The way you propose to set it up, it wuold become trivial to pay people for votes. You could actualy get a receipt proving that your money was well spent.
All you'd get would be a piece of paper with a serial number. Hardly a 'receipt'. If you wanted more you could ask for copies of receipts of 20 random other people too, so you could take home a stack of 'receipts'. Of course, you'd want to somehow mark yours so you could identify which it was later.
I can see the project simmilar to Amazon's mechanical turk on some offshore server - input your serial number now, and if after the votes are published it turnes out to be candidate X, you get some cash...
So I find the guy buying votes for the candidate I want, and enter my serial number to make some cash? Real travesty there. And then I follow up by going to each of the other sites, and start entering serial numbers at random, with decent odds of making even more money. Yeah, its the end of the world.
Besides, if this is suposed to be truely anonymous, what is to stop someone from claiming that he had a different serial number and so his vote was miscounted? I can see a great new area for demagoguery right there.
That's the entire point. How do we determine if your vote was miscounted now or counted at all for that matter? We can't. Period.
With my method, they dig up the ballot with that serial number and look at it. It is what it is. And that's the end of it. If there are significant or credible discrepencies between 'what people claim', and whats actualy in the box, then you review security to see if/how the 'real ballots were redirected' while the box was stuffed with fakes.
Something we could never detect now. Right now we can't detect that AT ALL. Unless the total for your candidate is 0.
And it goes without saying that you can't challenge a ballot without self identifying and losing your anonymity, but you can -confirm- a vote was recorded and counted this way. And that's a damned sight better than what we have now.
ahh but if anybody is able to see what any serial number voted.. what is to keep your boss asking you the day after what your serial # was? and then seeing if you voted his way?
How about bring in someone elses serial number? Hell, make it so that the elections people will, upon request, print you out someone elses serial number, based on the candidate you want it to reflect. So if you want an 'obama serial number', even though you voted for Paul, just ask, and you'll be given, at random, a copy of someone elses serial number to hand to your boss.
You'll be able to do this anytime, until the polls close.
The only time it won't work is if nobody voted for the candidate the boss wanted. And that's ok, because
a) its not terribly likely, as the 'boss' is probably rooting for a major candidate b) if the candidates total was 0, the boss is going to know you didn't vote for him, even without seeing your serial number.
This is why I've long held that the only way to ensure all votes are accurately counted, is to end the secret ballot. Don't make it available on the internet, but make it so groups, with stringent limitations, can audit the list, and people can check their own vote.
All you need for that is to issue a serial number with a voting stub. Let the voter check that a given serial number exists in the tally, and what the vote was recorded as.
It would be trivial to publish the list of serial numbers, and their votes. Voters could see that their vote was recorded correctly and included in the tally. And the tallies could be independantly verified.
The only thing you couldn't do is track back who voted for who, which is a good thing I think.
Re:Why doesn't the headline say "Carbon Offsets"?
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FTC Offput by Offsets
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offput (which Firefox tells me is not a real word, confirmed by Google...
Its clearly based on the much more common word "off-putting", which suggests it should be hyphenated as "off-put". But "off-put" doesn't appear in any dictionaries (that I checked) either which I found odd given that off-putting appears in *all* of the ones I checked, and its seems reasonable that by the rules of english suffix use that it would be reasonable to say:
One would be off-put by that which is off-putting.
Then again that's english... where we can "put you on" or "put you off" (deceive you for amusement, or delay meeting with you, respectively). You can't be on-putting, but you can be off-putting. And though if you are annoying we will be annoyed if we find you off-putting we apparently will not be off-put (off-putted? No, the past tense of 'put' is 'put', Had we 'putted' we would have hit a golf ball.)
Really its a wonder we can communicate at all. Do not correct this post for grammar or spelling. It hurts my brain just to write it once... I'm not going to proof it.
Do we really want to put people on new drugs like this? What if in 40 years all these people come down with some kind of cancer?
Do the math.
I think a 75 year old diagnosed with alzheimer's wouldn't blink at taking a chance on that. Coming down with cancer at 115 is not going to impact him much. He'll probably have died 15-25 years prior.
And I think even a 35 year old diagnosed with alzheimer's would probably take that chance. Choosing cancer in your 70s vs severe dementia by 40... its not a call I'd find hard to make. I'll take the 'cure' thanks. And maybe 40 years from now they'll be able to control the cancer too.
If no regulations exist, then banking in Second Life can't be trusted at all.
This really should have been a given. IRL in an anarchy without regulations, you can still find the corrupt bankers, tie them to a tree and let them starve while crows peck out their eyes... and send a message to other potential corrupt bankers. In SL there was absolutely nothing you could do. Period. Giving them money in trust was idiotic.
And Eve isn't any better. Nor are the 'lotteries' and 'gambling games' people try to run in mmorpogs from EQ to Wow. Even reputation isn't relevant when someone is leaving the game anyway and now just wants to fuck with the other players.
It seems like it would be in a vendor's best interests to operate in a system where a set of rules dictate portions of its behavior. Then trust is less of an issue and competition increases as new players join the market.
Travelling merchants in medieval time hired security and travelled in caravan's to distribute the cost of said security. And they deposited their profits at multiple respected banks in multiple countries to protect themselves from the fact that banks were also unreliable, and even the countries they were in weren't entirely stable.
Even today its possible to have your assets siezed if they are stored in a country that under goes regime change, or to lose your deposits if the bank goes under. Its just not terribly likely with major banks in stable first world countries. But Hitler did it in Germany to the Jews, for example. And even today first world countries do this to 'suspected criminals' in certain cases... and the scope of when they'll do it has been rapidly expanding lately in the US.
Its always in one's best interest to have security so that trust is less of an issue, whether your hiring your own caravan gaurds yourself or funding goverment to provide regulation and police services through taxes.
The people getting ripped off in SL and other games, and even often in RL, simply don't and usually can't perform competent risk analysis.
If someone came up to you on the street, wearing a mask, told you their name was 'drpeeper', and asked you to put a chunk of your savings in his bank (by which he means put money in the cardboard box he made himself with the word atm printed on it)... would you? What if he had a few shills also wearing masks standing around telling you how great he was, and how they'd made $50 dollars in interest in the last couple weeks alone on a $1000 'investment'?
If you tried it for fun, using money you could afford to lose, and found that it worked, would you then be convinced and drop a lot more money into it?
Or would you realize that even though it worked once, you STILL have no gaurantee, and the more money you put in the box the more likely drpeeper is going to disappear with it, and suspect that indeed, his entire plan all along is to disappear with it once the box is full enough. Because if he's not there tomorrow, there is sweet fuck all you can do about it.
If so, go home and sign control over your money to somebody competent.
His other argument is that CC-licensed photos might have images of people who haven't given permission for certain usages of their image. In copyright-speak that's 'provided a model release'.
How is that not a risk with non-CC licensed photos? I mean, that seems to be a general risk. Period. At best, CC images, should be available in packages with copies of the model releases included. This is how the major stockphotog sites handle it. You must upload an image including the releases.
But even then, you've got the switcheroo problem I've just outlined.
The 'old switcheroo' problem is trivial to work around. Users need to simply protect their investment by documenting how and where they got the photo, preferably with screenshots, showing the photo and its CC license. They should do this with *all* photos they buy or otherwise acquire.
If anything, CC photo distributors should simply make the process more 'transaction like' so that images downloaded, while still 'free', are bundled in packages with model release forms, with confirmation emails indicating that the image had been downloaded from the-site, on such and such a date, under such and such a license.
I.e. its not a flaw of the license, its a flaw of the distribution system.
If 'bigstockphoto' let you buy download credits, and then when you clicked on a link and downloaded an image they simply removed a credit, we'd have the same problem. No evidence that you purchased and licensed a particular photo... at best evidence you paid for a photo. But no, they send you confirmation emails identifying the file, with custom download links etc etc. So if you get sued later on, provided you kept everything you can document that you obtained the file from them, legally.
And even then you should do more diligence; what if bigstockphoto.com goes under and vanishes from the internet. Suddenly users everywhere get sued... all they have is some confirmation emails that say they bought "image0005234.jpg". But possibly no copy of the license, and no proof that image005234.jpg is the image they are being sued over...
I started programming in Pascal, and then moved to C/C++. Structured programming, language syntax, variable typing, functions, parameters, recursion, etc I could ALL learn in Pascal.
When I came through Java was still pretty new, but I did take a java course, and found it reminded me a more of Pascal than C/C++; I'd say its a good starter language.
Also you can easily write command line apps in java, so i don't know why they blamed gui dependancy on java.
And as for 'systems programming' well DUH. Your first language is where you learn the basics of programming, before you start taking systems programming you should also have a lower level course ideally in something like assembly language (even if its just on emulated hardware) or C.
You seem to be conflating 'legally convicted of' with 'what really happened'.
You illustrated it yourself when you mentioned shoplifting. If you don't get charged, that doesn't change the reality that you still did it.
If you exceeded the speed limit but didn't get caught, you were still speeding. Even if you were driving someone who wasn't breathing to the hospital... a scenario where your speeding would (provided its safe) likely be found justified and the charges dropped.
Fair use works like -that-. Its "infringment but with justification". You aren't guilty of infringment, just as you aren't guilty of speeding until you lose your trial. But there is no question whether you were speeding or whether you infringed... the question was whether it was justified, and whether you should be legally liable for what you did. There is never a question of what you did.
Essentially we aren't legally guilty of infringment even though we infringed provided our fair use defense holds up in court. Just as I've sped, been charged with speeding, and had the charges dropped at trial because it was justified. I *was* speeding, but wasn't found legally guilty of speeding.
To be honest, I am surprised that Vista has sold as much as it has, considering that the upgrade from Windows 9x to XP was a much bigger step than from XP to Vista.
9x to XP was a bigger step, but XP was a 0.1 upgrade from w2k, which meant that even when XP was "new" it was already a few years old in a lot of key respects. Most drivers for 2k worked with XP and were already mature, for example. The networking stack was essentially 2k, and it fit into w2k networks exactly the same...pro even came with the CALs 2k pro did... etc, etc... so there was a lot less resistance.
It was essentially already a "mature established product" even when it was new.
It's only "infringing" if it breaks copyright. Copyright is a limited set of rights granted by law to the creator. preventing people from making "fair use" copies is not one of those rights.. so it's not infringing on anything.
Fair use isn't a right. Its a defense. You make a copy, you get charged with infringement, you defend your copy as fair use. You hope you prevail.
Copyright law itself doesn't define fair use as a right, it recognizes that some infringement for fair use is allowed, and gives a set of guidelines to assist with recognizing fair use. But essentially each non-authorized copy is an infringement waiting for a lawsuit... and when the lawsuit comes, fair use is waiting as a defense... but until something has actually been ruled fair use and a precedent is set, its legal standing is essentially unknown... we know a lawsuit can be brought, and we know fair use is a credible defense strategy... but we don't actually KNOW how it will turn out.
Ripping a CD to a PC has never been ruled on. So there is no precedent confirming that fair use is recognized. You and I can think its "clearly obvious" that a fair use defense would prevail (and I think it would)... but until it actually does...we don't actually KNOW.
Uh. Except it's NOT copyright infringement, it falls under fair use for consumers. we're allowed to make copies of shit for our own personal use.
If it falls under fair use, then it IS copyright infringment by definition.
An original CD is not an infringing copy. It is an authorized copy. We don't have to defend having it by invoking fair use specifically because its an authorized non-infringing copy.
If we make a copy of that Cd without express permission of the rights holder then its an unauthorized copy, and infringing copyright. However, if that copy is for our own personal use, making a copy is still legal and defensible with fair use.
Its still infringing and unauthorized... but its also completely legal. Fair use doesn't make it a non-infringinging copy or somehow provide authorization for the copy... it just makes it legal.
And if the rights holder decides to sue you for making that non-authorized infringing copy, they will lose, because a fair use defense will (or at least should) prevail.
Its irrational to believe in something there is no proof of.
There's no proof the universe exists outside your mind. There's no proof you have free will. Between those two alone everything else you might choose to beleive (or think you chose to beleive) is pretty moot.
Why else would I have joined the site and filled out the profile forms if I didn't want to provide this information for my friends to use?
Most people I associate with only have a facebook account because it was the only way to see their nieces wedding photos, or to rsvp to a family gathering, or some nonsense like that. They didn't WANT their own profile, they didn't WANT to provide any information for their friends to use, and they most certainly had no interest whatsoever providing any information for facebook itself to harvest from them.
They ONLY wanted access to the information their friends wanted them to have but are so dim that they don't think twice (hell don't think even once) about forcing their friends and family to sign up to facebook to see it. And why should they think twice? Its "free" right?
Hah.
My definition of utopia is simply a society of citizens who think critically about their actions. And like all utopia's its a pipe dream.
GP isn't talking about a Linux dev environment, he's talking about a Perl dev environment. Since Perl is cross-platform, the dev environment should be as well.
What exactly do you think a 'development environment' is?
For anything remotely complicated, the operating system idiosyncracies tend to be a significant part... the shell, the environment variables, configuration defaults, file permissions/ACLs, file locations, links, package manager, patches applied, etc, etc.
You can setup a perl dev env in OSX trivially, just as you can on linux. But they are going to be slightly different environments unless you jump through a lot more hoops to make them identical, or jump through hoops to make one's project robust enough to operate in either.
For me, however, I simply wasn't willing to invest the absurd amount of energy and time to get my development environment going on it that would have taken me an hour from start to finish on any given linux system.
I can understand why you wanted this, but I don't really grok why you thought it would be easy. Unix and Linux are similiar, but they are not the same. OSX is Unix. Never forget that.
Its absurd to expect exactly replicating a Linux dev environment on Unix would be easy. Getting a LAMP stack going in OSX or Solaris, or even windows is pretty trivial. Getting your exact linux lamp stack going in OSX, or Solaris, or Windows is not.
You sort of missed the point of the discussion. Floola is a tool that supplants itunes, but it does things the ipod way using the (reverse engineered / cracked ) ipod database format.
The premise of this argument is that we can achieve ipod's feature set without going the ipod route. And I'm arguing we can't. We can certainly improve on the ipod by opening the database format, and removing silliness like mangling the filenames, but we can't get ipods features on a 'generic mass storage device' unless we implement an ipod like database to track metadata that the device will use and update, and use a utility to sync that meta data back and forth.
At which point, its not a 'generic mass storage device' system anymore, its a cone of the ipod system.
Your point (1) is simply incorrect - there's no reason whatsoever that the player couldn't use a sideband database, recognizing songs by some provided metadata and storing with those as the keys in a separate file. Nobody has done this yet, but there's no reason the set of features you want requires an iPod-like database.
Hate to break it to you but a sideband database *is* an ipod like database, all you did was move it to the side.
The -only- effecitve difference is that your device apparently will inefficiently scan, say, 160GB worth of hard drive to find out what songs are on it each time you use it, and then build or updates the sideband database on the fly, instead of just referring to the database as the authoritative source of information. I'm not sure how that's progress.
I think a MUCH better approach would be to do it the ipod way making the database inband, but build into the the device a feature to re-building the database by scanning itself -on demand-. The ipod itself could be improved thusly.
Granted that moves the database "inband" from "sideband", but the performance advantages are pretty clear. And then all you need to do is update the database when you actually move songs or sync metadata.
It could all be done perfectly adequately on a classic mass storage system.
There's no reason at all that Rhythmbox couldn't do something like that. All it takes is for the device makers to make their database format open. It's a bit disingenuous to somehow suggest this is a fault of Rhythmbox, whereas really its an issue with proprietry lock-in.
1) The point is that generic-sync-to-mass-storage is unable to meet the feature set of the ipod database system. Whether the format is open or proprietary is irrelevant. The fact remains that a database system like what the ipod's got (or an equivalenet to it) is needed to get those features.
2) Its true that there is nothing stopping the OpenSource community from creating an OpenStandard, implementing it in Rhythmbox, and convincing Sansa et al to implement device support for the standard.
3) IF the OSS community did such a thing, created an open standard, got device support, and so on. The generic-sync-to-mass-storage group would STILL be pissed because they'd STILL need a 'dedicated music program' like rhythmbox that would sync the meta-data back and forth to get the full feature set. generic mass storage devices are not sufficient to meet these features.
So if I set up rythymbox, and have it sync to a 'mass storage player' like, say, a Sansa. I can set up a smart playlist that will rotate songs based on the songs 'star rating', 'play count', 'last played date', and 'skip count'?
-and- (and *this* is the important part)
When I go off and listen to my "mass storage player" for a few days, and plug it back into my rythymbox, all that play data will sync back into rythymbox, so that it can update the playlists based on:
a) what, when, and how often I listened or skipped a track *ON THE DEVICE* b) any ratings adjustments I made to the song *ON THE DEVICE*
The last time I tried a non-ipod, the above features, which I now view as critical, were not even close to available. And according to the research I -did- do, these features -require- an itunes like 'database' because a lot of that meta information I base my smart playlists on is not stored in the actual songs.
Now, I'm sure a 'rythymbox' type program could create its own meta-data databse, while still letting me move songs around 'manually'... but unless the player itself updated that database of meta-information as I used it, there wouldn't actually be much point.
I'd welcome finding out I was wrong... but as far as I know, only the ipod can currently do this.
Even using the mass storage device method, it is still possible to create playlists that overlap the songs included on the device without needing mulitple copies of the song.
The difference is that with an ipod its trivial, transparent, and effortless.
The advantage of using the device as a mass storage device is that I can use my MP3 player, which I pretty much have on me at all times, to store anything I want. I can also connect my MP3 player to any computer with a USB connection to transfer data and songs to and fro. This comes in handy at work where I cannot install something like iTunes on my computer.
An ipod does actually let you mount as a MSD. Its a trivial feature to enable, right from within itunes, and once enabled it mounts as an MSD from anywhere. So when you need to transfer files back and forth to work or something, your ipod can do the job ably. I enabled MSD the first day I got it (one checkbox to set in itunes) and it was good to go.
However, because files transferred this way aren't in the "ipod database" on the device, they aren't playable on the ipod. This is a deal breaker for someone who wants to manage their own playlists and music... but an irrelevant limitation for someone who just wants to use the ipod to move files around.
If your mp3 player doesn't load as a "mass storage device" and let you just swap the materials back and forth, then
YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG PLAYER.
Err... I bought an ipod precisely for the extra features, like smart playlist syncing, collecting play stats, being able to rate songs on the ipod itself, create multiple playlists with overlapping songs but only have one copy of the song on the disk, etc, etc.
All that pretty much requires the ipod style 'database'. I don't -want- to swap the materials back and forth manually. TYVM.
I -do- agree it sucks that music is sort of hidden on the ipod, and can't be played if its not in the ipod's database, and would welcome the ability to rebuild the ipod database on the fly as a feature addition. And there are other features I'd add too.
But between choosing manual song and folder management vs ipods way... I choose the ipod. No question.
I have hated downloading music within iTunes only to be told that I cannot make a mix mp3 CD (for my truck, which reads mp3 discs) with some of the music I just paid for the right to use.
There has always been a workaround for itunes, involving buring the track as a regular Cd and then ripping it back as an mp3. But yeah, I agree workarounds should NEVER be necessary to do something like this.
Check out itunes plus -- itunes tracks, no DRM,.99 cents a song. Selection is considerably more limited though.
I feel the same way about movies, and to take it a step further, I feel most of my drive space is something expendable. If I lose an mp3 from a rip, I simply rip again. If I lose a download, I am SOL.
Why not download the mp3, burn a few hundred to a CD, and then put in on a shelf. At that point its as secure as any bought CD. Of course your CD may deteriorate, but that happens with bought CD's too.
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The way you propose to set it up, it wuold become trivial to pay people for votes. You could actualy get a receipt proving that your money was well spent.
All you'd get would be a piece of paper with a serial number. Hardly a 'receipt'. If you wanted more you could ask for copies of receipts of 20 random other people too, so you could take home a stack of 'receipts'. Of course, you'd want to somehow mark yours so you could identify which it was later.
I can see the project simmilar to Amazon's mechanical turk on some offshore server - input your serial number now, and if after the votes are published it turnes out to be candidate X, you get some cash...
So I find the guy buying votes for the candidate I want, and enter my serial number to make some cash? Real travesty there. And then I follow up by going to each of the other sites, and start entering serial numbers at random, with decent odds of making even more money. Yeah, its the end of the world.
Besides, if this is suposed to be truely anonymous, what is to stop someone from claiming that he had a different serial number and so his vote was miscounted? I can see a great new area for demagoguery right there.
That's the entire point. How do we determine if your vote was miscounted now or counted at all for that matter? We can't. Period.
With my method, they dig up the ballot with that serial number and look at it. It is what it is. And that's the end of it. If there are significant or credible discrepencies between 'what people claim', and whats actualy in the box, then you review security to see if/how the 'real ballots were redirected' while the box was stuffed with fakes.
Something we could never detect now. Right now we can't detect that AT ALL. Unless the total for your candidate is 0.
And it goes without saying that you can't challenge a ballot without self identifying and losing your anonymity, but you can -confirm- a vote was recorded and counted this way. And that's a damned sight better than what we have now.
ahh but if anybody is able to see what any serial number voted.. what is to keep your boss asking you the day after what your serial # was? and then seeing if you voted his way?
How about bring in someone elses serial number? Hell, make it so that the elections people will, upon request, print you out someone elses serial number, based on the candidate you want it to reflect. So if you want an 'obama serial number', even though you voted for Paul, just ask, and you'll be given, at random, a copy of someone elses serial number to hand to your boss.
You'll be able to do this anytime, until the polls close.
The only time it won't work is if nobody voted for the candidate the boss wanted. And that's ok, because
a) its not terribly likely, as the 'boss' is probably rooting for a major candidate
b) if the candidates total was 0, the boss is going to know you didn't vote for him, even without seeing your serial number.
This is why I've long held that the only way to ensure all votes are accurately counted, is to end the secret ballot. Don't make it available on the internet, but make it so groups, with stringent limitations, can audit the list, and people can check their own vote.
All you need for that is to issue a serial number with a voting stub. Let the voter check that a given serial number exists in the tally, and what the vote was recorded as.
It would be trivial to publish the list of serial numbers, and their votes. Voters could see that their vote was recorded correctly and included in the tally. And the tallies could be independantly verified.
The only thing you couldn't do is track back who voted for who, which is a good thing I think.
offput (which Firefox tells me is not a real word, confirmed by Google...
Its clearly based on the much more common word "off-putting", which suggests it should be hyphenated as "off-put". But "off-put" doesn't appear in any dictionaries (that I checked) either which I found odd given that off-putting appears in *all* of the ones I checked, and its seems reasonable that by the rules of english suffix use that it would be reasonable to say:
One would be off-put by that which is off-putting.
Then again that's english... where we can "put you on" or "put you off" (deceive you for amusement, or delay meeting with you, respectively). You can't be on-putting, but you can be off-putting. And though if you are annoying we will be annoyed if we find you off-putting we apparently will not be off-put (off-putted? No, the past tense of 'put' is 'put', Had we 'putted' we would have hit a golf ball.)
Really its a wonder we can communicate at all. Do not correct this post for grammar or spelling. It hurts my brain just to write it once... I'm not going to proof it.
Do we really want to put people on new drugs like this? What if in 40 years all these people come down with some kind of cancer?
Do the math.
I think a 75 year old diagnosed with alzheimer's wouldn't blink at taking a chance on that. Coming down with cancer at 115 is not going to impact him much. He'll probably have died 15-25 years prior.
And I think even a 35 year old diagnosed with alzheimer's would probably take that chance. Choosing cancer in your 70s vs severe dementia by 40... its not a call I'd find hard to make. I'll take the 'cure' thanks. And maybe 40 years from now they'll be able to control the cancer too.
If no regulations exist, then banking in Second Life can't be trusted at all.
This really should have been a given. IRL in an anarchy without regulations, you can still find the corrupt bankers, tie them to a tree and let them starve while crows peck out their eyes... and send a message to other potential corrupt bankers. In SL there was absolutely nothing you could do. Period. Giving them money in trust was idiotic.
And Eve isn't any better. Nor are the 'lotteries' and 'gambling games' people try to run in mmorpogs from EQ to Wow. Even reputation isn't relevant when someone is leaving the game anyway and now just wants to fuck with the other players.
It seems like it would be in a vendor's best interests to operate in a system where a set of rules dictate portions of its behavior. Then trust is less of an issue and competition increases as new players join the market.
Travelling merchants in medieval time hired security and travelled in caravan's to distribute the cost of said security. And they deposited their profits at multiple respected banks in multiple countries to protect themselves from the fact that banks were also unreliable, and even the countries they were in weren't entirely stable.
Even today its possible to have your assets siezed if they are stored in a country that under goes regime change, or to lose your deposits if the bank goes under. Its just not terribly likely with major banks in stable first world countries. But Hitler did it in Germany to the Jews, for example. And even today first world countries do this to 'suspected criminals' in certain cases... and the scope of when they'll do it has been rapidly expanding lately in the US.
Its always in one's best interest to have security so that trust is less of an issue, whether your hiring your own caravan gaurds yourself or funding goverment to provide regulation and police services through taxes.
The people getting ripped off in SL and other games, and even often in RL, simply don't and usually can't perform competent risk analysis.
If someone came up to you on the street, wearing a mask, told you their name was 'drpeeper', and asked you to put a chunk of your savings in his bank (by which he means put money in the cardboard box he made himself with the word atm printed on it)... would you? What if he had a few shills also wearing masks standing around telling you how great he was, and how they'd made $50 dollars in interest in the last couple weeks alone on a $1000 'investment'?
If you tried it for fun, using money you could afford to lose, and found that it worked, would you then be convinced and drop a lot more money into it?
Or would you realize that even though it worked once, you STILL have no gaurantee, and the more money you put in the box the more likely drpeeper is going to disappear with it, and suspect that indeed, his entire plan all along is to disappear with it once the box is full enough. Because if he's not there tomorrow, there is sweet fuck all you can do about it.
If so, go home and sign control over your money to somebody competent.
His other argument is that CC-licensed photos might have images of people who haven't given permission for certain usages of their image. In copyright-speak that's 'provided a model release'.
How is that not a risk with non-CC licensed photos? I mean, that seems to be a general risk. Period.
At best, CC images, should be available in packages with copies of the model releases included. This is how the major stockphotog sites handle it. You must upload an image including the releases.
But even then, you've got the switcheroo problem I've just outlined.
The 'old switcheroo' problem is trivial to work around. Users need to simply protect their investment by documenting how and where they got the photo, preferably with screenshots, showing the photo and its CC license. They should do this with *all* photos they buy or otherwise acquire.
If anything, CC photo distributors should simply make the process more 'transaction like' so that images downloaded, while still 'free', are bundled in packages with model release forms, with confirmation emails indicating that the image had been downloaded from the-site, on such and such a date, under such and such a license.
I.e. its not a flaw of the license, its a flaw of the distribution system.
If 'bigstockphoto' let you buy download credits, and then when you clicked on a link and downloaded an image they simply removed a credit, we'd have the same problem. No evidence that you purchased and licensed a particular photo... at best evidence you paid for a photo. But no, they send you confirmation emails identifying the file, with custom download links etc etc. So if you get sued later on, provided you kept everything you can document that you obtained the file from them, legally.
And even then you should do more diligence; what if bigstockphoto.com goes under and vanishes from the internet. Suddenly users everywhere get sued... all they have is some confirmation emails that say they bought "image0005234.jpg". But possibly no copy of the license, and no proof that image005234.jpg is the image they are being sued over...
C is a lousy beginners language.
I started programming in Pascal, and then moved to C/C++. Structured programming, language syntax, variable typing, functions, parameters, recursion, etc I could ALL learn in Pascal.
When I came through Java was still pretty new, but I did take a java course, and found it reminded me a more of Pascal than C/C++; I'd say its a good starter language.
Also you can easily write command line apps in java, so i don't know why they blamed gui dependancy on java.
And as for 'systems programming' well DUH. Your first language is where you learn the basics of programming, before you start taking systems programming you should also have a lower level course ideally in something like assembly language (even if its just on emulated hardware) or C.
You seem to be conflating 'legally convicted of' with 'what really happened'.
You illustrated it yourself when you mentioned shoplifting. If you don't get charged, that doesn't change the reality that you still did it.
If you exceeded the speed limit but didn't get caught, you were still speeding. Even if you were driving someone who wasn't breathing to the hospital... a scenario where your speeding would (provided its safe) likely be found justified and the charges dropped.
Fair use works like -that-. Its "infringment but with justification". You aren't guilty of infringment, just as you aren't guilty of speeding until you lose your trial. But there is no question whether you were speeding or whether you infringed... the question was whether it was justified, and whether you should be legally liable for what you did. There is never a question of what you did.
Essentially we aren't legally guilty of infringment even though we infringed provided our fair use defense holds up in court. Just as I've sped, been charged with speeding, and had the charges dropped at trial because it was justified. I *was* speeding, but wasn't found legally guilty of speeding.
To be honest, I am surprised that Vista has sold as much as it has, considering that the upgrade from Windows 9x to XP was a much bigger step than from XP to Vista.
9x to XP was a bigger step, but XP was a 0.1 upgrade from w2k, which meant that even when XP was "new" it was already a few years old in a lot of key respects. Most drivers for 2k worked with XP and were already mature, for example. The networking stack was essentially 2k, and it fit into w2k networks exactly the same...pro even came with the CALs 2k pro did... etc, etc... so there was a lot less resistance.
It was essentially already a "mature established product" even when it was new.
Actually, iirc, diamonds undergo 'decompression' over time, loses its crystalline shape, and becomes 'ordinary' carbon. Think 'coal'.
Takes a while though. Longer than human civilization has been around. MUCH longer.
It's only "infringing" if it breaks copyright. Copyright is a limited set of rights granted by law to the creator. preventing people from making "fair use" copies is not one of those rights.. so it's not infringing on anything.
Fair use isn't a right. Its a defense. You make a copy, you get charged with infringement, you defend your copy as fair use. You hope you prevail.
Copyright law itself doesn't define fair use as a right, it recognizes that some infringement for fair use is allowed, and gives a set of guidelines to assist with recognizing fair use. But essentially each non-authorized copy is an infringement waiting for a lawsuit... and when the lawsuit comes, fair use is waiting as a defense... but until something has actually been ruled fair use and a precedent is set, its legal standing is essentially unknown... we know a lawsuit can be brought, and we know fair use is a credible defense strategy... but we don't actually KNOW how it will turn out.
Ripping a CD to a PC has never been ruled on. So there is no precedent confirming that fair use is recognized. You and I can think its "clearly obvious" that a fair use defense would prevail (and I think it would)... but until it actually does...we don't actually KNOW.
Uh. Except it's NOT copyright infringement, it falls under fair use for consumers. we're allowed to make copies of shit for our own personal use.
If it falls under fair use, then it IS copyright infringment by definition.
An original CD is not an infringing copy. It is an authorized copy. We don't have to defend having it by invoking fair use specifically because its an authorized non-infringing copy.
If we make a copy of that Cd without express permission of the rights holder then its an unauthorized copy, and infringing copyright. However, if that copy is for our own personal use, making a copy is still legal and defensible with fair use.
Its still infringing and unauthorized... but its also completely legal. Fair use doesn't make it a non-infringinging copy or somehow provide authorization for the copy... it just makes it legal.
And if the rights holder decides to sue you for making that non-authorized infringing copy, they will lose, because a fair use defense will (or at least should) prevail.
Its irrational to believe in something there is no proof of.
There's no proof the universe exists outside your mind. There's no proof you have free will. Between those two alone everything else you might choose to beleive (or think you chose to beleive) is pretty moot.
Why else would I have joined the site and filled out the profile forms if I didn't want to provide this information for my friends to use?
Most people I associate with only have a facebook account because it was the only way to see their nieces wedding photos, or to rsvp to a family gathering, or some nonsense like that. They didn't WANT their own profile, they didn't WANT to provide any information for their friends to use, and they most certainly had no interest whatsoever providing any information for facebook itself to harvest from them.
They ONLY wanted access to the information their friends wanted them to have but are so dim that they don't think twice (hell don't think even once) about forcing their friends and family to sign up to facebook to see it. And why should they think twice? Its "free" right?
Hah.
My definition of utopia is simply a society of citizens who think critically about their actions. And like all utopia's its a pipe dream.
GP isn't talking about a Linux dev environment, he's talking about a Perl dev environment. Since Perl is cross-platform, the dev environment should be as well.
What exactly do you think a 'development environment' is?
For anything remotely complicated, the operating system idiosyncracies tend to be a significant part... the shell, the environment variables, configuration defaults, file permissions/ACLs, file locations, links, package manager, patches applied, etc, etc.
You can setup a perl dev env in OSX trivially, just as you can on linux. But they are going to be slightly different environments unless you jump through a lot more hoops to make them identical, or jump through hoops to make one's project robust enough to operate in either.
For me, however, I simply wasn't willing to invest the absurd amount of energy and time to get my development environment going on it that would have taken me an hour from start to finish on any given linux system.
I can understand why you wanted this, but I don't really grok why you thought it would be easy. Unix and Linux are similiar, but they are not the same. OSX is Unix. Never forget that.
Its absurd to expect exactly replicating a Linux dev environment on Unix would be easy. Getting a LAMP stack going in OSX or Solaris, or even windows is pretty trivial. Getting your exact linux lamp stack going in OSX, or Solaris, or Windows is not.
You sort of missed the point of the discussion. Floola is a tool that supplants itunes, but it does things the ipod way using the (reverse engineered / cracked ) ipod database format.
The premise of this argument is that we can achieve ipod's feature set without going the ipod route. And I'm arguing we can't. We can certainly improve on the ipod by opening the database format, and removing silliness like mangling the filenames, but we can't get ipods features on a 'generic mass storage device' unless we implement an ipod like database to track metadata that the device will use and update, and use a utility to sync that meta data back and forth.
At which point, its not a 'generic mass storage device' system anymore, its a cone of the ipod system.
Your point (1) is simply incorrect - there's no reason whatsoever that the player couldn't use a sideband database, recognizing songs by some provided metadata and storing with those as the keys in a separate file. Nobody has done this yet, but there's no reason the set of features you want requires an iPod-like database.
Hate to break it to you but a sideband database *is* an ipod like database, all you did was move it to the side.
The -only- effecitve difference is that your device apparently will inefficiently scan, say, 160GB worth of hard drive to find out what songs are on it each time you use it, and then build or updates the sideband database on the fly, instead of just referring to the database as the authoritative source of information. I'm not sure how that's progress.
I think a MUCH better approach would be to do it the ipod way making the database inband, but build into the the device a feature to re-building the database by scanning itself -on demand-. The ipod itself could be improved thusly.
Granted that moves the database "inband" from "sideband", but the performance advantages are pretty clear. And then all you need to do is update the database when you actually move songs or sync metadata.
It could all be done perfectly adequately on a classic mass storage system.
There's no reason at all that Rhythmbox couldn't do something like that. All it takes is for the device makers to make their database format open. It's a bit disingenuous to somehow suggest this is a fault of Rhythmbox, whereas really its an issue with proprietry lock-in.
1) The point is that generic-sync-to-mass-storage is unable to meet the feature set of the ipod database system. Whether the format is open or proprietary is irrelevant. The fact remains that a database system like what the ipod's got (or an equivalenet to it) is needed to get those features.
2) Its true that there is nothing stopping the OpenSource community from creating an OpenStandard, implementing it in Rhythmbox, and convincing Sansa et al to implement device support for the standard.
3) IF the OSS community did such a thing, created an open standard, got device support, and so on. The generic-sync-to-mass-storage group would STILL be pissed because they'd STILL need a 'dedicated music program' like rhythmbox that would sync the meta-data back and forth to get the full feature set. generic mass storage devices are not sufficient to meet these features.
Alright, I'll bite...
So if I set up rythymbox, and have it sync to a 'mass storage player' like, say, a Sansa. I can set up a smart playlist that will rotate songs based on the songs 'star rating', 'play count', 'last played date', and 'skip count'?
-and- (and *this* is the important part)
When I go off and listen to my "mass storage player" for a few days, and plug it back into my rythymbox, all that play data will sync back into rythymbox, so that it can update the playlists based on:
a) what, when, and how often I listened or skipped a track *ON THE DEVICE*
b) any ratings adjustments I made to the song *ON THE DEVICE*
The last time I tried a non-ipod, the above features, which I now view as critical, were not even close to available. And according to the research I -did- do, these features -require- an itunes like 'database' because a lot of that meta information I base my smart playlists on is not stored in the actual songs.
Now, I'm sure a 'rythymbox' type program could create its own meta-data databse, while still letting me move songs around 'manually'... but unless the player itself updated that database of meta-information as I used it, there wouldn't actually be much point.
I'd welcome finding out I was wrong... but as far as I know, only the ipod can currently do this.
Even using the mass storage device method, it is still possible to create playlists that overlap the songs included on the device without needing mulitple copies of the song.
The difference is that with an ipod its trivial, transparent, and effortless.
The advantage of using the device as a mass storage device is that I can use my MP3 player, which I pretty much have on me at all times, to store anything I want. I can also connect my MP3 player to any computer with a USB connection to transfer data and songs to and fro. This comes in handy at work where I cannot install something like iTunes on my computer.
An ipod does actually let you mount as a MSD. Its a trivial feature to enable, right from within itunes, and once enabled it mounts as an MSD from anywhere. So when you need to transfer files back and forth to work or something, your ipod can do the job ably. I enabled MSD the first day I got it (one checkbox to set in itunes) and it was good to go.
However, because files transferred this way aren't in the "ipod database" on the device, they aren't playable on the ipod. This is a deal breaker for someone who wants to manage their own playlists and music... but an irrelevant limitation for someone who just wants to use the ipod to move files around.
If your mp3 player doesn't load as a "mass storage device" and let you just swap the materials back and forth, then
YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG PLAYER.
Err... I bought an ipod precisely for the extra features, like smart playlist syncing, collecting play stats, being able to rate songs on the ipod itself, create multiple playlists with overlapping songs but only have one copy of the song on the disk, etc, etc.
All that pretty much requires the ipod style 'database'. I don't -want- to swap the materials back and forth manually. TYVM.
I -do- agree it sucks that music is sort of hidden on the ipod, and can't be played if its not in the ipod's database, and would welcome the ability to rebuild the ipod database on the fly as a feature addition. And there are other features I'd add too.
But between choosing manual song and folder management vs ipods way... I choose the ipod. No question.
...and find solace in Europe, where reasonable government and personal liberty reign supreme! ...wait, what?
There is a reason the UK is on an island. They don't really want to be a part of Europe, and Europe reciprocates the sentiment.
I have hated downloading music within iTunes only to be told that I cannot make a mix mp3 CD (for my truck, which reads mp3 discs) with some of the music I just paid for the right to use.
.99 cents a song. Selection is considerably more limited though.
There has always been a workaround for itunes, involving buring the track as a regular Cd and then ripping it back as an mp3. But yeah, I agree workarounds should NEVER be necessary to do something like this.
Check out itunes plus -- itunes tracks, no DRM,
I feel the same way about movies, and to take it a step further, I feel most of my drive space is something expendable. If I lose an mp3 from a rip, I simply rip again. If I lose a download, I am SOL.
Why not download the mp3, burn a few hundred to a CD, and then put in on a shelf. At that point its as secure as any bought CD.
Of course your CD may deteriorate, but that happens with bought CD's too.