And when you do hit the P2P networks again, you'll again be a clearly defined "thief", "pirate" or whatever else they want to call you. Currently it would be slightly tricky to sue you as you are technically buying the music, even if the legality of the site is questionable. More to the point, it would also attract adverse publicity, as you could quite reasonably use the defence that you were "trying to follow a legal route to obtain music". People would sympathise.
But if you download illegally, you're a clear-cut, simple to define statistic and they can label you as a "thief", draining the resources of the honest hard-working record industry.
So yes, it probably is a pretty good move for them. Nothing changes in terms of the money they receive, and they can criminalise you in a nice clear definable fashion and pursue their agenda accordingly.
I used litestep for several years on NT4 and Win2K, and whilst i haven't tried recent incarnations of it on WinXP i'd definitely recommend it based on my experience.
I'm not sure what the current state of the litestep community is like - it seemed to undergo some sort of implosion a few years back, and the main litestep sites closed up shop. Was kinda sad, given how well the shell worked. Anyone here know how things are currently?
If i break into someone else's computer or obtain information by deception (or ask a friend to do it for me) and then use the information gained to my advantage, its my understanding that in most western countries i am personally liable in law (usual IANAL disclaimer here). However, it seems that if i do it on company time, then my employer is normally held responsible? They get a fine, a slap on the wrist and i might or might not get sacked, depending on where in the managerial structure i sit.
However, the crime was still committed by me, not by the non-physical entity called "my employer", so i should still be the one who takes the punishment. Obviously my employer should also not be allowed to profit from this (or there remains the option of just sacrificing people for corporate gain), but unless the perpetrators and their accomplices are held personally responsible (to the point of going to jail) then there seems little incentive not to break the law.
It seems clear in many cases (including this one) that senior management is implicated in such law breaking. Fine, so maybe someone "misinterprets" your instructions and breaks the law in your name without your knowledge, but deliberately ignoring that fact when it becomes obvious what has happened does not make you innocent. Senior management must be held accountable for this kind of crap. If its your responsiblilty to run the company, then you also have a duty to know what is going on. And if there is a strong chance you'll go to jail if you don't, then turning a blind eye might suddenly look a rather less attractive option.
My friends signed up, and disappeared from reality. When they occasionally surfaced during daylight (usually to put in minimum hours at their place of work) they all said how great it was. So I started the process of signing up. Then i asked myself a few questions:
1. Am i a person with a potential gaming addiction?
2. Will this affect my life, girlfriend and job?
3. Is this really such a good idea?
I didn't sign up.
I have a propensity to play games too much, and i know it. Basically people, spend a bit of time being honest with yourself. If you also have an addictive personality, don't expose yourself to such an easy drug. Prevention is a hell of a lot easier than cure, and i'll bet most people with a current addiction knew before they signed up that they'd develop it. I have sympathy, but some problems in life can be avoided with a little more thought and a little less denial. This is one of them.
I tend to separate my hard drive experience into two loosely divided time scales - pre disk space explosion, and post disk space explosion. Older disks were simply more reliable. I rarely saw any drives fail in the sub 10Gb range. Exceptions to this were western digital, specifically the 3.1Gb ones which i killed a few of. I've still got several happily working drives in the 6-40Gb range that have been running 24/7 for god knows how many years. And its not like these are the last survivors - i've actually seen very few fail (just to note, i never bought any IBM deathstars). Notably reliable are the 6.4Gb quantums, which just don't seem to want to die.
Things kinda change once we got upto 80Gb, and i have no 120Gb's left that work. This is echoed across my friends also. Maxtor are particularly guilty in that range. As for more modern drives, well i've failed a couple of 200Gb seagates and a 40Gb hitachi laptop drive (2 months old) gave up last week. Now, given that my experience is true for everyone i know, why are the MTF values on these drives so high when the disks themselves are increasingly unreliable?
Yup i agree. And every time they confiscate a fork from my lunchbox at heathrow i get a little bit more pissed off, cos i know that i'd be damn site more successful hijacking a plane with a broken glass bottle i bought in the duty free, than i'd ever be with a sodding fork. And why was it they never stopped selling stuff at duty free, even at the time they were confiscating knitting needles from old ladies?
Thats ridiculous. You can't justify a crime by saying your victim is a bigger criminal than you. How do you judge the severity of the crime? Ok, so its easy to justify the murder of someone who's killed 5 people (you kill 1, he killed 6. Simple maths), but how many thefts = 1 rape? How many speeding tickets = 1 assault? How many of these "ethical points" of yours does a person need to accrue before someone else can in turn legally:
1. Assault them?
2. Rape them?
3. Murder them?
I'm sorry, you're an idiot. And so am i, cos i should have used my mod points to give you "+1 funny".
The difference is, when it comes to pederasty, I can't really think of many methods I wouldn't condone to cull the abomination.
I can think of many. They are generally illegal, undermine the due process of law, and result in the aforementioned pederast walking free from court with a clean record.
>What kind of abuse of this new feature even comes close to outweighing the benefits of being able to connect reported abuse to certain IP addresses individually, and probably more usefully statistically?
You are assuming the police have already put into place the statistical data mining hardware needed to weed out 5 bad people from 10 million reports. I doubt this is true.
>If you (or I) are wrongfully reported, wouldn't the hassle of answering a few questions about your life (if it ever even came to that) far outweigh the benefits of increasing the protection of children, and even adults?
No, Its not. I don't have to answer police questions for every other crime i haven't committed, and i don't see why i should have to answer these ones. And in some situations even this is a problem - assume i'm a teacher, and one of my pupils has a crush on me. I'm not interested, but her and her friends get my IM details (easy enough to do) and report me. Fine, i can prove i did nothing wrong, but even having the police turn up on the door and ask me compromises my current and future employment. Of course, children aren't at all vindictive like this...
For some people reparations are not enough. If you put a lot of effort into your garden and it gets bulldozered, then no amount of fixing is going to make it the same. Some plants take years to mature, and a nice, flat, moss-free lawn can take a lifetime. For many a garden is a labour of love, not just a quick trip to the garden centre.
And using heavy machinery does seem a bit like overkill. If the guy did bury his ill-gotten gains there, then he did it with a spade. Surely an old fashioned metal detector would do the trick, and failing that one of those clever underground scanners the archeologists use.
I would agree. It would be unfair to throw a lot of blame around for this. "Tragedy" is a good word for it. "Lost" is perhaps inaccurate.
Note though that some people did try to buy the tapes of their own work from the BBC when they realised it would be erased, but weren't allowed to due to copyright issues and the lack of any internal process by which they would be allowed to. I also wonder if the reason some techs took stuff home was because they realised its value and made personal decisions to not allow it to be destroyed.
True. I agree completely. It is a very subjective issue. But even if you (or I) don't like something, that doesn't detract from its wider importance. The legacy of the Beatles is not in their music, but in the music which followed. The legacy of comedians like Peter Cook and Spike Milligan is similarly in the material which followed and performers who continue to be influenced by them. Cultural tastes do "come and go", but they are generally built upon those which precede. It would be nice to be able to see the original works which have such lasting effect, even if they have "aged" to a point where we can no longer appreciate them in context (I used to hide behind the sofa when watching Dr Who as a kid, but yes it doesn't look so good now).
As for the moon landings, your argument can easily be reversed: I wasn't born, the pictures aren't all that great, and i can't think of a way it has affected my life at all. Its just some grainy movie clips they put into documentaries every few years.
But this reasoning is flawed, as it is a defining moment in social and technological history, and will have had an effect on my life, even if i don't know it. The same applies to lost footage from the BBC (and doubtless other media broadcasters). Some of it IS important, and documents times and events which HAVE had an effect on the society we live in (and not just within the UK). It is therefore a shame that any of it (moon landings or Monty Python) is lost.
Its not so much the DVD revenue which is the issue. They've lost a hell of a lot more than just a few potential sales. A lot of this stuff was important cultural material. Things like Monty Python, radio interviews with influential and historically important people, live performances by genre-defining musicians (The Beatles/Rolling Stones/Led Zep etc). These are also missing. Now I agree it probably wasn't as important as the moon landings but i think "vaguely watchable" is somewhat ignorant and belittling.
The BBC does exactly the same. They've lost vast numbers of TV programmes over the years. Every so often an episode of Dr Who, Hancock's Half Hour or Steptoe and Son turns up in the basement of some guy who used to work there.
I guess the difference is that the Beeb never really thought these things were historically important, and hence had poor archiving rules. You'd hope that this was not the case at NASA.
These ideas are not communist. They're as democratic and American as mom and the flag and apple pie.
They may well be part of the democratic ideal, but they seem to conflict to some extent with the capitalist implementation. A completely free market economy seems to lead to a polar distribution of wealth. A completely communist economy (at least in the way it tends to be implemented) leads to the same. The problem seems to lies in our inherent need to be better than our neighbour. This is clearly a good thing in that it drives us forward to better and greater things, but if left unchecked you get the disparity which so clearly affects the US and, increasingly, other western countries. Society can only move forward as a whole, not in parts determined by wealth, and to achieve that some balance is required in which ambition and success are encouraged, but still capped.
You are quite right in saying that the key to this balance is the variance in wealth distribution, and it is interesting that the countries with the lower disparity between rich and poor generally seem to have better health, longer lifespans and a higher standard of living. These are often (but not always) the more democratic socialist states, particularly the scandinavian countries http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/ (undp.org). These also rank high in terms of happiness, due to sensible work-life balance and employment regulations that don't force you to work every hour of the day. Not to say these countries have it right, but i only have one life and i'd rather enjoy it, see my family and live to a decent age. Even if it means i have a lower chance to strike it rich.
Its a great idea, but it still looks like a heat engine to me and so is limited by the difference between hot (the solar collector) and cold (not mentioned in the article) parts of the cycle. Its an idea that resurfaces every few years (i remember reading when i was a kid about undersea power generation utilising the temp difference between surface and deep water), but no-one seems to be able to make it work commercially.
The problem is fundamental - thermodynamics defines the maximum efficiency to be eff=1-T(cold)/T(hot). Given that those temps are in Kelvin, not celcius, optimistic max efficiency for this system (ie assuming you can boil the water and have a glacier in your back garden for cooling) is about 26%. Solar cells are already near this, and more centralised forms of power generation are well above.
A good point, and i agree. Your argument also holds true for all sources though, so what you're really saying is that a completely ignorant reader should research several independent sources (wiki included or not) before coming to a conclusion you. i.e. good basic research.
I generally use wiki as a reference text for something i already know, but can't completely remember. Something like the derivation of a commonly used function, or an exact date for an event etc. I wouldn't use it for more specialised "professional" information (i'm a research scientist). Basically i treat it like an encyclopedia rather than an authoritative reference text. It has value in that context, but i agree with your point that in other ways it doesn't.
As with all sources, the facts on wiki must be considered with your brain turned on. I've read plenty of peer reviewed research papers which contain glaring inaccuracies/mistakes - no source should be taken as fact.
In recent times i've actually started to consider wiki as not being so bad. This is mainly because it has grown up, and is no longer the repository of knowledge of america's teenagers, as it seemed to be to start with. Its still a bit weak in some areas, and perhaps a bit too technical in others. But all in all its a pretty decent effort.
Unfortunately, its greatest strength (dynamic content) is also the reason it cannot be used as a definitive academic resource. In essence, the content that a student or researcher references is not necessarily the content that someone down the line is going to read. So if i reference a synthesis technique or method thats on wiki, someone who tries to duplicate my work might not be following the same recipe that i did. Reproducability is the keystone of research (even incorrect methods/results must be referenceable), and so university people get understandably annoyed by wiki references. Its a great resource, but for academics it can only ever be an interface to static content from somewhere else.
Err, why is this +5 moderated? Ignorance attracts positive moderation?
Racism, noun:
1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
Stereotype, noun
1. A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.
2. One that is regarded as embodying or conforming to a set image or type.
I'm sorry, but you seem to be confused. Redneck is "by definition" NOT racist for the simple reason that there is no race called the "rednecks": No-one can be termed "ethnically redneck". The term is certainly derogatory, insulting and undoubtedly offensive, but it is definitely not racist.
Now i accept that there are security concerns regarding interception, and consequently authentication/identification/billing and a whole host of other stuff. But did the author actually read that line about spammers? Email is an inappropriate analogy - mobile phone networks are a much better guide to the kind of abuses you will see. I don't currently get voice mail messages from His Rt Hon Umbago De ConArtist (could be a good laugh though), but i do get all sorts of "would i like to change my mobile tarif" calls. Why will VoIP be different?
These are just supercapacitors - a device designed to bridge the gap between batteries (which store energy chemically) and capacitors (which store energy as an electric field). The idea is not new - for decades people have wanted to combine battery type capacity with capacitor discharge characteristics.
However, there is now a lot of academic and business interest in them as they are ideal for a wide range of modern applications. Devices like UPS's and power smoothers still run on lead acid batteries, which are bulky, contain corrosives and are prone to unexpected failure (at least mine seems to be). There is also a big push from the electric vehicle crowd. Note though that they are unlikely to form the primary power source for an electric vehicle (they still have poor energy density compared to chemical technologies), but are extremely attractive for both initial power-up (i.e. heating a fuel cell to running temperature) and for sensible implementation of regenerative braking - charge the supercap when you brake, use the energy for short term bursts (driving up a hill, overtaking etc).
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.archive.org/details/isforAto1953/
But if you download illegally, you're a clear-cut, simple to define statistic and they can label you as a "thief", draining the resources of the honest hard-working record industry.
So yes, it probably is a pretty good move for them. Nothing changes in terms of the money they receive, and they can criminalise you in a nice clear definable fashion and pursue their agenda accordingly.
I'm not sure what the current state of the litestep community is like - it seemed to undergo some sort of implosion a few years back, and the main litestep sites closed up shop. Was kinda sad, given how well the shell worked. Anyone here know how things are currently?
However, the crime was still committed by me, not by the non-physical entity called "my employer", so i should still be the one who takes the punishment. Obviously my employer should also not be allowed to profit from this (or there remains the option of just sacrificing people for corporate gain), but unless the perpetrators and their accomplices are held personally responsible (to the point of going to jail) then there seems little incentive not to break the law.
It seems clear in many cases (including this one) that senior management is implicated in such law breaking. Fine, so maybe someone "misinterprets" your instructions and breaks the law in your name without your knowledge, but deliberately ignoring that fact when it becomes obvious what has happened does not make you innocent. Senior management must be held accountable for this kind of crap. If its your responsiblilty to run the company, then you also have a duty to know what is going on. And if there is a strong chance you'll go to jail if you don't, then turning a blind eye might suddenly look a rather less attractive option.
1. Am i a person with a potential gaming addiction?
2. Will this affect my life, girlfriend and job?
3. Is this really such a good idea?
I didn't sign up.
I have a propensity to play games too much, and i know it. Basically people, spend a bit of time being honest with yourself. If you also have an addictive personality, don't expose yourself to such an easy drug. Prevention is a hell of a lot easier than cure, and i'll bet most people with a current addiction knew before they signed up that they'd develop it. I have sympathy, but some problems in life can be avoided with a little more thought and a little less denial. This is one of them.
Things kinda change once we got upto 80Gb, and i have no 120Gb's left that work. This is echoed across my friends also. Maxtor are particularly guilty in that range. As for more modern drives, well i've failed a couple of 200Gb seagates and a 40Gb hitachi laptop drive (2 months old) gave up last week. Now, given that my experience is true for everyone i know, why are the MTF values on these drives so high when the disks themselves are increasingly unreliable?
Yup i agree. And every time they confiscate a fork from my lunchbox at heathrow i get a little bit more pissed off, cos i know that i'd be damn site more successful hijacking a plane with a broken glass bottle i bought in the duty free, than i'd ever be with a sodding fork. And why was it they never stopped selling stuff at duty free, even at the time they were confiscating knitting needles from old ladies?
1. Assault them?
2. Rape them?
3. Murder them?
I'm sorry, you're an idiot. And so am i, cos i should have used my mod points to give you "+1 funny".
I can think of many. They are generally illegal, undermine the due process of law, and result in the aforementioned pederast walking free from court with a clean record.
You are assuming the police have already put into place the statistical data mining hardware needed to weed out 5 bad people from 10 million reports. I doubt this is true.
>If you (or I) are wrongfully reported, wouldn't the hassle of answering a few questions about your life (if it ever even came to that) far outweigh the benefits of increasing the protection of children, and even adults?
No, Its not. I don't have to answer police questions for every other crime i haven't committed, and i don't see why i should have to answer these ones. And in some situations even this is a problem - assume i'm a teacher, and one of my pupils has a crush on me. I'm not interested, but her and her friends get my IM details (easy enough to do) and report me. Fine, i can prove i did nothing wrong, but even having the police turn up on the door and ask me compromises my current and future employment. Of course, children aren't at all vindictive like this...
And using heavy machinery does seem a bit like overkill. If the guy did bury his ill-gotten gains there, then he did it with a spade. Surely an old fashioned metal detector would do the trick, and failing that one of those clever underground scanners the archeologists use.
Note though that some people did try to buy the tapes of their own work from the BBC when they realised it would be erased, but weren't allowed to due to copyright issues and the lack of any internal process by which they would be allowed to. I also wonder if the reason some techs took stuff home was because they realised its value and made personal decisions to not allow it to be destroyed.
As for the moon landings, your argument can easily be reversed: I wasn't born, the pictures aren't all that great, and i can't think of a way it has affected my life at all. Its just some grainy movie clips they put into documentaries every few years.
But this reasoning is flawed, as it is a defining moment in social and technological history, and will have had an effect on my life, even if i don't know it. The same applies to lost footage from the BBC (and doubtless other media broadcasters). Some of it IS important, and documents times and events which HAVE had an effect on the society we live in (and not just within the UK). It is therefore a shame that any of it (moon landings or Monty Python) is lost.
Its not so much the DVD revenue which is the issue. They've lost a hell of a lot more than just a few potential sales. A lot of this stuff was important cultural material. Things like Monty Python, radio interviews with influential and historically important people, live performances by genre-defining musicians (The Beatles/Rolling Stones/Led Zep etc). These are also missing. Now I agree it probably wasn't as important as the moon landings but i think "vaguely watchable" is somewhat ignorant and belittling.
I guess the difference is that the Beeb never really thought these things were historically important, and hence had poor archiving rules. You'd hope that this was not the case at NASA.
They may well be part of the democratic ideal, but they seem to conflict to some extent with the capitalist implementation. A completely free market economy seems to lead to a polar distribution of wealth. A completely communist economy (at least in the way it tends to be implemented) leads to the same. The problem seems to lies in our inherent need to be better than our neighbour. This is clearly a good thing in that it drives us forward to better and greater things, but if left unchecked you get the disparity which so clearly affects the US and, increasingly, other western countries. Society can only move forward as a whole, not in parts determined by wealth, and to achieve that some balance is required in which ambition and success are encouraged, but still capped.
You are quite right in saying that the key to this balance is the variance in wealth distribution, and it is interesting that the countries with the lower disparity between rich and poor generally seem to have better health, longer lifespans and a higher standard of living. These are often (but not always) the more democratic socialist states, particularly the scandinavian countries http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/ (undp.org). These also rank high in terms of happiness, due to sensible work-life balance and employment regulations that don't force you to work every hour of the day. Not to say these countries have it right, but i only have one life and i'd rather enjoy it, see my family and live to a decent age. Even if it means i have a lower chance to strike it rich.
The problem is fundamental - thermodynamics defines the maximum efficiency to be eff=1-T(cold)/T(hot). Given that those temps are in Kelvin, not celcius, optimistic max efficiency for this system (ie assuming you can boil the water and have a glacier in your back garden for cooling) is about 26%. Solar cells are already near this, and more centralised forms of power generation are well above.
Oh, i agree completely. Just pointing out that the comment could be a bit contentious and may spark some lively discussion. Which is a good thing.
All these questions to be answered in our forthcoming slashdot discussion thread.
PS: I tend to post my wide-sweeping taste/art/style etc generalisations anonymously...
I generally use wiki as a reference text for something i already know, but can't completely remember. Something like the derivation of a commonly used function, or an exact date for an event etc. I wouldn't use it for more specialised "professional" information (i'm a research scientist). Basically i treat it like an encyclopedia rather than an authoritative reference text. It has value in that context, but i agree with your point that in other ways it doesn't.
In recent times i've actually started to consider wiki as not being so bad. This is mainly because it has grown up, and is no longer the repository of knowledge of america's teenagers, as it seemed to be to start with. Its still a bit weak in some areas, and perhaps a bit too technical in others. But all in all its a pretty decent effort.
Unfortunately, its greatest strength (dynamic content) is also the reason it cannot be used as a definitive academic resource. In essence, the content that a student or researcher references is not necessarily the content that someone down the line is going to read. So if i reference a synthesis technique or method thats on wiki, someone who tries to duplicate my work might not be following the same recipe that i did. Reproducability is the keystone of research (even incorrect methods/results must be referenceable), and so university people get understandably annoyed by wiki references. Its a great resource, but for academics it can only ever be an interface to static content from somewhere else.
Racism, noun:
1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
Stereotype, noun
1. A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.
2. One that is regarded as embodying or conforming to a set image or type.
I'm sorry, but you seem to be confused. Redneck is "by definition" NOT racist for the simple reason that there is no race called the "rednecks": No-one can be termed "ethnically redneck". The term is certainly derogatory, insulting and undoubtedly offensive, but it is definitely not racist.
...if it was the Big Brother house.
However, there is now a lot of academic and business interest in them as they are ideal for a wide range of modern applications. Devices like UPS's and power smoothers still run on lead acid batteries, which are bulky, contain corrosives and are prone to unexpected failure (at least mine seems to be). There is also a big push from the electric vehicle crowd. Note though that they are unlikely to form the primary power source for an electric vehicle (they still have poor energy density compared to chemical technologies), but are extremely attractive for both initial power-up (i.e. heating a fuel cell to running temperature) and for sensible implementation of regenerative braking - charge the supercap when you brake, use the energy for short term bursts (driving up a hill, overtaking etc).