I totally agree with you. I just started hacking around with Cocoa, and I am pretty blown away by how elegant it is.
Objective C is pretty amazing, too. (I couldn't speculate about whether developing for Cocoa with Java is fun or not).
It's a total cliche, but it's true: You only get one shot at making a good API. If it has warts that you want to get rid of later, be assured that millions of developers will have written code that depends on those warts.
You raise fair points, except for this one, and I suspect it may be a misunderstanding:
And if Fund's solutions "skews voter rolls in favor of his party" because it eliminates partisan voter fraud, well, I thought we were all in favor of fair elections?
My contention was that voter ID laws intimidate the poor and disenfranchised, of course.
No, not the same as poll taxes or literacy tests. Proving a legal identity as a citizen is trivial 98%+ of the time.
You might be surprised by how relative the term "trivial" can be. And 2% would be problematic.
I'm not arguing for registration anarchy, of course. And really, you should consider your problem solved since Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, right? John Fund, et al, won. But you probably won't convince me that it was fair elections that Mr. Fund was concerned about.
Looks like we're just going to disagree on this one.
I believe your intentions are good. But the ACORN case is indeed a red herring. You may think it pedantic, but the acorn volunteers didn't commit vote fraud, they committed registration fraud, individually, while canvassing. And what the DoJ and Schlozman did was definitely against protocol and possibly illegal.
And, fwiw, I think you are misguided in looking for more security in the form of voter id laws. It is too close to poll taxes and literacy tests. Like the latter two examples from the bad old days, states and DoJ have been very selective in the way they enforce voting law.
John Fund is a partisan hack, I'm afraid. The crisis he describes doesn't exist, and the solutions to these non-problems reliably skews voter rolls in favor of his party. YMMV, but I think you will find much more useful information about the incident in the transcripts from the Senate hearings. But, again, YMMV.
It doesn't stop illegal aliens from voting. It doesn't stop college students and Florida snowbirds from voting in two places. It doesn't stop groups like ACORN from registering fictitious voters.
You do know that these examples are red herrings, right? The ACORN example in particular was onerous enough to warrant a congressional hearing, as announcing indictments on the eve of an election is against Justice Dept procedure. In addition, the indictments were announced by interim AUSA Bradley Schlozman, who replaced Todd Graves, who was pushed out for refusing to play ball.
There is election manipulation, but it is pretty much the exactly the opposite of your suspicions. The problem is definitely not "illegals" voting for liberals. Sorry.
Also, there's no way you can use John Fund as a reference with a straight face.
Playing the devil's advocate, what you call "legaleze" appears indecipherable because it uses specialized forms to eliminate (or try to) ambiguity.
This is almost a meme on slashdot now: Legal language is similar to code, in that both must use arcane structures to be unambiguous; ideally, any machine will interpret code the same way every time according to the rules of the language, and, ideally, an interpretation of a legal document will be similarly consistent.
That's often not the case, of course. But when it is abused, it is not the language that is at fault but the obfuscation. Banning legal language would be like banning C because it can be so spectacularly obfuscated.
This is a much more abstract conversation than I intended to have. Suffice to say, we have different positions on the role of national government, though your thoughts are well-reasoned.
All I was trying to say is that McDowell and Glass are not approaching this policy dilemma from Libertarianism. What they are after is a de facto regulation: an FCC decision that enshrines a service provider's right to inspect, alter, and stop traffic; even to the point of dictating what software you are allowed to run on your personal machine.
As a free expression advocate, I found his appeal to nntp users offensive. If I were a Libertarian, I think I would find his appeal to free-marketeers equally offensive.
No, the disingenuous bit was trying to appeal to usenet users, free-speech advocates, and small-government Libertarians. The submitter and Commissioner McDowell are not concerned about any of these groups. In fact, what they are proposing would almost certainly negatively affect all of the above.
I don't share your opinion about regulation, but you have to see that you are being manipulated. This is not about small-goverment conservatism. This is about giving telecoms and ISPs the freedom to VCast-ify the net. No unapproved applications (for security;) ). No unapproved encryption (exceptions for white-listed shopping and banking sites). No unapproved VPNs or SSH.
But hey, look at the high-bandwidth Celine Dion webcast! Check out the low latency on your FPS!
Not to be flip... Nothing personal, just a little angry. McDowell and Glass do not share your philosophy. See for yourself.
Here's my favorite bit:
There are other problems with P2P as well. It congests networks, degrading quality of service for other customers. It exploits known weaknesses in the TCP/IP protocol -- which became obvious when I was here at Stanford but have never been adequately fixed -- to seize priority over applications such as voice over IP that really need priority. And it's mostly used for piracy of intellectual property -- something we can't condone [emphases mine].
I think we may have differing definitions of troll. To me, submitting a story appealing to nntp users, well-meaning libertarians, and freedom of speech and expression advocates, while having an agenda that is, in fact, at cross purposes with those groups, seems a bit trollish.
It seems like your agenda is to give ISPs the right to block the services and software that most of us here on/. depend on every day in our careers. If you didn't mean it, I don't know why you said it in your letter to the FCC or in your testimony. Your words seem unambiguous...
Your vitriol towards "lobbyists" also seems strange, as the person you are praising was the vice-president and assistant general counsel to a FCC lobbyist group directly before his appointment.
I'm totally willing to listen to your explanation. I'm really not a troll.
[...] when I attempted to retrieve my e-mail, I
discovered that the virtual private networking protocol I was attempting to use to secure the transaction -
the SSH or "secure shell" protocol had been blocked. The FCC's network adminstrators - following best
industry practices [emphasis added] - had decided to open only certain specific TCP ports to users of the service which they
provided to the public within the building.
ISPs should inspect traffic and block applications
An application (a technical term for any computer program which is not an operating system) encodes and
embodies behavior - any behavior at all that the author wants. And anyone can write one. So, insisting
that an ISP allow a user to run any application means that anyone can program his or her computer to
behave any way at all - no matter how destructively - on the Internet, and the ISP is not allowed to
intervene. In short, such a requirement means that no network provider can have an enforceable
Acceptable Use Policy or Terms of Service.
This is a recipe for disaster [emphasis added].
McDowell is extensively involved in civic and political affairs. He has served on numerous boards and commissions. He was appointed by Virginia Governor George Allen to the Governor's Advisory Board for a Safe and Drug-Free Virginia, and to the Virginia Board for Contractors, to which he was reappointed by Governor Jim Gilmore. Also he is a veteran of several presidential campaigns, serving as counsel to the Bush-Cheney Florida Recount Team in 2000 and leading advance teams for President and Mrs. Bush in 2004, among many other endeavors.
Libertarians, I know he's speaking your language with this regulation==evil talk, but he does not have your interests at heart.
I totally fail to see how allowing ISPs to inspect and mangle data passing through their system is "pro-competition" or even "anti-regulation". These people want to destroy the internet as we know it.
What do you think that's going to do to their revenue stream?
Frankly, AC, I don't give a damn.
I don't think that the FBI should give a damn, either. Or Congress, or the courts.
In a world where the cost of distribution is effectively zero, their business model needs to change. Cliche, I know.
The worst case scenario if the industry lost the battle to control distribution: Two years free of craptacular films while the industry reorganizes, trimming executive fat (and as for shareholders... Well, I don't give a damn about them, either). Art houses will do fine, and a smaller mainstream theater industry will remain (where patrons are paying for a ride on a $100 000 system).
In summary, I don't believe the health of any part of the entertainment industry is worth this invasion of people's lives. Basic human rights are more important than Hollywood's survival.
You mentioned Bollywood. I would like to add Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, and show you a counter-example to your "happy medium". The film industry of these cities flourishes, in spite of an almost complete disregard for our style of intellectual property law in Asia.
It is my personal opinion that freeing information will do more for a nation's economy than protecting the distribution rights of a particular industry.
Getting defensive about your choice of a/v cable is sad.
I suppose it's useless for me to tell you that you're wrong about linux boxes, hdmi, and drm. But, fwiw, you're wrong about linux boxes, hdmi, and drm.
I don't think your parents had a dumb idea when they decided to have children. But, honestly, it depresses the hell out of me that you are wasting the perfectly good dna (probably) that they gave you on screwing with people like jedidiah because you're insecure about your a/v cables.
That said, I think it's pretty obvious that the commission makes biased decisions all the time. The Republican commissioners are almost always unified, and the Democrat commissioners seem to swing over to the "regulation is bad, m'kay" position a lot of the time.
No, I'm afraid you don't really understand. The 1992 law is a piece of a strategy that has, so far, failed. The idea, as described in the signing statement, is to "[...] encourage future commercial opportunities" by "[...] supporting investments in new remote sensing technologies".
This law (and many others that failed, thankfully), came out of a philosophy that proposed that private interests could do a better job than the government at disseminating data. It's totally cynical, of course: These entities just wanted to charge for what NOAA could distribute for free and make sure that any data that NOAA and similar agencies already had was "licensed" to them (i.e. not given away).
Accuweather's (for one) last attempt to "privatize" data was in 2005. It's almost a bi-annual effort.
On reflection, I can see how you could make a case for this law in the realm of remote imaging from satellites. This law was written for Digital Globe. The justification was that an imaging company needed government help to make the work economically feasible. But, obviously, the X-Prize foundation has a different philosophy on encouraging space exploration:).
Sucks that the DoC got stuck with implementing this thing. My main point is this: This is not NOAA's fault. Somebody at the Commerce Department threw a hissy (likely somebody at Digital Globe or GeoEye complained), and this law is indeed on the books.
Again, in summary: Please don't blame NOAA. They do amazing work, give us all the data we want for free with no hassle, and have resisted efforts to take away our (taxpayers) data. They're the good guys. Seriously. Very good nerds. Nerds that we can only dream of becoming someday.
This is law, and is totally out of the control of NOAA.
I've done a lot of work with NOAA and NOAA datasets and this sort of thing happens a lot, because of businesses who believe that "the government should not be in the business of distributing data". Predictably, they lobby congress. FWIW, I've witnessed NOAA passively resist this bullshit as much as they can.
BTW, if you find this sort thing disgusting (as I do), stop going to weather.com and accu-weather. They are the worst offenders. Every couple of years they try to shut down NOAA ftp servers so they can be the gatekeepers of taxpayer-funded data (like maps).
This law, in particular, is a piece of a strategy that didn't work in the early 90s, thanks in large part to career people at NOAA. They got this law passed, but they weren't able to shut down the ftp servers.
Please don't blame the NOAA people. Blame the businesses like weather.com and accu-weather, and blame a bribable congress.
If you can't be bothered to read seven paragraphs in a wikipedia article, my other comments, or RobertM1968's comments, I don't know why I should think you'll read this. But since this is definitely Stuff That Matters, here goes:
HDCP is only required when you play blu-ray or hd-dvd discs.
You remember saying this, right? This was reason number one I responded. Because it's not true.
The second wrong statement (admittedly imho) was that RobertM1978 was being paranoid. It's not a "conspiracy theory" that Microsoft colludes with hardware manufacturers and makes arbitrary requirements to harm competitors. Winmodems were a good example.
The scenario goes thusly: License the design to a manufacturer. Put a sticker on the box that says "Vista Required". Make it required by using an hdmi interface. If you want to use your shiny new monitor, you have to use an operating system and software that has suspicious (and proprietary, non-free as in beer and speech) twisted DRM code all the way down to the metal (which is what Vista is).
See? You had it backwards. Vista doesn't require your monitor, your monitor requires Vista!
[...] what on earth makes you think Microsoft would REQUIRE it for GENERAL PURPOSE equipment?
If you use an hdcp interface, such as dvi-p, hdmi, gvif, or udi (if that's still alive), then this is already the case. Your equipment won't work if your software is not an hdcp source.
Please just say "Thanks for explaining, I was wrong". This is the last thing I'm going to write on this thread.
I suppose Microsoft could agree to require it on DRMed media [...]
One the fancy new "features" of Vista is "Output Content Protection", which makes your pc compatible with HDCP-enabled sinks (and now with hdmi, any 1080p device). Here's the docs (from 3 years ago): http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/media/output_protect.mspx.
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I totally agree with you. I just started hacking around with Cocoa, and I am pretty blown away by how elegant it is.
Objective C is pretty amazing, too. (I couldn't speculate about whether developing for Cocoa with Java is fun or not).
It's a total cliche, but it's true: You only get one shot at making a good API. If it has warts that you want to get rid of later, be assured that millions of developers will have written code that depends on those warts.
You raise fair points, except for this one, and I suspect it may be a misunderstanding:
My contention was that voter ID laws intimidate the poor and disenfranchised, of course.
You might be surprised by how relative the term "trivial" can be. And 2% would be problematic.
I'm not arguing for registration anarchy, of course. And really, you should consider your problem solved since Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, right? John Fund, et al, won. But you probably won't convince me that it was fair elections that Mr. Fund was concerned about.
Looks like we're just going to disagree on this one.
I believe your intentions are good. But the ACORN case is indeed a red herring. You may think it pedantic, but the acorn volunteers didn't commit vote fraud, they committed registration fraud, individually, while canvassing. And what the DoJ and Schlozman did was definitely against protocol and possibly illegal.
And, fwiw, I think you are misguided in looking for more security in the form of voter id laws. It is too close to poll taxes and literacy tests. Like the latter two examples from the bad old days, states and DoJ have been very selective in the way they enforce voting law.
John Fund is a partisan hack, I'm afraid. The crisis he describes doesn't exist, and the solutions to these non-problems reliably skews voter rolls in favor of his party. YMMV, but I think you will find much more useful information about the incident in the transcripts from the Senate hearings. But, again, YMMV.
You do know that these examples are red herrings, right? The ACORN example in particular was onerous enough to warrant a congressional hearing, as announcing indictments on the eve of an election is against Justice Dept procedure. In addition, the indictments were announced by interim AUSA Bradley Schlozman, who replaced Todd Graves, who was pushed out for refusing to play ball.
There is election manipulation, but it is pretty much the exactly the opposite of your suspicions. The problem is definitely not "illegals" voting for liberals. Sorry.
Also, there's no way you can use John Fund as a reference with a straight face.
Playing the devil's advocate, what you call "legaleze" appears indecipherable because it uses specialized forms to eliminate (or try to) ambiguity.
This is almost a meme on slashdot now: Legal language is similar to code, in that both must use arcane structures to be unambiguous; ideally, any machine will interpret code the same way every time according to the rules of the language, and, ideally, an interpretation of a legal document will be similarly consistent.
That's often not the case, of course. But when it is abused, it is not the language that is at fault but the obfuscation. Banning legal language would be like banning C because it can be so spectacularly obfuscated.
Thanks for that.
Mr. Glass is unbelievable. I wish the orthodox Libertarians weren't so credulous.
This is a much more abstract conversation than I intended to have. Suffice to say, we have different positions on the role of national government, though your thoughts are well-reasoned.
All I was trying to say is that McDowell and Glass are not approaching this policy dilemma from Libertarianism. What they are after is a de facto regulation: an FCC decision that enshrines a service provider's right to inspect, alter, and stop traffic; even to the point of dictating what software you are allowed to run on your personal machine.
As a free expression advocate, I found his appeal to nntp users offensive. If I were a Libertarian, I think I would find his appeal to free-marketeers equally offensive.
No, the disingenuous bit was trying to appeal to usenet users, free-speech advocates, and small-government Libertarians. The submitter and Commissioner McDowell are not concerned about any of these groups. In fact, what they are proposing would almost certainly negatively affect all of the above.
This (pdf) is what Mr. Glass is about.
I don't share your opinion about regulation, but you have to see that you are being manipulated. This is not about small-goverment conservatism. This is about giving telecoms and ISPs the freedom to VCast-ify the net. No unapproved applications (for security ;) ). No unapproved encryption (exceptions for white-listed shopping and banking sites). No unapproved VPNs or SSH.
But hey, look at the high-bandwidth Celine Dion webcast! Check out the low latency on your FPS!
Not to be flip... Nothing personal, just a little angry. McDowell and Glass do not share your philosophy. See for yourself.
Here's my favorite bit:
I think we may have differing definitions of troll. To me, submitting a story appealing to nntp users, well-meaning libertarians, and freedom of speech and expression advocates, while having an agenda that is, in fact, at cross purposes with those groups, seems a bit trollish.
It seems like your agenda is to give ISPs the right to block the services and software that most of us here on /. depend on every day in our careers. If you didn't mean it, I don't know why you said it in your letter to the FCC or in your testimony. Your words seem unambiguous...
Your vitriol towards "lobbyists" also seems strange, as the person you are praising was the vice-president and assistant general counsel to a FCC lobbyist group directly before his appointment.
I'm totally willing to listen to your explanation. I'm really not a troll.
That's not an answer. And yes, we all love Unix, but pandering to us isn't going to help your cause.
Do you think that ISPs blocking SSH traffic is an industry "best practice"?
Do you believe that subscribers running their own applications is a "recipe for disaster"?
If there was any doubt about this being an "online strategy" to affect the FCC's decision, parent should have removed it for you.
Tricks are for kids.
I have some questions for you.
Do you stand by the following statements in your 2008-09-20 letter to the FCC?
ISPs should block SSH
ISPs should inspect traffic and block applications
Here is the trade association (read: telecom lobbyist group) that he served as assistant General Counsel and Vice President: http://www.comptel.org/.
From his bio:
Libertarians, I know he's speaking your language with this regulation==evil talk, but he does not have your interests at heart.
I totally fail to see how allowing ISPs to inspect and mangle data passing through their system is "pro-competition" or even "anti-regulation". These people want to destroy the internet as we know it.
Frankly, AC, I don't give a damn.
I don't think that the FBI should give a damn, either. Or Congress, or the courts.
In a world where the cost of distribution is effectively zero, their business model needs to change. Cliche, I know.
The worst case scenario if the industry lost the battle to control distribution: Two years free of craptacular films while the industry reorganizes, trimming executive fat (and as for shareholders... Well, I don't give a damn about them, either). Art houses will do fine, and a smaller mainstream theater industry will remain (where patrons are paying for a ride on a $100 000 system).
In summary, I don't believe the health of any part of the entertainment industry is worth this invasion of people's lives. Basic human rights are more important than Hollywood's survival.
You mentioned Bollywood. I would like to add Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, and show you a counter-example to your "happy medium". The film industry of these cities flourishes, in spite of an almost complete disregard for our style of intellectual property law in Asia.
It is my personal opinion that freeing information will do more for a nation's economy than protecting the distribution rights of a particular industry.
Getting defensive about your choice of a/v cable is sad.
I suppose it's useless for me to tell you that you're wrong about linux boxes, hdmi, and drm. But, fwiw, you're wrong about linux boxes, hdmi, and drm.
I don't think your parents had a dumb idea when they decided to have children. But, honestly, it depresses the hell out of me that you are wasting the perfectly good dna (probably) that they gave you on screwing with people like jedidiah because you're insecure about your a/v cables.
Indeed, the body of FCC commissioners is designed to be double-sided.
That said, I think it's pretty obvious that the commission makes biased decisions all the time. The Republican commissioners are almost always unified, and the Democrat commissioners seem to swing over to the "regulation is bad, m'kay" position a lot of the time.
No, I'm afraid you don't really understand. The 1992 law is a piece of a strategy that has, so far, failed. The idea, as described in the signing statement, is to "[...] encourage future commercial opportunities" by "[...] supporting investments in new remote sensing technologies".
This law (and many others that failed, thankfully), came out of a philosophy that proposed that private interests could do a better job than the government at disseminating data. It's totally cynical, of course: These entities just wanted to charge for what NOAA could distribute for free and make sure that any data that NOAA and similar agencies already had was "licensed" to them (i.e. not given away).
Accuweather's (for one) last attempt to "privatize" data was in 2005. It's almost a bi-annual effort.
On reflection, I can see how you could make a case for this law in the realm of remote imaging from satellites. This law was written for Digital Globe. The justification was that an imaging company needed government help to make the work economically feasible. But, obviously, the X-Prize foundation has a different philosophy on encouraging space exploration :).
Sucks that the DoC got stuck with implementing this thing. My main point is this: This is not NOAA's fault. Somebody at the Commerce Department threw a hissy (likely somebody at Digital Globe or GeoEye complained), and this law is indeed on the books.
Again, in summary: Please don't blame NOAA. They do amazing work, give us all the data we want for free with no hassle, and have resisted efforts to take away our (taxpayers) data. They're the good guys. Seriously. Very good nerds. Nerds that we can only dream of becoming someday.
If you move laterally to this thread, everything there is pretty right on (I had forgotten about the rainmaker telnet... very cool).
I don't know for sure that they're not evil, but wunderground.com has a nexrad interface that is the bee's knees.
This is law, and is totally out of the control of NOAA.
I've done a lot of work with NOAA and NOAA datasets and this sort of thing happens a lot, because of businesses who believe that "the government should not be in the business of distributing data". Predictably, they lobby congress. FWIW, I've witnessed NOAA passively resist this bullshit as much as they can.
BTW, if you find this sort thing disgusting (as I do), stop going to weather.com and accu-weather. They are the worst offenders. Every couple of years they try to shut down NOAA ftp servers so they can be the gatekeepers of taxpayer-funded data (like maps).
This law, in particular, is a piece of a strategy that didn't work in the early 90s, thanks in large part to career people at NOAA. They got this law passed, but they weren't able to shut down the ftp servers.
Please don't blame the NOAA people. Blame the businesses like weather.com and accu-weather, and blame a bribable congress.
Well, good on you, then. Enjoy.
You forgot to mention getting people to buy hdmi equipment (the latest attempt at closing the analog hole).
Screwing people out of their rights and getting them to pay you for the privilege. Brilliant.
If you can't be bothered to read seven paragraphs in a wikipedia article, my other comments, or RobertM1968's comments, I don't know why I should think you'll read this. But since this is definitely Stuff That Matters, here goes:
You remember saying this, right? This was reason number one I responded. Because it's not true.
The second wrong statement (admittedly imho) was that RobertM1978 was being paranoid. It's not a "conspiracy theory" that Microsoft colludes with hardware manufacturers and makes arbitrary requirements to harm competitors. Winmodems were a good example.
The scenario goes thusly: License the design to a manufacturer. Put a sticker on the box that says "Vista Required". Make it required by using an hdmi interface. If you want to use your shiny new monitor, you have to use an operating system and software that has suspicious (and proprietary, non-free as in beer and speech) twisted DRM code all the way down to the metal (which is what Vista is).
See? You had it backwards. Vista doesn't require your monitor, your monitor requires Vista!
If you use an hdcp interface, such as dvi-p, hdmi, gvif, or udi (if that's still alive), then this is already the case. Your equipment won't work if your software is not an hdcp source.
Please just say "Thanks for explaining, I was wrong". This is the last thing I'm going to write on this thread.
In the past few minutes, the UK technical manager for Foxconn has posted on ubuntuforums.
He sounds genuinely sorry, and says that the bios will be fixed next week, and they will look into their testing procedures.
It looks like maybe OP just had the bad luck of getting a support person who didn't know enough to pass him up to another support level.
WTF? Why is GP being modded interesting?
Summary: GP is objectively wrong. Look it up if you must.
Here's a link to the white paper from DCP (owners of HDCP) (pdf).
One the fancy new "features" of Vista is "Output Content Protection", which makes your pc compatible with HDCP-enabled sinks (and now with hdmi, any 1080p device). Here's the docs (from 3 years ago): http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/media/output_protect.mspx.
@Ahnteis: Nothing personal.