The tire makers are just trying to comply with the law! The TREAD (Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation) Act requires tire makers to track all of their tires in case they need to recall them.
Recalls are not driving this. It would be cheaper to do this another way and unique IDs are not needed for recalls.
Does anyone think it's cheaper to "invest" in all new equipment than it is to use established bar codes? Tell me why the company can't paint a nice little white bar coded serial number on the side of the tire? Everyone's got barcode readers and they would be more practical. How is a tire shop going to check the serial number of a single tire, when every tire in range answers?
RFIDs are only useful for others who have nothing to do with tire recalls. Does anyone really expect to be told that their tires are recalled? Most recalls are silent, you either find out about them on your own from paid advertisements or you don't. While it would be very nice for Michalin to contact me if my particular lot of tires is bum, I don't see what that has to do with someone being able to ID my car from a distance. If tire lot is all you need, why the unique number? Won't unique serial numbers actually impeed lot recognition? When tires are sold at a shop all the information the company needs to meet the stated goal is collected. After that, no one else needs to know who you are.
The biggest hazard, as others have pointed out, is to people stepping out doors. A year or two ago a proffesor at LSU was KILLED by a golf cart. The poor guy got his head crushed in the door frame. Golf carts may be bigger than this Segway thingy, but the principle remains the same and the Segway moves faster. It may not be a good idea to have Segways on sidewalks.
For some reason we put up with the hazards that automobiles create. Handguns have not caught up to them yet, and I doubt Segways ever will.
TRtech is AOL Thanks, but no thanks for the training wheels. After almost ten years of paying for AOL, I'm going to kill the account. Their email IS useless due to spam but I've thought of the $10/month fee as a Mozilla supporter. The money will now go to the Free Software Foundation.
How about Denial of Service problems? If only AOL, M$N, and five of their best friends are alowed to run mail servers, it would be trivial to disrupt email and impossible for the rest of us to route around the damage. This is not the way the internet is supposed to work, it's the way dead tree publications work.
I'm shocked and appauled that people at MIT would say such clueless stuff.
Now, if what you meant to say was "port 25 blocking should be instituted for people on dialup addresses", I might be slightly more inclined to agree with that. There's a lot less accountability with dialup (read: modem) addresses (due to free trial accounts) than there is with cable or DSL
That's hard to square with you previous statement about not judging based in IP address. Some of us don't feel like spending an extra $30/month for accelerated advert browsing. Give me a break will you?
The real solution is to make those who abuse email pay for that abuse by simply outlawing spam.
To make your analogy more accurate. The homeless man was going into the restraunt, goosing the waitresses, yelling and throwing stuff until the customers left.
That's close, but it's more like the troll did the same thing with 50 robots and whores so that no one could even get in the door, much less carry on a conversation or enjoy being there.
I like this and hope all the Steve Barktos and their company sponsors are ruined. That's right, whores, I'd like to see you lose your jobs, houses and reputations for such activity.
That 40 year old fridge used about 200-300% more energy than a newer model...
Even if that is true, imagine how much energy, and other resources are saved by not having to replace it. It seems to use the same kind of compressors as new units, except it can be smaller thanks to it's use of older and now banned freon.
many companies are exploring the potential of software to improve products by making them more durable. Software replaces knobs that break and mechanical parts that wear out, and it allows customers to fix and add features without buying a new machine. Software updates can be delivered to customers over the Web.
Does this strike anyone else as very cynical way of introducing the new "planned obsolescense"? We've already seen it in the computer world, you have to buy another one because the "software driver" is no longer "supported." There's a fridge in my grandparent's house that's fourty years old and it works great. Their oven is fifty years old. The newest appience they owned was a twenty year old microwave oven. All of it was worked by simple, but sturdy knobs and levers. I don't see many electronic components built with that kind of life expectancy. Far from expecting a software update for my fridge, I'm expecting someone to tell me that I'll have to buy a new one because they don't support that model anymore.
Free software could help, but only if it's used up front and consistently by the manufacturer. OEMs that work that way already don't have reliability problems anyway and will really use this as a means of improving their appliances. They will most likely take free software and use it to reduce their development and upkeep costs, use the same processor in all of their units and be able to make eveything work in a well mannered and published way. Those that don't work this way will purchase the cheapest processor available and waste money developing everything all over again, perhaps outsourcing the works, so that the people who really know what makes the device work don't write the software.
You ask and state, "What was wrong with turning a dial? Big dials are fast and I don't have to take my eyes off of the road to do it like you do in the BMW 745."
Quoth the article:
Consider BMW and its luxury 745i sedan.... the car contains around 70 microprocessors. Its most striking feature, iDrive, is what Car and Driver magazine classifies as a "miracle knob." This single element of the dashboard is designed, through a computerized console, to replace more than 200 buttons that control everything from the position of seats to aspects of the navigation of the car itself to climate, communications and entertainment systems.
So it's not really a knob? I can just imagine a single knob that set's my seat position, changes my radio station, opens my trunk and changes my gears. It would be a miracle if the only the silly computers crashed.
My oldest computer manual is still useful. Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs Manual, Sixth Edition, Version 18, March 1987 is still useful. Stuff about Excell 4 and what are not.
No. If you could limit peer to peer to only allow people that you personally know to download your files, fine. However, most of the people downloading from you or that you download from are not your friends. They are other members of the network.
P2P is not a mass publication. It is supposed to link you up with people of similar interests. I'd like to think of those kinds of people as friends and indeed when I meet them they might be. The service works by sharing the load of distribution. If the cumulative effect is not to the liking of current music publishers, that is too bad for them, it does not make the individuals involved republishers. Indeed those users who's service becomes excessive quickly turn off their clients so that they can use their network for other things.
it's already begun! how much are those trolls getting paid?!
Ever met a rich whore? Neither have I. People who sell out like that are always pawns and never have anything.
The wistle blower should not be trusted. If he had left while the effort was ongoing instead of after it was shut down, his credibility would be much greater. I don't believe him when he says that he did not engage in cracking and other illegal activity. We have several posts here that attest to the fact that people are using the P2P networks to spread viruses. All we can be sure of is that the RIAA and friends are doing everything in their power to eliminate fair use music sharing.
They hate music sharing because they don't control it. If people are free to share what they realy enjoy instead of being forced to listen to programs designed to sell 40 albums a year, the recorded music world will once again regain the diversity the real music world still has and we will start to see more recording lables than you can shake a stick at. The RIAA will be ruined, of course. Oh well.
You are trapped in many industry spawned falacies when you say:
See, you're breaking the law from the privacy of your own home. This means that the government doesn't see that you're doing it, so you're not making much of a statement. You're not going to acheive anything doing it this way, and you know it. This makes it not civil disobedience, but regular lawbreaking.
Not everyone believes that fair use sharing of their music with a few friends is illegal. It does not constitute a republication and therefore does not violate copyright. This is essentially what peer to peer does, it simply eliminates the need to copy things onto tapes or a CD. Most people, don't think there is anything wrong with music sharing any more than they think there's something wrong with lending a book or getting together to watch a movie in their living room.
The movie and music industry would like us to believe that sharing is wrong, but people are not going to be convinced. You understand why "hiding" in your house works, don't you? It's because people would be outraged if the police started breaking into private houses because their teen age children had swapped a few dozen songs over the home computer. Just let them do that and see what kinds of laws get enacted. They are trying to take away everyone's rights by pretending that only a few people can or want to engage in music sharing. Don't worry, they are wrong and it's not going to work.
Because we're sitting around discussing this on Slashdot...
Heh! Where else are you going to learn about the free software that will end this latest nightmare addition to the closed software, turn the crank, money waster?
How many times does a consultant solve the problems of US business, accounting, orders, inventory and all that jazz?
You think that Utilities won't discover "outsourcing". Wrong - it's already happened as they focused on "core business." I worked for a large Utility operations company and they had fired most of their IT folks a few year back, saying "we're a generating company, not a software company." It was really brain dead because their in house staff had developed wonderful custom software that worked very well. It cost them $5 million. Now they are buying a $10 million package to replace it that's doomed to failure because it's being built by clueless upper management types who talk about things like Six Sigma and what not.
You then predict:
First, the outsourcing trend is going to worsen. Corporate America is going to increasingly ship its IT work overseas to companies like Wipro. Mostly this is because corporate America is greedy, short-sighted, and fairly stupid, and has absolutely no problem with skewering the economy and destroying the middle class if they can squeeze a little more profit out of the system in the short term.
I say it is entirely possible that corporate America will not stay clueless forever and will discover, free software. This will end the wasteful duplication of closed source software and indeed require local talent to oversee and develop. Those in corporate America who move in that direction first will realize many savings.
There is one way to stop the hemorage of US money and fix this: free software. Think about it, much of this programing is closed source waste and duplication. They are solving the same problems over and over again. No money is saved, even at 1/4 price, if you have to buy it eight times. Just remember that as this practice has been going up, IT budgets have also been rising. Free software could stop this hemorage of US currency and put you back to work. It's not the software that matters, it's knowing how to use it to get something done. Of course, in a free software world, we won't have to think of our fellow programers as "competition" any more, but as our peers and friends. There 15,000 "technologists" could be doing better work at home too. I'd like to see more of them designing semi-conductor masks than rewriting comercial applications for big stupid US companies.
While I don't doubt the ability of people around the world to write software, that little blurb only proves this company was involved in some high level bull shit. Of course, those who do are those who know. Certs have been discussed ad nauseum here, and few people have respect for them.
Six Sigma is some kind of formalized screw up analysis process of the kind only highly regulated and industries could love. When you see that, you know all involved are clueless. Got your "black belt" yet? Eye glazing is an understatement.
It's easy to find a project manager willing to praise his project to the stars, deserved or not.
You ask, Do YOU really want Congress deciding this issue., and I have to answer yes. Congress is responsible for copyright law and should adjust it according to technology available. When the price of publication falls, less exclusivity is needed to promote the useful arts and the lenght of copyright should be shortened. If technology is used to defeat the public domain, Congress may decide that copyright is no longer necessary.
You think I'm a loon? Congress is elected and it's members will do what it takes to stay that way. It's a simple matter to convince people their rights are being infringed, given the current state of outrageous copyright laws. If the public turns its attention to this issue for long, they might just understand it - and poof, many Mikey Mouse schemes will vaporize. Publishers make their living by wooing the public. Time lays waste the plans of mice and men.
You say, "and they arguably have a better core system than any of their competitors anyway."
Please name that "competitor," I'd love to know of any software system flakier than M$ and avoid it.
You then claim, "They've already run through their shared source program with various universities and no dirty laundry leaked out." I'm not sure what you mean by that. The reputation M$ enjoys is based on the performance of their product line compounded by deceptive marketing and licensing. I doubt there was much more to tell at the Universities even if the participants wanted to break their NDAs.
All and all, however, I agree with you, Microsoft must free their code if they wish to remain relavant. Using free software has done good things for IBM. It's arguable that Microsoft could maintain their market dominance if they were to free their code. What's not debatable is the fact that the rest of the world no longer trusts Microsoft and its closed source model and is in the process of replacing them with free software they can trust. As you point out, it's not like they are going to lose revenue where Windoze is pirated.
Once I compared free to closed source software to the difference between marriage and protitution. A man choses a whore at random, has no trust of it, has no responsibiltity for it and might just be done in by it. A man choses a wife on merrit and must do all in his power to engener trust and mutual development. A normal man is happy to share his wife socially and sees that reasonable contact with the world does both of them good. This case, however, makes me think that prostition is too good a thing to compare with closed source software, it's more like a spank mag.
This little peek does about as much good for the parties concerned as porn. Those governments can fantisize over what little M$ lets them see, but they have no more an idea of what they are looking at than they have ownership or control of it. Quality, of course, suffers. In the microsoft case, quality suffers intentionally.
Cost issues are secondary, but it should be obvious that costs are extreem for closed source software as M$ rakes in more money each year and has a larger budget than many countries do.
Slashdot Mirror
Recalls are not driving this. It would be cheaper to do this another way and unique IDs are not needed for recalls.
Does anyone think it's cheaper to "invest" in all new equipment than it is to use established bar codes? Tell me why the company can't paint a nice little white bar coded serial number on the side of the tire? Everyone's got barcode readers and they would be more practical. How is a tire shop going to check the serial number of a single tire, when every tire in range answers?
RFIDs are only useful for others who have nothing to do with tire recalls. Does anyone really expect to be told that their tires are recalled? Most recalls are silent, you either find out about them on your own from paid advertisements or you don't. While it would be very nice for Michalin to contact me if my particular lot of tires is bum, I don't see what that has to do with someone being able to ID my car from a distance. If tire lot is all you need, why the unique number? Won't unique serial numbers actually impeed lot recognition? When tires are sold at a shop all the information the company needs to meet the stated goal is collected. After that, no one else needs to know who you are.
For some reason we put up with the hazards that automobiles create. Handguns have not caught up to them yet, and I doubt Segways ever will.
The get in the way of my skateboard, and let me tell you, when you get hit by my 200 lb gut and big ugly head you had better be wearing a helmet!
What kind of picture is this to paint?
With a long white goatee and stout body, Hughes resembles Orson Welles in his later days...
He sometimes taught English classes at West Point with a parakeet perched on his shoulder...
"He's a military man who says, 'I know where my hill is, and I'm going to take it,' and he didn't really care who got in the way."
Arrrr, me hardies! 100 watts for all and a broadside at those worthless telcos!
He's right, you know.
TRtech is AOL Thanks, but no thanks for the training wheels. After almost ten years of paying for AOL, I'm going to kill the account. Their email IS useless due to spam but I've thought of the $10/month fee as a Mozilla supporter. The money will now go to the Free Software Foundation.
I'm shocked and appauled that people at MIT would say such clueless stuff.
Now, if what you meant to say was "port 25 blocking should be instituted for people on dialup addresses", I might be slightly more inclined to agree with that. There's a lot less accountability with dialup (read: modem) addresses (due to free trial accounts) than there is with cable or DSL
That's hard to square with you previous statement about not judging based in IP address. Some of us don't feel like spending an extra $30/month for accelerated advert browsing. Give me a break will you?
The real solution is to make those who abuse email pay for that abuse by simply outlawing spam.
That's close, but it's more like the troll did the same thing with 50 robots and whores so that no one could even get in the door, much less carry on a conversation or enjoy being there.
I like this and hope all the Steve Barktos and their company sponsors are ruined. That's right, whores, I'd like to see you lose your jobs, houses and reputations for such activity.
Even if that is true, imagine how much energy, and other resources are saved by not having to replace it. It seems to use the same kind of compressors as new units, except it can be smaller thanks to it's use of older and now banned freon.
many companies are exploring the potential of software to improve products by making them more durable. Software replaces knobs that break and mechanical parts that wear out, and it allows customers to fix and add features without buying a new machine. Software updates can be delivered to customers over the Web.
Does this strike anyone else as very cynical way of introducing the new "planned obsolescense"? We've already seen it in the computer world, you have to buy another one because the "software driver" is no longer "supported." There's a fridge in my grandparent's house that's fourty years old and it works great. Their oven is fifty years old. The newest appience they owned was a twenty year old microwave oven. All of it was worked by simple, but sturdy knobs and levers. I don't see many electronic components built with that kind of life expectancy. Far from expecting a software update for my fridge, I'm expecting someone to tell me that I'll have to buy a new one because they don't support that model anymore.
Free software could help, but only if it's used up front and consistently by the manufacturer. OEMs that work that way already don't have reliability problems anyway and will really use this as a means of improving their appliances. They will most likely take free software and use it to reduce their development and upkeep costs, use the same processor in all of their units and be able to make eveything work in a well mannered and published way. Those that don't work this way will purchase the cheapest processor available and waste money developing everything all over again, perhaps outsourcing the works, so that the people who really know what makes the device work don't write the software.
Quoth the article:
Consider BMW and its luxury 745i sedan. ... the car contains around 70 microprocessors. Its most striking feature, iDrive, is what Car and Driver magazine classifies as a "miracle knob." This single element of the dashboard is designed, through a computerized console, to replace more than 200 buttons that control everything from the position of seats to aspects of the navigation of the car itself to climate, communications and entertainment systems.
So it's not really a knob? I can just imagine a single knob that set's my seat position, changes my radio station, opens my trunk and changes my gears. It would be a miracle if the only the silly computers crashed.
My oldest computer manual is still useful. Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs Manual, Sixth Edition, Version 18, March 1987 is still useful. Stuff about Excell 4 and what are not.
P2P is not a mass publication. It is supposed to link you up with people of similar interests. I'd like to think of those kinds of people as friends and indeed when I meet them they might be. The service works by sharing the load of distribution. If the cumulative effect is not to the liking of current music publishers, that is too bad for them, it does not make the individuals involved republishers. Indeed those users who's service becomes excessive quickly turn off their clients so that they can use their network for other things.
Ever met a rich whore? Neither have I. People who sell out like that are always pawns and never have anything.
The wistle blower should not be trusted. If he had left while the effort was ongoing instead of after it was shut down, his credibility would be much greater. I don't believe him when he says that he did not engage in cracking and other illegal activity. We have several posts here that attest to the fact that people are using the P2P networks to spread viruses. All we can be sure of is that the RIAA and friends are doing everything in their power to eliminate fair use music sharing.
They hate music sharing because they don't control it. If people are free to share what they realy enjoy instead of being forced to listen to programs designed to sell 40 albums a year, the recorded music world will once again regain the diversity the real music world still has and we will start to see more recording lables than you can shake a stick at. The RIAA will be ruined, of course. Oh well.
See, you're breaking the law from the privacy of your own home. This means that the government doesn't see that you're doing it, so you're not making much of a statement. You're not going to acheive anything doing it this way, and you know it. This makes it not civil disobedience, but regular lawbreaking.
Not everyone believes that fair use sharing of their music with a few friends is illegal. It does not constitute a republication and therefore does not violate copyright. This is essentially what peer to peer does, it simply eliminates the need to copy things onto tapes or a CD. Most people, don't think there is anything wrong with music sharing any more than they think there's something wrong with lending a book or getting together to watch a movie in their living room.
The movie and music industry would like us to believe that sharing is wrong, but people are not going to be convinced. You understand why "hiding" in your house works, don't you? It's because people would be outraged if the police started breaking into private houses because their teen age children had swapped a few dozen songs over the home computer. Just let them do that and see what kinds of laws get enacted. They are trying to take away everyone's rights by pretending that only a few people can or want to engage in music sharing. Don't worry, they are wrong and it's not going to work.
and then you woke up.
Geeze, I actually responded to a slashdotting troll. What a waste.
ICP, (I see pee^H^Hci) list.
Heh! Where else are you going to learn about the free software that will end this latest nightmare addition to the closed software, turn the crank, money waster?
How many times does a consultant solve the problems of US business, accounting, orders, inventory and all that jazz?
As many times as you pay him to.
You then predict:
First, the outsourcing trend is going to worsen. Corporate America is going to increasingly ship its IT work overseas to companies like Wipro. Mostly this is because corporate America is greedy, short-sighted, and fairly stupid, and has absolutely no problem with skewering the economy and destroying the middle class if they can squeeze a little more profit out of the system in the short term.
I say it is entirely possible that corporate America will not stay clueless forever and will discover, free software. This will end the wasteful duplication of closed source software and indeed require local talent to oversee and develop. Those in corporate America who move in that direction first will realize many savings.
There is one way to stop the hemorage of US money and fix this: free software. Think about it, much of this programing is closed source waste and duplication. They are solving the same problems over and over again. No money is saved, even at 1/4 price, if you have to buy it eight times. Just remember that as this practice has been going up, IT budgets have also been rising. Free software could stop this hemorage of US currency and put you back to work. It's not the software that matters, it's knowing how to use it to get something done. Of course, in a free software world, we won't have to think of our fellow programers as "competition" any more, but as our peers and friends. There 15,000 "technologists" could be doing better work at home too. I'd like to see more of them designing semi-conductor masks than rewriting comercial applications for big stupid US companies.
Six Sigma is some kind of formalized screw up analysis process of the kind only highly regulated and industries could love. When you see that, you know all involved are clueless. Got your "black belt" yet? Eye glazing is an understatement.
It's easy to find a project manager willing to praise his project to the stars, deserved or not.
Oh yeah, that's it, Poland 1939, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact signed on August 23rd of 1939.
You think I'm a loon? Congress is elected and it's members will do what it takes to stay that way. It's a simple matter to convince people their rights are being infringed, given the current state of outrageous copyright laws. If the public turns its attention to this issue for long, they might just understand it - and poof, many Mikey Mouse schemes will vaporize. Publishers make their living by wooing the public. Time lays waste the plans of mice and men.
Please name that "competitor," I'd love to know of any software system flakier than M$ and avoid it.
You then claim, "They've already run through their shared source program with various universities and no dirty laundry leaked out." I'm not sure what you mean by that. The reputation M$ enjoys is based on the performance of their product line compounded by deceptive marketing and licensing. I doubt there was much more to tell at the Universities even if the participants wanted to break their NDAs.
All and all, however, I agree with you, Microsoft must free their code if they wish to remain relavant. Using free software has done good things for IBM. It's arguable that Microsoft could maintain their market dominance if they were to free their code. What's not debatable is the fact that the rest of the world no longer trusts Microsoft and its closed source model and is in the process of replacing them with free software they can trust. As you point out, it's not like they are going to lose revenue where Windoze is pirated.
This little peek does about as much good for the parties concerned as porn. Those governments can fantisize over what little M$ lets them see, but they have no more an idea of what they are looking at than they have ownership or control of it. Quality, of course, suffers. In the microsoft case, quality suffers intentionally.
Cost issues are secondary, but it should be obvious that costs are extreem for closed source software as M$ rakes in more money each year and has a larger budget than many countries do.