I describe this as a change of licensing terms because when I spoke with Watchfire, they asserted that I had been notified about the change through the EULA displayed when I installed Bobby 5.0 -- in other words, through a changed license agreement. If it was simply a change in the business model for Bobby, and a feature downgrade, that would be one thing -- but they actively asserted to me that the omission of the feature was driven by a desire to change the terms under which users purchased Bobby, and those new terms were laid out in the new EULA.
Sorry if this wasn't clear in my original post -- I can see how it might be confusing.
A guy then used the Freedom of Information Act to get the actual reports detailing Bush's "issues" with reporting for duty: You Can't Just Walk Away
CNN reported Bush's denial (Bush Dismisses Report He Skipped Air National Guard Service), but it's notable what a weak denial it was: "Asked about his Air National Guard attendance record, Bush told reporters it was 'spotty attendance but I did the duty necessary... I did the time that was required in the Guard.' " Not the kind of ringing denial you'd expect if there wasn't at least an element of truth to the story.
Unsurprisingly, the media didn't press him on the issue back during the campaign, and they're certainly not likely to now. But as far as I can see the questions are still open, and the "Bush was AWOL" side seems to have more facts and evidence at their disposal than does the "no he wasn't" side.
"Don't ask me why this bugs me so... I can't explain it. Other gammar and spelling mistakes don't faze me... From the online Mirriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary:"
I guess other mistakes really don't bother you:
"grammar", not "gammar"
"Merriam-Webster", not "Mirriam-Webster"
Just remember, kids... if you're gonna post a spelling flame, be sure to, um, check your spelling:-)
Mozilla doesn't have a pointy-clicky way to change the useragent out of the box, but you can add that with the Mozilla Useragent Toolbar. That's what I used (on Moz 1.0 RC1) and it got me past Hotmail's browser Nazism without a problem. Many thanks to David Illsley (developer of uabar) for the nifty add-on!
It's bizarre that you assumed I worked in the music industry.
Yes, it sure is bizarre to assume that when someone on a thread regarding the music industry says "your post is what we in the industry call clueless", he/she/it is referring to the music industry. You must have been referring to the cluelessness industry instead. My apologies.
*YOU* have a choice... You can either pay for the music and listen to it. Or you can not listen to the music. Since recorded music is a luxury item and not a subsistence item, you do not have any inherent moral right to steal it because it is being denied to you.
Pay very close attention to what I am about to say, "sonny". I have an Archos Jukebox that has 6GB of MP3s on it. Each and every one of those was ripped from a CD that I forked over hard-earned money for.
I believe doing this is my privilege under the principle of fair use. The music industry disagrees. Is this "theft"? How is it different from copying a CD to a tape? What is the magic element that putting it on a hard drive mixes in?
Remember, I am NOT DISTRIBUTING this music! (Not all MP3s are dumped into Kazaa, y'know.)
And yet, even this is too much for the RIAA. They want NO copies. They want NO fair use. In other words, they want to take a legal privilege that I had in the analog world, and revoke it unilaterally, just because the hardware in question has changed -- and because they see an opportunity to force me to buy additional copies of all those CDs, at prices set by their cozy cartel.
In other words, for their private profit, they want to take my rights away. So think about that next time you consider who's a thief.
Your post is what we in the industry call clueless.
And this is why "you in the industry" are in the process of running your insanely profitable businesses into the ground. What you're feeling tightening around your neck is not Napster or Kazaa or Gnutella or whatever -- it's Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand"! Look, it's very simple. When all of your customers feel that you are charging too much for your product, or that your terms of use are too restrictive, or whatever, a black market is going to spring up. Simple as that. It's as true for bread as it is for music -- if every bakery in the US banded together and raised the price universally to $100/loaf, college students would be breaking into grocery stores and selling grey market Wonder Bread out of their dorm rooms. It's the magic of the free market at work.
Now, you say that's dirty pool because people used to think sixteen bucks a CD was a fair price, so they should continue to feel that way. But you've missed the ground shifting underneath your feet. New technologies have devalued your product in the eyes of the public. You need to either reprice it or accept that there's gonna be a certain amount of loss. You can throw out tepid, restrictive alternatives all you want, but why should people buy it? What's your value proposition for the consumer? (That's what businesses are supposed to do, you know -- serve consumers.)
Is grey-market music illegal? Sure. But grey-market bread would be too. Laws that attempt to impose morality on human nature are doomed to failure. Better to figure out how to profit off human nature by providing something useful at a price your audience thinks is fair than to try to ram outdated products and outmoded laws down our throats.
The venerable MS-DOS is dead... but its kissing cousin PC-DOS lives on at IBM. Yes, Big Blue will happily sell you PC-DOS 2000 for the low, low price of only $62 ($50 if you want the download-only version).
I can understand why they offer it -- there's probably still a few places where legacy DOS apps are in place, and IBM has a long history of never ever backing away from a technology it's made a "strategic commitment" to. Still, it's funny to click on the "System requirements" link and see "Intel 8088/8086, 512K RAM, 6-18MB hard disk space". Kinda takes ya back, doesn't it? (snif)
You might check out Dave Winer's site, Scripting News. He's a rare breed, a software developer who (a) is passionate about openness and interoperability and (b) skeptical about open-source software. He is also a pioneer in Weblogging, so you can find several years' worth of his outspoken opinions on the subject on his site.
Some examples:
"Stallman's philosophy is not open source, it's not the spirit of sharing, it's not generous. It has other purposes, it's designed to create a wall between commercial development and free development." (9/7/2000)
"Talking with Nicholas Petreley a few days ago I said that the problems that open source addresses have already been dealt with." (9/9/2000)
"It's possible to be an open source developer with high integrity, I'm sure of that, I know people who do that. But it's not inevitable that all open source developers and middlemen have high integrity." (8/8/2000)
And that's just a few of the more recent posts to his log. Don't get me wrong, Dave is a very thoughtful, articulate guy who's no Microsoft parrot -- he and his company, UserLand Software, were one of the authors of the SOAP specification that is proving so critical for future interoperability. He's just got a keen intelligence and is fond of applying it, which means he'll often come up with a different angle on things than you might expect. Go search his site and I bet you'll find, if not the answer you seek, at least some interesting questions.
I wonder why the reporter didn't think to ask the CEO of Boeing if he is tormented by feelings of guilt? After all, the attacks showed us that he makes his living selling giant flying bombs that Very Bad People can use to kill thousands of our people in one fell swoop. Surely he must agree that he and his company have blood on their hands, right?
Of course not. Boeing isn't responsible for this tragedy, and neither is Phil Zimmerman (and kudos to Phil for standing up and saying so). Boeing's aircraft have contributed immensely to our national economy by helping make easy commercial air travel possible. Strong crypto has contributed immensely to the economy by helping make the online world a safe, secure place to do business. Both have been misused by evil men to do a great wrong; but they are just tools, with no moral implications beyond those transferred to them through the hands of those who wield them. To place the blame anywhere else is to absolve the monsters behind the attack of the full weight of their crimes.
A PQA? Waste of time. How about giving us something anyone with a small form-factor device can use to browse Slashdot on the go, like, say, an AvantGo channel. So much great content is available in AvantGo format already that anyone who's anyone already has the reader on their Palm or PocketPC, and they've got good support for developers too. Sure, it's not wireless, but until we all have 3G wireless web-browsing cell phones, it's about as cool as cool can get -- at least compared to the dead-end of PQA.
Indeed -- in fact, IBMers were considered so important to the US war effort that the War Department had a separate hierarchy of ranks for servicemen who maintained and supported the IBM systems that drove artillery and other ballistic weapons. So, for example, a Private First Class who worked in this capacity would carry the official rank of PFCI (Private First Class, IBM), and his rank insignia were marked with an "I" to denote his special status.
USA Today ran a good column about Tom Watson Sr. and the way the whole IBM-backed-the-Holocaust group is misrepresenting him and his actions. The whole thing is a mess, and does a disservice to Watson and the other IBMers who did so much to help the Allies win WW2.
... you've already answered your own question. When you need Oracle or DB2, believe me, you will KNOW it, or you're a moron and beyond hope anyway. At my current position I'm managing a Web team responsible for a site that lets users build complex queries that then sling around 16GB databases. We're using MS SQL Server and even with that we look covetously upon Oracle's reliability and scalability. There is no way on God's green earth I'd try to do this in MySQL. I love MySQL, but it's just not ready for prime time for these kinds of applications. Which is why I say you'll know when you need it; if there is any question in your mind, you probably either don't need it or aren't experienced enough to know what you need in the first place, so be careful that you don't put your Free Software Advocate hat on over your Responsible IT Professional hat:-)
"Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know much about your world. I look around and see steel beasts racing down the streets, growling and spitting smoke. I don't know how to operate your 'personal computers' or 'automatic teller machines'. Your ways frighten me! There is one thing I do know, however, and that is that we must outlaw all antibiotics immediately before any more of my harmless brothers are slaughtered. Thank you for your time."
The whole ongoing SDMI fiasco makes one wonder why they even bother trying to create a secure format anyway. In today's CPU-cycle-saturated world, there is no such thing as a truly secure format! If the data behind that wall of encryption is valuable enough, someone, somewhere, will break it -- and in this case, the information is extremely valuable; break SDMI and you've got unlimited access to all the music the world wants, all for free! Who could say no to that?
Now, that's not to say it's impossible to create secure music. But the only way to do that is to take the original master recording directly from the studio to a lead-lined vault ten miles below ground, lock the door, and throw away the key. Be sure to toss the band in there too, so they can't play unauthorized copies or variants of the song during their next concert. Of course, even then you're not truly secure, as the recording engineer or any other people who heard the session could sell his recollection of the arrangement to some cover artist to re-create, so you'd have to lock them in the vault too.
Now you're secure! Of course, you're also unable to sell the recording to anyone. Oops.
Given all that, one wonders why the industry doesn't just cut their losses, declare victory, and go home. They'd be well advised to follow the counsel of Rep. John Kasich, a Republican House member who has based his career on opposition to federal spending on programs that don't make sense. One particular hobby horse of Kasich's was the B-2 Stealth bomber, whose $1 billion per plane price tag Kasich found ludicrous. During one House committee hearing on funding the bomber's development, Kasich asked the Department of Defense witnesses if it wouldn't be cheaper and just as effective to simply announce that we'd built the B-2, rather than actually building any. After all, since the B-2 was supposed to be invisible, how could any enemy be certain we hadn't? Maybe the best outcome for all parties in the SDMI fiasco would be to just roll out a wide-open protocol, declare it secure, and concentrate on doing what they do best -- marketing and promotion of acts with mass appeal -- rather than doing what they are so manifestly bad at -- software engineering. Oh well, one can hope...
"There is no reason to have universal car registration except for confiscation. Nowhere in the history of this world has car registration NOT lead (sic) to confiscation..."
Oh, wait, that's different -- if some moron gets a hold of a car and goes 95 miles per hour through a residential area, he might hurt somebody! Thankfully, guns require no such safeguards -- any moron can blast away without fear of the Big Bad Gummint coming to check up on exactly what they are blasting away at. God Bless America!!!
Viewing the election results in practice is fascinating and I can't help but wonder how much the U.S. elections would improve if we used a similar system.
Yeah, good thinking there, Michael! The U.S. elections would be much better if they were conducted like ICANN elections. I'd love it if the majority of members of Congress were chosen by an unrepresentative group rather than by public election, and the only voice we got was one token member from each region of the country. It'd be even better if there were completely unreasonable barriers to participation in the process, and election "rules" that change at a moment's notice based on whether or not said unrepresentative group feels that an election might go its way or not. That sounds GREAT!
In all seriousness, it's good to see that at least some people at ICANN will have a clue now. I just hope that they move towards greater transparency and participation so that we don't see a repeat of this year's election fiasco ever again.
Judging from the story on starwars.com, it's not entirely clear whether Lucas is 100% disavowing this rumor or not. Take a close look at Lucas' exact words:
"The robotics technology inside the Artoo models have advanced to the point where they can achieve most of the performance I need right along side the other actors. Still, there's an element of humanity to Artoo that comes from having Kenny Baker inside. We've always had Kenny scheduled for a number of shots during the final week of shooting at Elstree Studios."
Lucas certainly isn't enthusiastically stating that only Kenny Baker can play R2D2. It sounds to me like Lucas is saying that most of the R2D2 shots can be done with robotic technology; he just wants Kenny to come in for a few specific shots that, for whatever reason, the robotics can't handle. (I'll leave speculation as to whether this is due to technical limitations or to avoid looking publicly like he was dumping Kenny Baker as an exercise for the reader.)
Truth be told, for all the to-do about this story, my sentiments are mixed. While Baker made a great R2D2, Terry Gilliam makes a great point in his commentary track on the Criterion Collection DVD of Time Bandits, which Baker starred in. He says that it's a shame that actors like Baker are forced by their height to spend their lives playing robots and Ewoks, hidden under costume and makeup, rather than playing actual human beings who just happen to be shorter than most. Something worth thinking about while we all wring our hands over whether Kenny gets to spend a week in a robot suit.
Unfortunately for the world, it's hard to imagine a more poorly equipped society to deal with the Human Genome Project than the U.S.
Um, no it isn't:
Nazi Germany
Stalinist Russia
Any ethnic-cleansing-happy Balkan state
See, that wasn't so hard. If there was a Nazi state today (say, if Hitler hadn't been dumb enough to invade Russia), it would be hard to imagine anything worse than that state having the genome map -- instead of murdering Jews and Slavs and Gypsies and homosexuals and the other "inferior races", they could just engineer them out of existence with the force of the state behind the "genetic cleansing" effort, rather than just personal decisionmaking. Compared to that, I'd say the U.S. is much better prepared to handle this new technology!
Of course, there are serious ethical and philosophical issues at stake with this new technology, as there are with all new technologies. But Katz's hyperbole is a little bit out of proportion to the stakes at hand, as per usual.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Re:What's Really Important Here
on
Virtual War
·
· Score: 5
What's the agenda here? Why is the United States spending so much time and effort bombing people with alleged "precision" munitions (munitions which, in the Gulf War at least, were later shown to have only a 40% hit rate--a far cry from the perception that every bomb hit every target). We need to ask ourselves what the government is doing with all of this money, and who the next target of those weapons will be.
The United States government has shown, in recent years, a great intolerance for certain "fringe" groups. These munitions, once honed to perfection (after being tested on foreign soil in conflicts that are generated out of thin air), may be used in the future to silence groups that dare to speak out against the government.
Oh, please. The government is developing smart standoff munitions... to silence internal dissidents? Are you serious? Don't you think that any government that was really interested in cracking down on internal dissent would spend more money on lightweight, concealable small arms and body armor for secret police than for bombs that demolish a city block?
Beyond that, I find the whole premise of the book that Katz reviews to be questionable. (Disclaimer: I have not read the book, so I'm relying on Katz's description of its argument.) The "smart weapons" that Ignatieff deplores did not cause the risk-averse culture that he describes. Vietnam created that culture. We have a generation of leaders for whom war is synonymous with messy, low-intensity light infantry conflicts that drag out for years. So those leaders spend money on anything that promises to make those kinds of conflicts obsolete -- laser guided bombs, cruise missiles, robot aircraft, and the rest. They then employ these weapons instead of infantry, in places where infantry would probably be a more war-winning weapon, solely because they are terrified of repeating the Vietnam debacle. Result: conflicts that go half-won because we have ruled out the use of the most effective tool.
So, what's my beef with Ignatieff? By blaming this pattern on the weapons that we've created, he lifts the responsibility from the place it truly belongs -- the leaders. They make the decision to enter into "limited" wars, or to pull out when the first casualties come home. If they didn't have smart weapons, they'd use B-52s loaded with dumb iron bombs, or artillery sited miles away, or anything else except infantry. It's not the smart weapons that are causing this; you can lay that at the feet of our military and political leaders. The smart weapons are just a convenient tool. (Remember, the term "surgical strike" comes from Vietnam, when no smart weapons were in wide deployment.)
We too often fall into the trap of thinking that our whiz-bang technology is the cause a way of thinking. Technology is an expression of human values in steel or silicon. If those values are out of whack, remember that the fault lies with the toolmaker, not with the tool.
We now have a nation by the corporations for the corporations, with no easy way to take it back.
If you want to give a slap in the face to the corporate interests behind George W. and the Gore-Bot 2000, you should call your local Green Party organizer right now and ask how you can get involved. Ralph Nader, the Green Presidential candidate, is committed to reducing the influence that corporations have over our public life. Consider the following items from the Concord Principles, the platform that Nader is running on:
Second: The American people should have reasonable control over the public lands, public media airwaves, pension funds, and other societal assets which the public legally owns, rather than having these public assets controlled by a powerful few.
Third: We need modern mechanisms so that civic power for self-government and self-reliance can correct the often converging power imbalance of Big Business and Big Government that weakens the rights of citizens.
Seventh: Effective legal protections are needed for ethical whistleblowers who alert Americans to abuses or hazards to health and safety in the workplace, or contaminate the environment, or defraud citizens. Such conscientious workers need rights to ensure they will not be fired or demoted for speaking out within the corporations, the government, or in other bureaucracies.
Ninth: Shareholders, who are the owners of companies, should not have their assets wasted or worker morale victimized by executives who give themselves huge salaries, bonuses, greenmail, and golden parachutes, self-perpetuating boards of directors, and a stifling of the proxy voting system to block shareholder voting reforms.
You may say that it's pointless for Nader to take on these issues, since he "can't win". Well, I would argue that someone with his name recognition and integrity can and will be a credible third party candidate; but even if Nader loses, if he pulls ten or fifteen percent of the vote, he will be heard. Remember how nobody cared about the budget deficit until Ross Perot made it his defining issue in 1992? Nader can do the same for the way corporations screw us over every day. Nader's fighting an uphill battle to get on the ballot in several important states, and you can help just by gathering a few signatures to get him there. Even if you're not the Green type, if you care at all about curbing corporate power in this country, you owe it to yourself to at least check out the man's Web site and hear what he has to say.
Slashdot Mirror
I describe this as a change of licensing terms because when I spoke with Watchfire, they asserted that I had been notified about the change through the EULA displayed when I installed Bobby 5.0 -- in other words, through a changed license agreement. If it was simply a change in the business model for Bobby, and a feature downgrade, that would be one thing -- but they actively asserted to me that the omission of the feature was driven by a desire to change the terms under which users purchased Bobby, and those new terms were laid out in the new EULA. Sorry if this wasn't clear in my original post -- I can see how it might be confusing.
Here's a true classic of the "biz-buzz" genre:
Letter to Microsoft HR
Enjoy :-)
This must be an admin-configurable thing; I've seen it happen on some CS servers, but not others. It's definitely not completely unknown, however.
A quick Google search turned these up:
From the Boston Globe: One Year Gap in Bush's National Guard Duty
From the Dallas Morning News (reprinted in the Washington Post): Records of Bush's Alabama Military Duty Cannot Be Found
A guy then used the Freedom of Information Act to get the actual reports detailing Bush's "issues" with reporting for duty: You Can't Just Walk Away
CNN reported Bush's denial (Bush Dismisses Report He Skipped Air National Guard Service), but it's notable what a weak denial it was: "Asked about his Air National Guard attendance record, Bush told reporters it was 'spotty attendance but I did the duty necessary... I did the time that was required in the Guard.' " Not the kind of ringing denial you'd expect if there wasn't at least an element of truth to the story.
Unsurprisingly, the media didn't press him on the issue back during the campaign, and they're certainly not likely to now. But as far as I can see the questions are still open, and the "Bush was AWOL" side seems to have more facts and evidence at their disposal than does the "no he wasn't" side.
Is FORTRAN still alive? Check this out and learn the meaning of Fear:
(Yes, you read that right. FORTRAN.NET. Flee! The Seventh Seal has been opened!)
*cough* Chimera *cough*
I guess other mistakes really don't bother you:
- "grammar", not "gammar"
- "Merriam-Webster", not "Mirriam-Webster"
Just remember, kids... if you're gonna post a spelling flame, be sure to, um, check your spellingMozilla doesn't have a pointy-clicky way to change the useragent out of the box, but you can add that with the Mozilla Useragent Toolbar. That's what I used (on Moz 1.0 RC1) and it got me past Hotmail's browser Nazism without a problem. Many thanks to David Illsley (developer of uabar) for the nifty add-on!
-- Jason Lefkowitz
They already have these in most places. They're called Starbucks. And they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves...
-- Jason Lefkowitz
I believe doing this is my privilege under the principle of fair use. The music industry disagrees. Is this "theft"? How is it different from copying a CD to a tape? What is the magic element that putting it on a hard drive mixes in?
Remember, I am NOT DISTRIBUTING this music! (Not all MP3s are dumped into Kazaa, y'know.)
And yet, even this is too much for the RIAA. They want NO copies. They want NO fair use. In other words, they want to take a legal privilege that I had in the analog world, and revoke it unilaterally, just because the hardware in question has changed -- and because they see an opportunity to force me to buy additional copies of all those CDs, at prices set by their cozy cartel.
In other words, for their private profit, they want to take my rights away. So think about that next time you consider who's a thief.
-- Jason Lefkowitz
And this is why "you in the industry" are in the process of running your insanely profitable businesses into the ground. What you're feeling tightening around your neck is not Napster or Kazaa or Gnutella or whatever -- it's Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand"! Look, it's very simple. When all of your customers feel that you are charging too much for your product, or that your terms of use are too restrictive, or whatever, a black market is going to spring up. Simple as that. It's as true for bread as it is for music -- if every bakery in the US banded together and raised the price universally to $100/loaf, college students would be breaking into grocery stores and selling grey market Wonder Bread out of their dorm rooms. It's the magic of the free market at work.
Now, you say that's dirty pool because people used to think sixteen bucks a CD was a fair price, so they should continue to feel that way. But you've missed the ground shifting underneath your feet. New technologies have devalued your product in the eyes of the public. You need to either reprice it or accept that there's gonna be a certain amount of loss. You can throw out tepid, restrictive alternatives all you want, but why should people buy it? What's your value proposition for the consumer? (That's what businesses are supposed to do, you know -- serve consumers.)
Is grey-market music illegal? Sure. But grey-market bread would be too. Laws that attempt to impose morality on human nature are doomed to failure. Better to figure out how to profit off human nature by providing something useful at a price your audience thinks is fair than to try to ram outdated products and outmoded laws down our throats.
-- Jason Lefkowitz
I can understand why they offer it -- there's probably still a few places where legacy DOS apps are in place, and IBM has a long history of never ever backing away from a technology it's made a "strategic commitment" to. Still, it's funny to click on the "System requirements" link and see "Intel 8088/8086, 512K RAM, 6-18MB hard disk space". Kinda takes ya back, doesn't it? (snif)
-- Jason Lefkowitz
Some examples:
And that's just a few of the more recent posts to his log. Don't get me wrong, Dave is a very thoughtful, articulate guy who's no Microsoft parrot -- he and his company, UserLand Software, were one of the authors of the SOAP specification that is proving so critical for future interoperability. He's just got a keen intelligence and is fond of applying it, which means he'll often come up with a different angle on things than you might expect. Go search his site and I bet you'll find, if not the answer you seek, at least some interesting questions.
-- Jason Lefkowitz
I wonder why the reporter didn't think to ask the CEO of Boeing if he is tormented by feelings of guilt? After all, the attacks showed us that he makes his living selling giant flying bombs that Very Bad People can use to kill thousands of our people in one fell swoop. Surely he must agree that he and his company have blood on their hands, right?
Of course not. Boeing isn't responsible for this tragedy, and neither is Phil Zimmerman (and kudos to Phil for standing up and saying so). Boeing's aircraft have contributed immensely to our national economy by helping make easy commercial air travel possible. Strong crypto has contributed immensely to the economy by helping make the online world a safe, secure place to do business. Both have been misused by evil men to do a great wrong; but they are just tools, with no moral implications beyond those transferred to them through the hands of those who wield them. To place the blame anywhere else is to absolve the monsters behind the attack of the full weight of their crimes.
-- Jason Lefkowitz
-- Jason Lefkowitz
Indeed -- in fact, IBMers were considered so important to the US war effort that the War Department had a separate hierarchy of ranks for servicemen who maintained and supported the IBM systems that drove artillery and other ballistic weapons. So, for example, a Private First Class who worked in this capacity would carry the official rank of PFCI (Private First Class, IBM), and his rank insignia were marked with an "I" to denote his special status.
USA Today ran a good column about Tom Watson Sr. and the way the whole IBM-backed-the-Holocaust group is misrepresenting him and his actions. The whole thing is a mess, and does a disservice to Watson and the other IBMers who did so much to help the Allies win WW2.
... you've already answered your own question. When you need Oracle or DB2, believe me, you will KNOW it, or you're a moron and beyond hope anyway. At my current position I'm managing a Web team responsible for a site that lets users build complex queries that then sling around 16GB databases. We're using MS SQL Server and even with that we look covetously upon Oracle's reliability and scalability. There is no way on God's green earth I'd try to do this in MySQL. I love MySQL, but it's just not ready for prime time for these kinds of applications. Which is why I say you'll know when you need it; if there is any question in your mind, you probably either don't need it or aren't experienced enough to know what you need in the first place, so be careful that you don't put your Free Software Advocate hat on over your Responsible IT Professional hat :-)
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Unfrozen Caveman Bacterium!
"Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know much about your world. I look around and see steel beasts racing down the streets, growling and spitting smoke. I don't know how to operate your 'personal computers' or 'automatic teller machines'. Your ways frighten me! There is one thing I do know, however, and that is that we must outlaw all antibiotics immediately before any more of my harmless brothers are slaughtered. Thank you for your time."
The whole ongoing SDMI fiasco makes one wonder why they even bother trying to create a secure format anyway. In today's CPU-cycle-saturated world, there is no such thing as a truly secure format! If the data behind that wall of encryption is valuable enough, someone, somewhere, will break it -- and in this case, the information is extremely valuable; break SDMI and you've got unlimited access to all the music the world wants, all for free! Who could say no to that?
Now, that's not to say it's impossible to create secure music. But the only way to do that is to take the original master recording directly from the studio to a lead-lined vault ten miles below ground, lock the door, and throw away the key. Be sure to toss the band in there too, so they can't play unauthorized copies or variants of the song during their next concert. Of course, even then you're not truly secure, as the recording engineer or any other people who heard the session could sell his recollection of the arrangement to some cover artist to re-create, so you'd have to lock them in the vault too.
Now you're secure! Of course, you're also unable to sell the recording to anyone. Oops.
Given all that, one wonders why the industry doesn't just cut their losses, declare victory, and go home. They'd be well advised to follow the counsel of Rep. John Kasich, a Republican House member who has based his career on opposition to federal spending on programs that don't make sense. One particular hobby horse of Kasich's was the B-2 Stealth bomber, whose $1 billion per plane price tag Kasich found ludicrous. During one House committee hearing on funding the bomber's development, Kasich asked the Department of Defense witnesses if it wouldn't be cheaper and just as effective to simply announce that we'd built the B-2, rather than actually building any. After all, since the B-2 was supposed to be invisible, how could any enemy be certain we hadn't? Maybe the best outcome for all parties in the SDMI fiasco would be to just roll out a wide-open protocol, declare it secure, and concentrate on doing what they do best -- marketing and promotion of acts with mass appeal -- rather than doing what they are so manifestly bad at -- software engineering. Oh well, one can hope...
$previous_post=~s/gun/car/g;
print $previous_post;
"There is no reason to have universal car registration except for confiscation. Nowhere in the history of this world has car registration NOT lead (sic) to confiscation..."
Oh, wait, that's different -- if some moron gets a hold of a car and goes 95 miles per hour through a residential area, he might hurt somebody! Thankfully, guns require no such safeguards -- any moron can blast away without fear of the Big Bad Gummint coming to check up on exactly what they are blasting away at. God Bless America!!!
Quoth Michael:
Yeah, good thinking there, Michael! The U.S. elections would be much better if they were conducted like ICANN elections. I'd love it if the majority of members of Congress were chosen by an unrepresentative group rather than by public election, and the only voice we got was one token member from each region of the country. It'd be even better if there were completely unreasonable barriers to participation in the process, and election "rules" that change at a moment's notice based on whether or not said unrepresentative group feels that an election might go its way or not. That sounds GREAT!
In all seriousness, it's good to see that at least some people at ICANN will have a clue now. I just hope that they move towards greater transparency and participation so that we don't see a repeat of this year's election fiasco ever again.
Judging from the story on starwars.com, it's not entirely clear whether Lucas is 100% disavowing this rumor or not. Take a close look at Lucas' exact words:
Lucas certainly isn't enthusiastically stating that only Kenny Baker can play R2D2. It sounds to me like Lucas is saying that most of the R2D2 shots can be done with robotic technology; he just wants Kenny to come in for a few specific shots that, for whatever reason, the robotics can't handle. (I'll leave speculation as to whether this is due to technical limitations or to avoid looking publicly like he was dumping Kenny Baker as an exercise for the reader.)
Truth be told, for all the to-do about this story, my sentiments are mixed. While Baker made a great R2D2, Terry Gilliam makes a great point in his commentary track on the Criterion Collection DVD of Time Bandits , which Baker starred in. He says that it's a shame that actors like Baker are forced by their height to spend their lives playing robots and Ewoks, hidden under costume and makeup, rather than playing actual human beings who just happen to be shorter than most. Something worth thinking about while we all wring our hands over whether Kenny gets to spend a week in a robot suit.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Um, no it isn't:
See, that wasn't so hard. If there was a Nazi state today (say, if Hitler hadn't been dumb enough to invade Russia), it would be hard to imagine anything worse than that state having the genome map -- instead of murdering Jews and Slavs and Gypsies and homosexuals and the other "inferior races", they could just engineer them out of existence with the force of the state behind the "genetic cleansing" effort, rather than just personal decisionmaking. Compared to that, I'd say the U.S. is much better prepared to handle this new technology!
Of course, there are serious ethical and philosophical issues at stake with this new technology, as there are with all new technologies. But Katz's hyperbole is a little bit out of proportion to the stakes at hand, as per usual.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Oh, please. The government is developing smart standoff munitions... to silence internal dissidents? Are you serious? Don't you think that any government that was really interested in cracking down on internal dissent would spend more money on lightweight, concealable small arms and body armor for secret police than for bombs that demolish a city block?
Beyond that, I find the whole premise of the book that Katz reviews to be questionable. (Disclaimer: I have not read the book, so I'm relying on Katz's description of its argument.) The "smart weapons" that Ignatieff deplores did not cause the risk-averse culture that he describes. Vietnam created that culture. We have a generation of leaders for whom war is synonymous with messy, low-intensity light infantry conflicts that drag out for years. So those leaders spend money on anything that promises to make those kinds of conflicts obsolete -- laser guided bombs, cruise missiles, robot aircraft, and the rest. They then employ these weapons instead of infantry, in places where infantry would probably be a more war-winning weapon, solely because they are terrified of repeating the Vietnam debacle. Result: conflicts that go half-won because we have ruled out the use of the most effective tool.
So, what's my beef with Ignatieff? By blaming this pattern on the weapons that we've created, he lifts the responsibility from the place it truly belongs -- the leaders. They make the decision to enter into "limited" wars, or to pull out when the first casualties come home. If they didn't have smart weapons, they'd use B-52s loaded with dumb iron bombs, or artillery sited miles away, or anything else except infantry. It's not the smart weapons that are causing this; you can lay that at the feet of our military and political leaders. The smart weapons are just a convenient tool. (Remember, the term "surgical strike" comes from Vietnam, when no smart weapons were in wide deployment.)
We too often fall into the trap of thinking that our whiz-bang technology is the cause a way of thinking. Technology is an expression of human values in steel or silicon. If those values are out of whack, remember that the fault lies with the toolmaker, not with the tool.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
If you want to give a slap in the face to the corporate interests behind George W. and the Gore-Bot 2000, you should call your local Green Party organizer right now and ask how you can get involved. Ralph Nader, the Green Presidential candidate, is committed to reducing the influence that corporations have over our public life. Consider the following items from the Concord Principles, the platform that Nader is running on:
You may say that it's pointless for Nader to take on these issues, since he "can't win". Well, I would argue that someone with his name recognition and integrity can and will be a credible third party candidate; but even if Nader loses, if he pulls ten or fifteen percent of the vote, he will be heard. Remember how nobody cared about the budget deficit until Ross Perot made it his defining issue in 1992? Nader can do the same for the way corporations screw us over every day. Nader's fighting an uphill battle to get on the ballot in several important states, and you can help just by gathering a few signatures to get him there. Even if you're not the Green type, if you care at all about curbing corporate power in this country, you owe it to yourself to at least check out the man's Web site and hear what he has to say.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz