Slashdot Mirror

see also:
piracy and web design

There is plenty of free software, free graphics, and other free resources. But rather than use Strata 3d base, people would prefer to pirate Maya. Rather than using Gimp, people would prefer to pirate Photoshop. Rather than using Linux, people would prefer to pirate Windows? Why? Because piracy allows people to set their own price to zero and juistify it to themselves. A free market is based on the buyer and seller agreeing on a price. Piracy, by it's refusal to even include the seller in the conversation, is death to a free market economy. This reduces the number of sellers wishing to participate, and therefore the amount of goods available. It could be argued that piracy helps makes Microsoft a monopoly. Few people can afford to create competing products and not get paid for their efforts.

see also:
piracy and web design

There is plenty of free software, free graphics, and other free resources. But rather than use Strata 3d base, people would prefer to pirate Maya. Rather than using Gimp, people would prefer to pirate Photoshop. Rather than using Linux, people would prefer to pirate Windows? Why? Because piracy allows people to set their own price to zero and juistify it to themselves. A free market is based on the buyer and seller agreeing on a price. Piracy, by it's refusal to even include the seller in the conversation, is death to a free market economy. This reduces the number of sellers wishing to participate, and therefore the amount of goods available. It could be argued that piracy helps makes Microsoft a monopoly. Few people can afford to create competing products and not get paid for their efforts.

Now let's face it. Regardless of patent issues, it seems more and more retailers have simply copied Amazon.com's site in it's entirety. That somehow strikes me as unfair.

Now let's consider Apple. I'm not going to go through the sortid history of who stole what from whom but let's simply say that by the time Windows 95 came out, many of us had seen that desktop a few times before. As for the Mac cases, it's not like many of us haven't been hunting for a cool case for awhile. The only difference is that we want a floppy drive and don't want a new monitor every time we upgrade.

And let's face it. The first place that tries to copy Slashdot in a non parody form will die a horrible death.

So why this claim? Apparently the United States Supreme Court might agree with Slashdotters in an appropriate case. " Please, don't presume to speak for me.

Look is look. MTV is MTV. Mountain Dew and Jolt are a way of life, other caffine is just imitation.

And in a hype marketing world, I'm tired of cheap knock offs.

- Ken Boucher http://www.virtualsurreality.com

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I do web page design, programming, and have a number of outdoor interests. Since I haven't replaced my last digital camera (stolen), I'm in the market for a new one.

With Kodak offering a VGA camera (a.k.a. the Palm Pix) I see an all in one solution.

With the two combined I can take photos of a disc golf course or event, label them, make notes about the photos and upload the page as soon as I get home. Using a portable keyboard makes the whole thing much easier and allows me to carry the whole production on the course.

One final comment:
"Remember, when color film came out, the quality of motion pictures went down." - Yeah, the Wizard of OZ sucked until Pink Floyd released a new sountrack... :)

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First we have this wonderful timeline of events and eToys' stock price. But perhaps that's all propaganda...

Who is eToys target customer?
That would be net-savvy or at least net-capable people. The kind of people that would be bound to come across the massive amount of unfavorable eToys press. The kind of people who would have to be blind to miss half the protest sites if they did a search on eToys.

Who is eToys target investor?
People who are subject to all of the above but also get to read all the bad investor news.

To top it all off, you have people who realize that if Etoys is looking at controlling the etoy.com content we should wonder what kind of content they have. Now the FCC does too. Hmmm, I wonder who sent the information on over 350 mismarketed products?

No. Toywar had nothing to do with the fall of eToys, and Slashdot is a powerless entity as well. The only people who want you to believe that is companies who don't want to face their own toywar.

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Currently I own virtualsurreality.com after a long and intensive search to find a decent domain name. What's sad is the number of shorter ones that are squatted on by major companies simply because it's cheap to do so. As much as I hate the people who squat for money, at least they have a goal in mind. I may not find their methods ethical, but they are understandable.

moc.com is held by Marathon Oil, who currently have a much better and cooler domain name. The best I can hope for is that they are holding onto moc.com in order to keep Mobil from getting it. The problem is that moc.com is a really cool, perfectly usable, domain name that will NEVER be used. Marathon might be willing to sell it, but as they seem to have no intention of replying to inquiries (I tried), it's not likely to happen.

And Marathon isn't the only person in that boat. Take a look at think.com. Oracle acquired the name and has no intention of using it.

The main question is, has the domain name been used or unused recently and has anyone approached you in the past year with an offer to buy the domain name? If so, you have an ethical responsibility to contact them and inform them that you are selling it through whatever means you choose to. (Ethics aside, informing potential bidders can't be a bad financial idea.)

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For, although your page is truly viewable in any browser, and is completely accessable to people of all disabilities, quit frankly my son, your page looks like festering backside of a unwashed gibbon.

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But Master, I followed all of w3.org's reccomendations. I used tidy and bobby, and checked all the links. I didn't use CSS because every browser interprets them differently. I rejected tables as they work differently on different browsers (especially table background images). I did my best to make sure that it looked just as good on Lynx as it does in Gecko!

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And that is the problem my son. All pages look like junk in Lynx. However, AOL users are spoiled little pigs. In the process to make your page appeal to the 10% of people who don't support the current IE and Netscape browsers, you have offended the other 90%. Go back and try again.

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The author is currently the webmaster of virtualsurreality.com. He has learned that even w3.org is still in confusion about the <p> tag and that table backgrounds are questionable (as can be seen by comparing his main page under Netscape and I.E.). He is however in love with Tidy.

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Jon Johanson : My name is Jon Johanson. I'd like to get a copy of the address book on my PC so I can e-mail my friends and keep them updated on my situation.
government rep. : I'm sorry. We cannot release those files.
JJ : What? Why not?
gr : You use the Linux operating system which is known to be user unfriendly. No one here knows how to use Linux.
JJ : So?
gr : So we decided that since we can't get to the files, we don't know what's in them. They might contain a lethal compuetr virus or something. Until we know what's in them you can't have access to any of them.
JJ : You have got to be kidding me. Is there anything I can do to get around this?
gr : Well, if you're willing to train everyone involved in this trial how to use Linux for free, I'm sure we can make an arrangement after everyone has sucessfully completed the course.
JJ : ARRRRGGGGHHHH!

Disclaimer: If you're offended Jon, I'm sorry.

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Rather than play catch-up, I'd like to see the Linux versions right there, up front. Star Craft is cool, but we don't play a lot of it the Lan Parties in Omaha anymore. (open invitation)

P.S. Moderators: Since this is an opinion, not fact based column, moderate the above comment up if you agree with it please.

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Take a look at Slashdot, and the Slash code. This is a very powerful tool with a large collection of options that's very simple to use. I can customize the way Slashdot appears with very little effort at all. My Slashboxes (on the right hand side) are the ones I choose in the order I want them. I've killed some of the graphics and the book reviews. I sort the replies at level 3 and drop my threshold or read responses when desired.

Open Source does not mean bad interfaces. For the most part Open Source is new enough that the core engines are still being built.

Do we need another good example? How about the Linux Doom Admin interface. Point and kill those tasks.

Linux fails the "mom" test not because of geek superiority, but because there have been other needs that are of a higher priority. Many closed source systems have decided to make user friendly systems that don't function. Linux has decided to make sure the dang thing works and then they'll make it look nice, and that's an order of priority I can live with.

Open Source does care about the end user. What the end user of Linux wanted was a stable product that worked and didn't need to be rebooted daily.

If you want ease of use over stability, you already have a company that makes that product. Meanwhile, it's not like Linux isn't still being improved and no one is preventing a good looking interface from being created.

Besides, even the big companies have an interface problem. Neoplanet almost brought me back to I.E. and it's getting combined with Mozilla on my home machine this weekend for a serious Version 13 test drive. Closing the source does not a good GUI make.

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Of course, the Simpsons are more informative than ABC news, so I'm not saying much...

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• nanotechnology: Either the ability to work with a material at an extremly small level or a self replicating machine.
• hacker: Either a war3z d00d or script kiddie or a person capable of coming up with an elegant solution involving technology.
• government, law, tax, etc.: Either a function of the United States that only applies to the United States, despite the fact that my log indicates that the U.S. is a minority in Slashdot or a vague concept that may or may not apply to any country.

Actually I'm not sure I do. How much of Redhat is "open source". Is Redhat required to release the source of any modifications they make to Linux, or can they keep something for themselves? If I submit a modification to the core Linux group is it rejected. Can I than do what I want with it, including patenting it and denying it to Linux in the future?
How much of the source is open? All of it or is there necessary security data that is not in the source release? Does Linux depend on closed source binaries at any point?
These are all things I don't know. Until I get the $ together to build a second box and start playing with Linux, my knowledge is far behind the rest of Slashdot. (no. I do not want my wife to deal with a dual boot machine on top of all the other things I've done to our sole PC.)

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This system should be:

• International in nature, including translation tools.
• Understandable by non-professionals.
• Easily and inexpensive to update.
• • Note that this causes it's own problems. I'll use Network Solutions as an example. Because it's so cheap to register your own domain name, companies now register multitudes of them. If it was expensive to register domain names, only the rich could get them.
• networked in nature so that any new item can point to the items it's based off of. Under the new system I would suggest that you reward people based on the strength of their prior art searches, not the weaknesses.
• Uses a seach engine to hunt for "similar" patents. This search engine would check for items with similar "parents", "grandparents", "uncles". This would mean that if I base my patent off a gas stove and a bathtub, I would still pull up a match (x%) with someone who based their patent off an electric heater and a goldfish bowl.

As an example I work for a large secondary credit card processor on a team of analysts. Everyone on the team has been involved in the computer industry from a programming standpoint for over 15 years.
And I'll bet this weeks paycheck, none of them know what the term "open source" means.

The problem exists everywhere. College Professors insist that COBOL is dead. (I only wish.) Webmasters insist that the internet is secure. (hahahaha.) The Slashdot Hivemind is positive that Windows is dead. (Does AOL have a Linux version?)

Companies that don't research prior art will simply hire experts to state that they're is no prior art.

Here's a better way of phrasing it:

How do you determine who came up with a process or application first in a world with concurrent, badly documented, research, when the people who need to make that determination graduated last in their high school?

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A recent attempt to upload the memories of the collective Slashdot Hivemind today was block by a court order. The Industry to Determine Individual Online Thought Security (i.d.i.o.t.s.) lodged a petition in court to prevent the storage of the Slashdot Hivemind because it contains the still secret code to DeCSS.

DeCSS was a format used in the dark ages to play antique films. It is still used by collectors of rare films to view those old 2d classics.

In related news, Star Wars Episode One is actually finally being rereleased to collectors of such items. This is the first time this award winning film has been released on DVD.

this message prescanned by somelegalcorporationwhowishedtheycouldgetashorterd omainname.com

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Ken Boucher.

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Their stock was at $65 a share. It dropped below $20 a share. That's below the IPO.

Meanwhile there still seem to be a lot of pages out there that the search engines are picking up. I wonder how many people are going to be all that interested in cleaning those old files off their web space.

I'm thinking my "How to build your own etoys resistance site" page may stay up for a long time as a HTML primer....

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Their stock was at $65 a share. It dropped below $20 a share. That's below the IPO.

Meanwhile there still seem to be a lot of pages out there that the search engines are picking up. I wonder how many people are going to be all that interested in cleaning those old files off their web space.

I'm thinking my "How to build your own etoys resistance site" page may stay up for a long time as a HTML primer....

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For more notes on #4, check out this article on ZDnet.

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The compound itself? Ah who cares. But Chime impressed me though.

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Now someone please explain something to me. Why are there 400 different counter scripts? Is this really necessary? From what I can see you have a choice of SSI or non-SSI, a collection of data to log, and the choice of text, graphic numbers, or pure graphics to choose from.
Navigation tools are worse. Far worse. And trying to figure out the difference between mail scripts makes me physicaly ill.

As a Perl Newbie, if someone is going to put out an online Perl Manual, please, I'm begging you, include in your site the best 2 or 3 scripts for a certain function and encourage your community to focus on improving them rather than writing their own. There should be an SSI and a non-SSI version of each, simply because many free hosting firms do allow non-SSI scripts. (I know, lame... but if there is a good free hosting firm that allows SSI, I missed it.)

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Some people have taken offense to my suggestion that they pull the code until the judge comes to his final decision. Let me explain myself a little better.

I believe it is our best interest to comply with the judge at this point in time, even if we do not live in the state of California. We can publicly disagree with his decision all we want, but we should show a willingness to abide by it. To disregard it only makes us match the public belief of hackers. A lot of the posts that are saying how we should mirror DeCSS all over the place sound remarkably like script kiddies screaming "Free Kevin" simply because of something they read at 2600.

Our goal, unless I am mistaken, is for the members of our community to be found not guilty on all charges. We want the judge to come to the understanding that these tools were created to improve the viability of DVD, not injure it, by allowing people with Linux computers the ability to show, and therefore purchase DVD movies.

At this point in time the judge has not yet reached a decision. he has requested that the information be taken down until he reaches that decision. This strikes me as fair. It's not a win, but it is fair to both parties. After all, is there anyone who can't wait a week or two for DeCSS (assuming anyone doesn't already have it.)

Now once the judge makes his final decision then you can make yours. You can choose if you want to obey the law or not. That choice is yours and you can make it freely. You can do it in the name of piracy or free speech, but the only person you put at risk is yourself.

However, at this point in time, our actions put others at risk. We may claim we're fighting for free speech, but we will not be the ones to take the fall. If you want to fight the fight, then become a Doe (one of the 500 unnamed defendants) and run the same risks as they are running.

But don't ack like a script kiddie and call it revolution.

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Governments do not make the laws.
It is not until a judge decides that a law is constitutional and decides on it's meaning that it has any power. The Digital Milleninum insanity alone is proof of this. Written by a number of lawyers, no one can identify it's purpose or meaning anymore. Perhaps laws should be written by children.

The legal system is not consistant.
This is the one thing I had no real understanding of until now. I knew that the laws of different countries, states, etc. were different but I never realized what an outdated concept we work with. A 15 year old from Norway is being charged in California. The judge from that trial appears to be working of an entire different legal system than the judge in new York. I suspect both of these trials will then be brought up to a higher court regardless of the ruling and each will be used as precedent in the other.

People do not understand judges
It amazes me to see people mirroring DeCSS now that a judge has asked us not to. What is the point of doing it now? Is there someone, somewhere who doesn't have it yet? Are you doing it just to spite the judge? If so, then perhaps it is time to consider the concequences of your actions, not to yourself but to the defendants and the court's final decision. To pull your copies, as I am doing, is to show respect for the court system. If you do not respect the court system it is likely to not respect you or your arguments right back. I would suggest that it would be best to replace your copies of DeCSS with copies of the court decision and a well written opinion of how you feel about them. In lack thereof, grab the Score:5 reply of your choice and post it. Currently, the request is to remove them until the court makes it's final decision. That seems reasonable enough and does not prevent us from putting it back up after the court has made it's decision. If you want to mirror it once the case is over, that's your decision and does not reflect on any way on the defendant's case. However, by mirroring it now, you put someone other than yourself at risk.

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Hmmm.. (Digging through pile of computer magazine...oh look, Maxim, [toss])Ah. Here's one.
(Shuffle Shuffle Shuffle)

Nope. I can honestly say these ads don't do a thing for me either. About all they're good for is making sure I WON'T buy their game.

Now before we get off on the wrong foot, I'm running a Windows platform just for games. Loki is making it possible for me to run a Linux only PC next year and I'm happy as heck. I go to LAN parties on a regular basis, including a small one last weekend. I'd buy Quake IV based on the name alone and I have to visit Bluesnews on a daily basis. Id, Bungie, and Blizzard are my current favorite companies (Firaxis took a big dive after betatest Centauri).

My point? I'm not surprised that the ad companies, and everyone else seems to have some horrible sterotypical views of females. Their veiws of me as a male computer programmer suck even more.

Off to the gym. Have fun everyone.

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Considering that a 15 year old had enough intelligence to hack DVD, something that has been considered quite important on Slashdot, a person stating that he doesn't want to read anything by a 14 year old student strikes me as odd. Strangely enough, somehow when that same student becomes a 35 year old Sys Admin he suddenly gets an opinion that matters. At least that's what I'm getting out of the comment I just read.

I can understand people believing that and saying it, but I never thought it would be moderated up.

Jon. I would like to thank you. I've obviously been mistaken as to what kind of people Slashdot attracted. After having set my threshold at 3, I still see noise, flaming, and a number of replies that don't seem to have anything to do with what you've written.

If anyone knows of a better place, please, check out my previous replies and decide for yourself if you would like to invite me. Slashdot just isn't cutting it anymore.

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