File sharing is a red herring. The evidence does not suggest that DRM actually prevents file sharing to any significant degree. DRM is a tool that:
takes away control over technology that is becoming increasingly important in our everyday lives, and gives that control to a few third parties;
raises barriers-to-entry into the market for that technology, thus reducing that market to a monopoly or an oligopoly; and
allows a few technology companies to control the distribution channels for DRM-"protected" content.
How long has it taken for the record companies to realize that iTunes DRM basically amounts to handing over their business to Apple? What they now need to realize is that DRM was and always has been a hoax; DRM simply can't do what's been promised, which is to control the copying of digital information. (Trying to make bits uncopyable has been compared to trying to make water not wet.)
I strongly oppose DRM, and I don't give a shit about file sharing. I just want my equipment to serve me and me alone, and I want access to a competitive market for that equipment.
Did you miss the part that said "Despite nationwide public support for his initial death sentence"? This isn't the Afghan government opressing it's citizens, it's the citizens asking the government to kill this man.
We know totalitarianism doesn't work. Why are we propping up a government that supports it?
Ever hear of "dogfooding", or "eating your own dog food"?
Yes, and it's something that I would say Microsoft does too much. MS, if anyone, seems totally clueless about how much their user experience SUCKS compared to pretty much every other system. Even Mac OS X beats them out, and it's not exactly the epitome of robustness or ease-of-use. (Try working outside their "drag and drop an application to install/remove it" metaphor. They have an "installer" that can't uninstall anything. I nearly hosed my girlfriend's 10.3.9 Mac just trying to install the compiler.)
If you're spending that much time concerned with how effective your program languages are at prohibiting your programmers from producing unreadable or unmaintainable code, I'd say you should look to hire some better programmers.
How do you expect anyone to actually do that? Have you ever tried to find really good programmers? There are a few around, but they don't exactly grow on trees. Remember: half of all developers are below the median skill level.
And why bother? Most projects don't need your rock star programmers (if you have any) to do the bulk of the work.
Furthermore, I haven't seen too many brilliant programmers complain seriously about Python (well, they do, but it's about how hasattr() swallows KeyboardInterrupt and about the str/unicode duality). It seems like one way to weed out idiot programmers is to see if their "WTFOMGwhitespace!!!" stage lasts too long, or if they still like PHP after using it for a few months.
Of course, if public policy changes, then you're screwed. If the clause is unenforceable, then the other party should have no problem removing it, right?
Huh? Written contracts are about contingency planning. When you come up with them, you _assume_ the other might try to screw you. If you sign a contract that relies on the other party being nice, then you don't understand the purpose of writing down a contract.
Don't sign the noncompete just as a matter of course. It sounds like working this project is important to you, so make sure you ask for what it's worth. Consider the possibility that you'll get hired, sign the non-compete, then 30 days later they'll cancel the project (while your non-compete remains in effect). That's a risk that you're taking, and they should compensate you just for taking that risk.
Also, get a lawyer's advice. Regardless of the non-compete, if you work there, then quit and continue working on the same project in the open-source field, they might accuse you of copyright infringement. I'm not sure what you can do to deal with that---that's what lawyers are there for.
But yeah, consider the risks they're asking you to take, and ask them to compensate you in return. There's no reason why you should take all the risk here (or in any contract).
But it's impossible to defend what the court says next:
As shown by the record, because e-mail transmission protocol requires entry of an IP address and domain name for the sender, the only way such a speaker can publish an anonymous e-mail is to enter a false IP address or domain name. Therefore... registered IP addresses and domain names discoverable through searchable data bases and registration documents "necessarily result[] in a surrender of [the speaker's] anonymity."
Impossible to defend? Just watch me.
You're overlooking a perfectly reasonable generalization that the judge is making. The IPv4 packet headers and the email headers, to the judge, are one and the same: Both can be used (indirectly) to identify the sender of the email, and both need to be "forged" in order to send anonymous email.
Keep in mind that tunnelling your packets through a proxy effectively "forges" the IPv4 source address, since the communication is actually originating at your computer, but on the receiving end, it shows up as being from the proxy, even though the communication actually originated elsewhere.
The judge was right to point out that you can't communicate on the Internet without including some kind of "sender address", and this address needs to be forged in order to use the Internet to communicate anonymously. As far as his argument is concerned, it doesn't matter whether the headers you're forging are specified in RFC 791 or in RFC 822.
Preemptive war isn't supposed to prevent engaging in a war, it's to shorten the war that you believe you will inevitably be engaged in. By attacking early, you prevent your enemy from accumulating the resources needed to win or at least to carry out a prolonged war.
There's nothing wrong with preemptive war when war really is inevitable anyway. The problem comes from when you start a war preemptively simply because you overestimated the likelihood of war in the first place.
This looks like a thinly-veiled attack on George W. Bush. Hint: There are better criticisms of Bush than Iraq or Afghanistan. Pick any domestic issue, really.
I really don't get why so many people are fixated on the US-initiated skirmishes in the middle east. The place is a social disaster of epic proportions, and no decision anyone makes is going to make the area a paradise any time soon.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ. 99.9999999% of all companies just want to buy a tool that works. They don't want to build the fucking thing. They don't even want to fix it. That's why they buy the support license.
Exactly, and having the source code, and the freedom to modify it, means that those 99.999...% of all companies can all buy the "support license" from whomever they want to.
With proprietary software, the vendor has a monopoly on support, which might explain why the support is often very poor.
This crap coming from Mozilla sounds a lot like the crap coming out of the XFree86 people not too long ago. That, combined with the horrible bloat of Firefox makes me wonder how long it will be until a new FOSS browser becomes the de-facto standard.
A harsher punishment doesn't reduce the amount of crime -- that's a false belief.
I keep hearing this, but it sounds to me like bullshit on its face: If harsher punishments don't do anything, then we could save a lot of money by reducing all punishments to incarceration for a single day. According to this theory, doing so would not increase crime. That seems really unlikely to me, and our experience with rioting (where the probability of getting punished drops, and at the same time, crime increases dramatically) seems to suggest otherwise. You're going to need some compelling evidence and an explanation of how this affects rioting to convince me of the soundness of your theory.
I'm guessing that somebody did a study showing that, for example, an increase in fines for speeding on the highway did not significantly change the number of speeding tickets issued. Or maybe it was a study showing that increasing the penalties for possession of illegal drugs didn't reduce the number of convictions for possession.
In both cases, it's still fairly unlikely that any particular person is going to get caught, so the expected cost of the illegal activity (penalty_if_convicted * probability_of_conviction) doesn't change much.
In both cases, if the people who enforce the law are operating at capacity, then the limiting factor will actually be their capacity, not the number of actual instances of the illegal activity.
In the second case (drugs), addiction is involved. For addicts, the cost of quitting is probably quite high compared to the expected cost of the illegal activity, even if penalties are increased. (See #1, above.)
Were data in the papers collected through double-blind experimentation? If not, can we account for experimenter bias? (How do you do a double-blind experiment with this kind of thing anyway?)
Are the statistical models in the paper sound, and are the calculations correct? Smart people routinely screw up statistics in very significant ways.
That's a far cry from proving that "an increase in penalties never affects crime".
It's not like Firefox makes it impossible to access a web site with a self signed certificate. It just makes it very obvious that something is wrong with the certificate, and tells the user that he shouldn't trust it to much.
No kidding. Using self-signed SSL certificates was never really all that trustworthy, but most people weren't aware of it and so just kept on using them. Firefox 3 simply brings to light what everyone with a clue already knew:
The HTTPS security model is a barely-functional hack.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people aren't happy to find that out.
There are really only two things that can solve this:
A self-certifying URL syntax (preferably using something like SPKI so remote servers can delegate their keys); or, if that's not possible,
DNSSEC, so we can strongly map the server's public keys to its hostname.
Slashdot Mirror
How long has it taken for the record companies to realize that iTunes DRM basically amounts to handing over their business to Apple? What they now need to realize is that DRM was and always has been a hoax; DRM simply can't do what's been promised, which is to control the copying of digital information. (Trying to make bits uncopyable has been compared to trying to make water not wet.)
I strongly oppose DRM, and I don't give a shit about file sharing. I just want my equipment to serve me and me alone, and I want access to a competitive market for that equipment.
_Florida_ is the idiot state. Florida.
Why, because Florida has arranged things such that the votes of its citizens actually matter in a federal election?
Did you miss the part that said "Despite nationwide public support for his initial death sentence"? This isn't the Afghan government opressing it's citizens, it's the citizens asking the government to kill this man.
We know totalitarianism doesn't work. Why are we propping up a government that supports it?
s/VBA/Bash/
And on *nix, you don't ever have to "justify having dev tools installed".
I wonder if your lowered productivity has been factored into the TCO of using Microsoft products. I bet it hasn't.
What's the problem? It's a password with 384 bits of entropy.
Ever hear of "dogfooding", or "eating your own dog food"?
Yes, and it's something that I would say Microsoft does too much. MS, if anyone, seems totally clueless about how much their user experience SUCKS compared to pretty much every other system. Even Mac OS X beats them out, and it's not exactly the epitome of robustness or ease-of-use. (Try working outside their "drag and drop an application to install/remove it" metaphor. They have an "installer" that can't uninstall anything. I nearly hosed my girlfriend's 10.3.9 Mac just trying to install the compiler.)
If you're spending that much time concerned with how effective your program languages are at prohibiting your programmers from producing unreadable or unmaintainable code, I'd say you should look to hire some better programmers.
How do you expect anyone to actually do that? Have you ever tried to find really good programmers? There are a few around, but they don't exactly grow on trees. Remember: half of all developers are below the median skill level.
And why bother? Most projects don't need your rock star programmers (if you have any) to do the bulk of the work.
Furthermore, I haven't seen too many brilliant programmers complain seriously about Python (well, they do, but it's about how hasattr() swallows KeyboardInterrupt and about the str/unicode duality). It seems like one way to weed out idiot programmers is to see if their "WTFOMGwhitespace!!!" stage lasts too long, or if they still like PHP after using it for a few months.
How easy is it to screw up with ADA? From what I understand, the point isn't to enable rapid development, but to have a well-behaved result.
Nobody sold you those Blizzard shares at gunpoint. Taxes are collected at gunpoint.
s/code/user/
Of course, if public policy changes, then you're screwed. If the clause is unenforceable, then the other party should have no problem removing it, right?
Huh? Written contracts are about contingency planning. When you come up with them, you _assume_ the other might try to screw you. If you sign a contract that relies on the other party being nice, then you don't understand the purpose of writing down a contract.
Don't sign the noncompete just as a matter of course. It sounds like working this project is important to you, so make sure you ask for what it's worth. Consider the possibility that you'll get hired, sign the non-compete, then 30 days later they'll cancel the project (while your non-compete remains in effect). That's a risk that you're taking, and they should compensate you just for taking that risk.
Also, get a lawyer's advice. Regardless of the non-compete, if you work there, then quit and continue working on the same project in the open-source field, they might accuse you of copyright infringement. I'm not sure what you can do to deal with that---that's what lawyers are there for.
But yeah, consider the risks they're asking you to take, and ask them to compensate you in return. There's no reason why you should take all the risk here (or in any contract).
But it's impossible to defend what the court says next:
As shown by the record, because e-mail transmission protocol requires entry of an IP address and domain name for the sender, the only way such a speaker can publish an anonymous e-mail is to enter a false IP address or domain name. Therefore... registered IP addresses and domain names discoverable through searchable data bases and registration documents "necessarily result[] in a surrender of [the speaker's] anonymity."
Impossible to defend? Just watch me.
You're overlooking a perfectly reasonable generalization that the judge is making. The IPv4 packet headers and the email headers, to the judge, are one and the same: Both can be used (indirectly) to identify the sender of the email, and both need to be "forged" in order to send anonymous email.
Keep in mind that tunnelling your packets through a proxy effectively "forges" the IPv4 source address, since the communication is actually originating at your computer, but on the receiving end, it shows up as being from the proxy, even though the communication actually originated elsewhere.
The judge was right to point out that you can't communicate on the Internet without including some kind of "sender address", and this address needs to be forged in order to use the Internet to communicate anonymously. As far as his argument is concerned, it doesn't matter whether the headers you're forging are specified in RFC 791 or in RFC 822.
Preemptive war isn't supposed to prevent engaging in a war, it's to shorten the war that you believe you will inevitably be engaged in. By attacking early, you prevent your enemy from accumulating the resources needed to win or at least to carry out a prolonged war.
There's nothing wrong with preemptive war when war really is inevitable anyway. The problem comes from when you start a war preemptively simply because you overestimated the likelihood of war in the first place.
This looks like a thinly-veiled attack on George W. Bush. Hint: There are better criticisms of Bush than Iraq or Afghanistan. Pick any domestic issue, really.
I really don't get why so many people are fixated on the US-initiated skirmishes in the middle east. The place is a social disaster of epic proportions, and no decision anyone makes is going to make the area a paradise any time soon.
The music on slotMusic comes without copyright protection
So it'll be dedicated to the public domain?
Oh, they meant copy protection...
On 20 million discs!
Jesus H. Fucking Christ. 99.9999999% of all companies just want to buy a tool that works. They don't want to build the fucking thing. They don't even want to fix it. That's why they buy the support license.
Exactly, and having the source code, and the freedom to modify it, means that those 99.999...% of all companies can all buy the "support license" from whomever they want to.
With proprietary software, the vendor has a monopoly on support, which might explain why the support is often very poor.
This crap coming from Mozilla sounds a lot like the crap coming out of the XFree86 people not too long ago. That, combined with the horrible bloat of Firefox makes me wonder how long it will be until a new FOSS browser becomes the de-facto standard.
Where can I get me some of that tanahol?
But you need to call a cow a cow and downplaying racism by calling it "racially biased" is a way to dodge accusations of racism.
And defining the term "racism" so broadly that it can't conceivably be avoided is a way to avoid rational discussion of the topic.
I could bore a thousand people to DEATH with all the stuff I know that the military has classified "Top Secret".
Put on a jacket. Someone will be knocking on your door and taking you for a "ride" in short order.
A harsher punishment doesn't reduce the amount of crime -- that's a false belief.
I keep hearing this, but it sounds to me like bullshit on its face: If harsher punishments don't do anything, then we could save a lot of money by reducing all punishments to incarceration for a single day. According to this theory, doing so would not increase crime. That seems really unlikely to me, and our experience with rioting (where the probability of getting punished drops, and at the same time, crime increases dramatically) seems to suggest otherwise. You're going to need some compelling evidence and an explanation of how this affects rioting to convince me of the soundness of your theory.
I'm guessing that somebody did a study showing that, for example, an increase in fines for speeding on the highway did not significantly change the number of speeding tickets issued. Or maybe it was a study showing that increasing the penalties for possession of illegal drugs didn't reduce the number of convictions for possession.
Assuming that, let's look at some possible confounding factors:
That's a far cry from proving that "an increase in penalties never affects crime".
The world would be a better place today if Bill Gates had refrained from a lot of his own "creative capitalism" in the 1990s.
It's not like Firefox makes it impossible to access a web site with a self signed certificate. It just makes it very obvious that something is wrong with the certificate, and tells the user that he shouldn't trust it to much.
No kidding. Using self-signed SSL certificates was never really all that trustworthy, but most people weren't aware of it and so just kept on using them. Firefox 3 simply brings to light what everyone with a clue already knew:
The HTTPS security model is a barely-functional hack.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people aren't happy to find that out.
There are really only two things that can solve this: