20. Unfortunately they were revision 2 discs (Macbook1,2) and my Macbook was a revision 1 model, thus the discs refused to install any software. Ten minutes of twiddling later, I was able to restore my software. It's hard to tell whether Apple is too lazy to implement an ironfisted DRM scheme or they just don't care, in any case these Vista activation nightmare stories make me glad to be a Mac user.
Regardless of how much pressure this levy will supposedly relieve from the consumer, I can't think of many things worse than supplying the music industry with government money on the merits of simply existing. Between this, the DMCA, network neutrality, the pre-emptive funding of Obama and Hillary on behalf of the RIAA, Disney's eternal manipulation of the copyright, and the RIAA single-handedly influencing Russia into dropping AllofMP3, it looks like we're getting closer to corporation-controlled nation states than we thought. You bring the deck. I'll bring the derms.
I share your contempt, but as I don't watch much television or shop outside, most of my energy is focused towards the internet. The sheer volume of ads, be it in pop-up, text, banner, Flash, blog, audio, video, or frame form, has become overwhelming recently. Not only is it annoying to spend a good minute Adblocking everything in sight whenever I click a link just to minimize headaches, but it's unnerving at a subconscious level to see so much of the economy run by ads. Spam, link farms, new aggregates, private websites, porn sites, all of these are fueled completely by banner ads and Google Adsense. Isn't anyone else the least bit disturbed by this?
The other day I gave up and set Adblock to wipe out everything except text. The amount of information actually presented on websites these days in relation to the amount of space taken up by ads became starkly apparent; I invite anyone reading this to try it out.
Well, assuming Sony was truly unaware of how the rootkits operated (coughbullshit), a more appropriate analogy would be paying your lawn company to keep insects out of your yard and waking up to exploding mail carriers.
I might be in the minority here, but I'm not a huge gamer. I didn't grow up with Nintendo or Sega, I'm not a Counterstrike master, I prefer Bejewled to Tetris, I never played Duke Nukem or DOOM or Myst. That said, I've always found the Killzone games irresistably attractive due to their Saving Private Ryan-esque, post-apocalyptic, frantic atmosphere, the sweeping environments and orchestral score, the sound work, the surreal environments, and most importantly, the Helghast, who are so frighteningly sinister and menacing that I enjoy the game most when I'm inflicting the most painful death possible on them. The whole franchise is like an interactive sci-fi action movie. It's not groundbreaking, it's not revolutionary, it doesn't draw me in. It's something I can sit down and enjoy after a frustrating day at work, something I can fire up when friends are over and there's nothing on HBO.
Why isn't Sony catering to people like me? I don't give a shit about the next gaming revolution, I want a centralized, versatile media center with stuff I can play with, listen to, watch, and hack. If they just laid off the overly aggressive DRM, worked in tandem with the movie and music industry to implement a cheap, online distribution model, pumped out more games like Killzone and Assassin's Creed and brought down the price a little, I would be out the door right now and taking the weekend off.
These claims of Nintendo and Microsoft dominating the "casual userbase" are overstated, I think. I have no desire to play Resident Evil 4, neither does my grandmother. So are the arguments that game consoles shouldn't be used as media platforms. I'm sure there are countless people out there like me, and it's sad that Sony is skimping on so many little things. Everything is in place. The hardware is there, the market is there, the potential is there. Why can't Sony just go the extra mile?
Damn, I can't believe I'm seriously considering buying a PS3.
I have to disagree with you. Self-criticism is necessary to improvement, but Michael Moore's brand of "criticism" is of the lowest form: deceptive, sensationalist, arrogant, bordering on propaganda and masqueraded as an authoritative documentary. If America is going to sit down and discuss the health care crisis it needs to do so in a balanced, rational manner, considering all evidence and viewpoints and constructively working towards a solution, rather than resorting to the hyperpartisan, us versus them "anyone who doesn't agree with me is a pathological idiot" mentality that Michael Moore loves to spread and you seem to have taken hook, line, and sinker.
Let me repeat that, people who have been paying for the insurance their entire lives die because the insurance companies want to save a few bucks. This is very evil. To be fair, you should take your complaints in this area to capitalism in general. The health care industry is under no legal obligation to be nice. Neither is any company.
Agreed. Unfortunately, after discovering http://riaaradar.com/ my music purchases have taken a sharp dive; it's sad to see so many of my favorite artists in league with the RIAA. My usual habit these days is to check a label for RIAA membership; if it's a positive, I either skip out on the album or pirate the music, ramp up my upload rate for some super seeding, and burn a few discs to distrubte to friends (if I'm feeling spiteful). If negative, I scan iTunes/eMusic/Rhapsody/etc. for downloadable tracks and buy. Downloadpunk in particular has an attractive system set up in which you can donate a portion of your purchase to a charity of your choice and download your non-DRM music in a ZIP file. In worst case scenarios, i.e. stores don't carry what I'm looking for, unacceptable bit rate, etc., I have to resort to AllofMp3, but I don't like it, and usually send a letter to my usual stores.
Why not buy CDs, you ask? I dislike physical media. I don't get any visceral satisfaction from owning things, it's a pain in the ass to catalogue, and I prefer my iPod-centric multimedia setup. Call me a clueless consumer whore, but I don't mind the media shift. Digital audio is a much more flexible medium and I really enjoy being able to carry all of my music with me, even if I lose some quality. I have yet to hear vinyl yet though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
What the music industry doesn't realize is that I am a customer. I enjoy supporting music, I love concerts, I play an instrument myself. I write to artists, I buy merchandise, I share music with my friends.
But when the industry starts suing innocent people, manipulating the legal system to their own ends, utilizing scare tactics, masquerading as a disciplinary force to college students, funding anti-competitive legislation, building a monopoly by hedging out internet radio, wasting billions of dollars on useless DRM schemes (thereby alienating the customer and driving up CD prices in the process, killing the music even moreso), implying that copyright infringement is tantamount to thievery and even murder, even connecting BitTorrent with terrorism, they have made a new enemy. I will never purchase an RIAA label album again in any medium. Not even if the RIAA relents, reforms, or even dissolves.
If every music fan came to this conclusion, the RIAA might finally realize that the cost of their actions far exceeds any monetary profits they might make from monopolizing the music industry in such a hostile, arrogant fashion.
But I guess that's the thing: the RIAA doesn't give a shit about its customers. I can rant and rave and boycott the RIAA all I want, but what do they care? It's more profitable to sue me.
The only thing frightening here is that this debate might encourage YouTube users to get politically involved. I mean really, seriously politically involved.
Picture this scenario: The fate of the US presidential election, and perhaps the free world, rests in the hands of the YouTube community.
"This country puts a lot more money into things that seem to me much crazier than this," said Mitch Rudman, a music industry executive in Las Vegas whose family foundation donated $20,000 to the experiment. "It's outrageous to me that talented scientists have to go looking for a few bucks to do anything slightly outside the box." All these years I've been wondering where all the money from RIAA record sales actually goes.
Now I know.
Nothing new here. And it is well known how to remove this information from the tracks. But why bother unless your intent is to actually upload them to a file server for widespread illegal distribution. This is a dangerous line of thinking. Why complain about DVD encryption if it's a.) well known how to remove the encryption and b.) no one would complain unless you wanted to illegally upload them? Why complain about binding your DNA to a music track so that only you can play them, hmmm? What's wrong with chaining DVDs to their respective players? Only a pirate (hiss!) would object to these perfectly legal constraints!
Slashdot Mirror
I think my favorite part of that video was the grizzled abacus instructor and his persistent victims. "Sometimes I get angry with them. Sometimes I hit them. But they keep coming. I hope they're happy."
Do you really think the average outraged teenager/citizen is going to have the time, resources, or know-how to assemble Paranoid Linux, XNet with Tor, gnupg, WiFi sniffers, security tools, etc.? Why would anyone in their right mind do that when a public, mass outlet has emerged for similar expression? Further you gain credibility by having multiple, collaborated sources, far more than some literally untraceable, anonymous internet source. One blog entry isn't noticeable or likely to get attention, 10,000 agreeing Twits definitely is. Pragmatics aside I can't believe you're encouraging "revolutionaries" to comply with government suppression. Doesn't that defeat the point of an uprising? Maybe all the Iranians should just listen to the police, go back inside peacefully, stop telling the world what's going on and accept the latest government announcement. Maybe while they listen they can invite over one of their 100s of Linux-qualified friends to help them set up an anonymous network connection! Twitter isn't going to save the world but it has a way better chance than anonymous Linux browsing.
You forgot an increasingly popular trend in most forums: ironic humor. Not only is it becoming increasingly (and irritatingly) difficult to differentiate between the genuinely stupid and the trolls, the addition of people "ironically" flaming everyone or trashing the forums is impossible to spot or verify since anyone accused of these things can claim they were doing so "ironically" as an ingenious, super-subtle commentary on forum "culture." Voila! By claiming to use ironic humor, anyone and everyone is now a modern day Oscar Wilde!
Why amusing? It's a perfectly logical, rational conclusion based on the available evidence. No one has ever provided any evidence or test to show that there is a supreme, omnipotent being watching over us. Nor has anyone ever provided any evidence to indicate how such a being could come into existence in the first place. The best anyone has ever offered is simply, "God/Vishnu/Chutulu/whatever has always existed." That is no evidence.
The difference that matters is that faith is, by definition, trust in things that are impossible to prove by nature. The New Testament writers made this really, really clear and the logic itself isn't hard to follow. Whether you choose to believe is one matter, trying to disprove that which was never meant to be proven is another. This is why skeptics and militant atheists can be so obnoxious sometimes with regards to religion: they're missing the point, and making themselves out to be super-intelligent when they're really just re-stating the obvious, ad-nauseum, and making a lot of noise over an issue that will never be resolved.
Religious folk are aware that there's no proof for their belief, their faith and trust in a supreme being would be useless without it.
As far as the "seeing is believing" attitude is concerned, it neglects to take into account the existence of things that humans can't perceive or understand, which is ironically narrow-minded.
Since when can you nullify human rights by signing a contract? I thought the point of "inalienable rights" was to transcend all that?
I hate to be a buzzkill, but I think it's too early to start praising the success of the XOs just yet. Kids love new things, especially things that look like toys. It's no surprise that they're getting so much attention right now, especially since they just came in. Let's see a story in a few months or so about the Peruvian XOs and their educational benefits once the novelty wears off and the laptops start having problems that the kids will have to fix.
You're making the same mistake that every other quasi-Luddite does. The point of consumer robotics, at least to my understanding, isn't to fill a needed role, but to fill it more efficiently. We already had carrier pigeons, why create the Postal Service? Why bother making cars when the horse and carriage combination is cheaper, safer, more fulfilling (horses, at least), and roads are already designed for carriages? Why spend hundreds of dollars on iron differential engines when we have humans who can do the same calculations infinitely more quickly?
Of course BeerBot would take 45 seconds to get the lazy American his beer, because the technology required to perform more efficient beer-fetching isn't feasible. Yet. Just because robots are not practical now doesn't mean they won't be practical, or maybe even necessary, in the future. It's people like you who are shunting things like space exploration and quantum computing simply because it's extremely difficult at the moment. If we had listened to your ancestors we probably would have never invented the wheel. Why not walk?
It's actually fairly easy to circumvent the hardware restrictions on some models of OSX 10.4 discs. See:
http://jonsharp.net/archives/2005/05/06/installing-tiger-on-lombard/
After stupidly losing my OSX install discs once and formatting my Macbook, I purchased a set off Ebay for $20. Unfortunately they were revision 2 discs (Macbook1,2) and my Macbook was a revision 1 model, thus the discs refused to install any software. Ten minutes of twiddling later, I was able to restore my software. It's hard to tell whether Apple is too lazy to implement an ironfisted DRM scheme or they just don't care, in any case these Vista activation nightmare stories make me glad to be a Mac user.
That is possibly the most appropriate username/post combination I've seen on /.
Regardless of how much pressure this levy will supposedly relieve from the consumer, I can't think of many things worse than supplying the music industry with government money on the merits of simply existing. Between this, the DMCA, network neutrality, the pre-emptive funding of Obama and Hillary on behalf of the RIAA, Disney's eternal manipulation of the copyright, and the RIAA single-handedly influencing Russia into dropping AllofMP3, it looks like we're getting closer to corporation-controlled nation states than we thought. You bring the deck. I'll bring the derms.
I share your contempt, but as I don't watch much television or shop outside, most of my energy is focused towards the internet. The sheer volume of ads, be it in pop-up, text, banner, Flash, blog, audio, video, or frame form, has become overwhelming recently. Not only is it annoying to spend a good minute Adblocking everything in sight whenever I click a link just to minimize headaches, but it's unnerving at a subconscious level to see so much of the economy run by ads. Spam, link farms, new aggregates, private websites, porn sites, all of these are fueled completely by banner ads and Google Adsense. Isn't anyone else the least bit disturbed by this?
The other day I gave up and set Adblock to wipe out everything except text. The amount of information actually presented on websites these days in relation to the amount of space taken up by ads became starkly apparent; I invite anyone reading this to try it out.
Well, assuming Sony was truly unaware of how the rootkits operated (coughbullshit), a more appropriate analogy would be paying your lawn company to keep insects out of your yard and waking up to exploding mail carriers.
Just curious: You aren't associated with Dynamic River, are you?
I might be in the minority here, but I'm not a huge gamer. I didn't grow up with Nintendo or Sega, I'm not a Counterstrike master, I prefer Bejewled to Tetris, I never played Duke Nukem or DOOM or Myst. That said, I've always found the Killzone games irresistably attractive due to their Saving Private Ryan-esque, post-apocalyptic, frantic atmosphere, the sweeping environments and orchestral score, the sound work, the surreal environments, and most importantly, the Helghast, who are so frighteningly sinister and menacing that I enjoy the game most when I'm inflicting the most painful death possible on them. The whole franchise is like an interactive sci-fi action movie. It's not groundbreaking, it's not revolutionary, it doesn't draw me in. It's something I can sit down and enjoy after a frustrating day at work, something I can fire up when friends are over and there's nothing on HBO.
Why isn't Sony catering to people like me? I don't give a shit about the next gaming revolution, I want a centralized, versatile media center with stuff I can play with, listen to, watch, and hack. If they just laid off the overly aggressive DRM, worked in tandem with the movie and music industry to implement a cheap, online distribution model, pumped out more games like Killzone and Assassin's Creed and brought down the price a little, I would be out the door right now and taking the weekend off.
These claims of Nintendo and Microsoft dominating the "casual userbase" are overstated, I think. I have no desire to play Resident Evil 4, neither does my grandmother. So are the arguments that game consoles shouldn't be used as media platforms. I'm sure there are countless people out there like me, and it's sad that Sony is skimping on so many little things. Everything is in place. The hardware is there, the market is there, the potential is there. Why can't Sony just go the extra mile?
Damn, I can't believe I'm seriously considering buying a PS3.
I have to disagree with you. Self-criticism is necessary to improvement, but Michael Moore's brand of "criticism" is of the lowest form: deceptive, sensationalist, arrogant, bordering on propaganda and masqueraded as an authoritative documentary. If America is going to sit down and discuss the health care crisis it needs to do so in a balanced, rational manner, considering all evidence and viewpoints and constructively working towards a solution, rather than resorting to the hyperpartisan, us versus them "anyone who doesn't agree with me is a pathological idiot" mentality that Michael Moore loves to spread and you seem to have taken hook, line, and sinker.
Agreed. Unfortunately, after discovering http://riaaradar.com/ my music purchases have taken a sharp dive; it's sad to see so many of my favorite artists in league with the RIAA. My usual habit these days is to check a label for RIAA membership; if it's a positive, I either skip out on the album or pirate the music, ramp up my upload rate for some super seeding, and burn a few discs to distrubte to friends (if I'm feeling spiteful). If negative, I scan iTunes/eMusic/Rhapsody/etc. for downloadable tracks and buy. Downloadpunk in particular has an attractive system set up in which you can donate a portion of your purchase to a charity of your choice and download your non-DRM music in a ZIP file. In worst case scenarios, i.e. stores don't carry what I'm looking for, unacceptable bit rate, etc., I have to resort to AllofMp3, but I don't like it, and usually send a letter to my usual stores.
Why not buy CDs, you ask? I dislike physical media. I don't get any visceral satisfaction from owning things, it's a pain in the ass to catalogue, and I prefer my iPod-centric multimedia setup. Call me a clueless consumer whore, but I don't mind the media shift. Digital audio is a much more flexible medium and I really enjoy being able to carry all of my music with me, even if I lose some quality. I have yet to hear vinyl yet though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
What the music industry doesn't realize is that I am a customer. I enjoy supporting music, I love concerts, I play an instrument myself. I write to artists, I buy merchandise, I share music with my friends.
But when the industry starts suing innocent people, manipulating the legal system to their own ends, utilizing scare tactics, masquerading as a disciplinary force to college students, funding anti-competitive legislation, building a monopoly by hedging out internet radio, wasting billions of dollars on useless DRM schemes (thereby alienating the customer and driving up CD prices in the process, killing the music even moreso), implying that copyright infringement is tantamount to thievery and even murder, even connecting BitTorrent with terrorism, they have made a new enemy. I will never purchase an RIAA label album again in any medium. Not even if the RIAA relents, reforms, or even dissolves.
If every music fan came to this conclusion, the RIAA might finally realize that the cost of their actions far exceeds any monetary profits they might make from monopolizing the music industry in such a hostile, arrogant fashion.
But I guess that's the thing: the RIAA doesn't give a shit about its customers. I can rant and rave and boycott the RIAA all I want, but what do they care? It's more profitable to sue me.
To be fair, we're very good at global warming. Might as well apply our natural talents to a more productive area, right?
Obligatory PBF: http://pbfcomics.com/archive/PBF081AD-The_Dreamcat cher_3000.jpg
The only thing frightening here is that this debate might encourage YouTube users to get politically involved. I mean really, seriously politically involved.
Picture this scenario: The fate of the US presidential election, and perhaps the free world, rests in the hands of the YouTube community.
How has the entire Sony marketing department not been fired by now? Is the marketing chair sleeping with Stringer or something?
Linux nerds could get their kernel running on a toaster. If there is an electron flow involved, it will run Linux.