You've got a fair point. The guy just may (likely) have not been able to hold it together under the conditions, which were pretty adversarial.
That said, though, take a good look at his record. For years he has consistently spoken against copying of any sort so stridently as to come across like a militant psychopath. The guy is pretty damned hardcore. THAT behaviour has (justly) earned him some serious disgust. Attacking him for that behaviour is quite justified.
RealNetworks have proven themselves to be liars, thieves, spammers, and dirtballs. I couldn't care less what they come out with--I won't support them. Not now, not then.
Well I only read the first paragraph, but I think it gives me a good idea of the rest of the article.
I certainly can't imagine that this is news to anyone. Tech stocks have traditionally been high-risk, high-return. In recent years, things have gotten totally out of hand. Almost the entire market valuation of computer-related stocks (especially the "dot-coms") is now based on air and hype. The companies aren't designed to be stable, and in many cases, not even to generate a profit. (possibly not even offer a product, which is really sad)
Ultimately, there's going to have to be a severe revaluation of the market. If it happens in a short period, it's going to be close to a full blown crash. Expect the Dow-Jones to drop 50% or more in a single day if panic sets in.
In the meantime, some people are going to get stinkingly rich on the market instability. That's what the stock market is all about!
Some interesting points. Some very good ones, too.
Some conterarguements, though. IDG has such a large market that they don't really have much concern with dilution. Furthermore, they've made a large point of going after non-profit groups, as well as mailing list administrators for off-the-cuff comments that submitters have made.
IDG has, just as Ambrose Bierce should have had, the full right to prosecute groups that compete, or legitimately threaten to dilute their trademark. (if, for instance, the bookstores were filled with "for dummies" books not published by IDG) This doesn't, however, give them license to attack all occurrences of the words "for" and "dummies" used in conjunction.
Also, while stealing the trademarked bits of the title is neither essential nor clever, it is sometimes an effective form of satire. (esp. things like "corporate standovers for dummies.")
I just handed an envelope containing DOS5.0 on six floppies to my wife. I asked her to read the shrinkwrap agreement and give me her opinion, without any other input.
She suggested cutting the envelope in half, leaving the agreement intact.
In other words, I can buy software, I can install software, I can do whateverthefuck I want with software, WITHOUT BREAKING THE SEAL THAT SUPPOSEDLY INDICATES MY IMPLICIT AGREEMENT!!!!!!
And best of all, all we need is ONE person to buy some software and cut the box in half to prove that the shrink-wrap agreement is null and void. No huge lawyer fees (much as I understand them at times), no subtleties, just a clear example of behaving appropriately.
Folks, if this goes as far as it should, please acknowledge my wife--Nancy B.. She may have just given us the ammo we need.
RealNetworks has been invading your privacy for years. About eight months ago (I'm guessing), they were caught recording your every move, as far as it related to RealWhatthefuckplayer. The day I heard that was the day I removed RealEverything from my computer, and the day that I started laughing at people who should have known better, but didn't.
They're a sleazy company, they produce a sleazy product, and they track you as well as they can. Can you even PRETEND to be surprised?
A few weeks ago (or so) the cyberpatrol thing came out. Pissed me off enough that I wrote to the media. Surprise surprise, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) interviewed me and Matt Skala, largely as a result of my letter. We were on national TV, here in the great white north.
Your job, in order to make this relevant, is to carry the story beyon/., beyond salon.com, and into mainstream media. Get their attention, and they'll occasionally listen to you--I found the CBC surprisingly happy to cover Mattel's shite. The thing to do is CARRY THE MESSAGE TO THE MEDIA! BRING THE CRIMES TO THE ATTENTION OF THE PUBLIC!
Simple: Being a musician is a profession. It is no different in this respect than administrators, lawyers, or cops. They're jobs, they expected to get paid.
And although raising kids is a substantially different venture, parents still get some amount of money back from the government in most countries, sometimes even moreso to stay at home fulltime to raise the kids. Pretty close to the same idea.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The drivers themselves do it. Think about it. You need a driver to be able to query the card to find it's address. But if you tell the driver to instead return some other value instead of quering the card, how can you (or a user-space application) tell the difference? So ifconfig tells the driver to return the value you give it instead of the actual value. How do I know that this is the case? If you reboot, the address returns to it's former (permanent) value. You never touch the hardware.
Yikes! I stand corrected, although this strikes me as a Bad Way of doing things. I admit that I wasn't speaking from linux experience here, but HP-UX, which actually polls the card for an address when requested. On some of their cards, it can be changed in hardware (and thus is entirely stable across reboots), and on the others can't be changed at all (showing that they don't set it in software).
I remember reading TwS when it first hit the fledgeling web, and was one of the first truly cool things therein. Great layout, great design, and pretty damned well written. The only problem was that I eventually came to the conclusion that PG was the exception to the rule that travel broadens the mind.
I hope he's grown up a bit since then.
As an aside, has he made sure that the American Chemical Society (registered as ACS) is OK with his choice of acronyms?
MAC addresses, AS ASSIGNED, definitely are unique. Changing them without a very good reason (and there aren't many very good reasons!) is a Bad Thing. Furthermore, some cards actually have the address burned into them, meaning that ifconfig doesn't do a damned bit of good.
Those comments aside, you're right. You can change your MAC address. Furthermore, if you have stuff to do that you don't want traced, you can just unplug the ethernet cable and use that old 56k modem! (or alternatively, get a few extra ethernet cards)
Apple had a potentially great design idea. (although the execution of the iMac sucked in a lot of ways) Other companies should be free to borrow some ideas and innovate with that information, but they shouldn't be allowed to rip off ideas directly.
In other words, if you look at a machine and think, "Hey--looks like Apple has a new machine out!" then they've violated Apple's trademark/patent rights. If you look at a machine and think, "Hey--looks like they stole Apple's design!" then they've violated Apple. If you look at a machine and think, "Hey--looks like they didn't have many original ideas" then things start to get grey. Of course, if you look at a machine and think, "Now THAT'S a unique design!" then they're obviously in the clear. Unless Apple disagrees, in which case you go to court.
Honestly, Apple came up with one of the only original not-a-beige-box ideas available, and nobody's had enough creativity to figure out that different design doesn't HAVE to mean rounded corners, transluscent colours, and friendly logos just like Apple's.
Here's the short test: Is this company's design riding on the coattails of Apple? In my mind, the answer is YES!
My fiancee (wife in five days!) and I were talking about cartoons last week. We grew up with the tail end of the 'classics' from Warner et. al. Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner (all before they got polite, I might add), and so forth.
Then came the really awful awful awful trash cartoons which were nothing but cheap rip-offs to promote games. The stories...weren't, the drama...wasn't, and the animation averaged about 2 frames/sec. They were SUCKY! Awful, in fact!
Now, with the aid of computers, animation quality has gotten much better again, and best of all--the cartoons out there now are being done by people my age, and half of the stuff out there is a great big tongue-in-cheek parody/tribute to those classics!
Now today I see that the cartoons I expect will be recognised as the worst in history are being reshown, and even more surprisingly, to appreciative audiences!
Ah well. Que sera, sera. Makes me feel old, though.:-)
I'm sorry, and I don't care how badly I get moderated down, but WHAT AN AWFUL REVIEW!!!
Sam is a hacker. Harry is a hacker. Terry is a hacker. Everyone's a hacker, and it's absolutely astounding because they didn't even consult with 'us' first!
GET A FUCKING GRIP! You brats didn't invent this idea of hacking, it doesn't apply solely to computer-related life, and in fact you didn't even invent the term. The only thing original you've done with regards to 'hacking' is to overuse, abuse, and dilute the term.
My dad took apart watches when he was a kid. Also made NI3 to torment the bully upstairs in university. Oh my god, he's a hacker and he didn't even read the official hacker manifesto. (if it doesn't exist yet, it will) Neither did Newton. It's amazing! They were, like, our spiritual forefathers, dudez!
Ah, fuck it. I only hope that Terry Gilliam doesn't get wind of this interview. It'll probably make him sick.
"The C compiler backdoor mentioned affected only people who installed the binary, instead of recompiling the compiler themselves"
<p>No! That was the point--the only way you could guarantee a clean compile from clean source was to have a clean compiler to begin with. And the ONLY way to have a clean compiler to begin with is to hand code it in machine code--if you're using a compiler that you obtained somewhere to compile a compiler, there's no guarantee (ever!) that it's going to be clean.
<p>Actually, that was only half of his point. He also pointed out that the C compiler example was only one of a nearly infinite number of places one could plant a trojan horse in a computer. Once you get above the level of bare logic gates, you're forced to trust people when dealing with computers.
1) Games. Most still aren't available for linux at all.
2) Apps. Please, let's not talk about StarOffice here. Maybe when 5.2 is released, it'll be stable enough, but it's still too slow to use comfortably.
3) Config. I have too many things that I want to 'eventually' set up under Linux, but until I do, I can't make the complete switch.
4) Maintenance. Like it or don't, Win95/98 neither requires nor allows the same level of maintenance and customisation that Unix in general does. Linux with its thousand different competing desktops is too damned confusing in that respect.
5) Time out! I'm a Unix admin during the day, and I can _ignore_ my OS at home when I'm running '98. Can't do that if I've got Linux. (come to think of it, this might be the same point as 3 and 4:-)
OK, first of all, JON KATZ IS A TERRIBLE WRITER!!!
God this was painful. He did something quite significant (meet with Pinkerton's as a result of his previous article), and had a lot of interesting stuff to report about the meeting. However, it was almost impossible to get through his rambling, repetitive, obtuse verbal diarrhea to find the interesting bits.
Why does/. continue to support (and maybe even pay? That's never been clear.) a writer who can't write concisely and explicitly refuses to self-edit his works?
OK, rant off. This story could have been written so much better by so many others, though.
That aside, there were some surprises. I would have thought, for instance, that the idea of corporations being inherently amoral is pretty obvious. Corporations make money. They'll behave ethically if they can make (more) money doing so. That's about it. There are a few ethical companies out there, but there'd be a lot fewer if they didn't get tax breaks for it.
Then again, I suspect Jon is naive in the very best sense of the word. He wants to change the world. He thinks (and I agree entirely with him) that companies _should_ care about what they're doing. Maybe that's where/. and its ilk can do something--we're a fairly significant voice folks!
If anything, I was a bit surprised at how flexible the Pinkerton's people seemed to be. While the WAVE project won't go away as a result of our actions (at least not this quickly) some of the suggestions seem to be getting incorporated. Rewards getting dropped, for one example. Changing the criteria (NB: singular ~ion; plural ~ia) used for another.
Finally, a note to all revolutionaries: The only way to get your ideas taken seriously by companies is to distill them into financial terms.
Damn!!! I read a post like this, and I think, "I wish I had moderator points to give this guy." Then I realise that I DO have moderator points! Then I realise that I've already posted to this thread, and can't moderate in it.
Oh well. Maybe by posting a followup, more people will see the original.
"Artists, music studios and the recording industry are angry they don't get proceeds from the swapped files"
That's interesting. I have yet to hear of any artists complaining. In fact, most of the new technology out there has been embraced by the musicians, who would be just as happy getting free of The Industry.
"All the new software could have been done by the record companies. But what you see is the industry trying to preserve the old model as opposed to it taking advantage of the new model and being innovative and cutting-edge."
This man (Jonathan Band) may be a genius. It's a PERFECT description of what's going on, all in two clear sentences.
Finally...
"The DMCA was never intended for companies like Napster."
He may not have intended it this way, but Neil Rosini is quite right. The DMCA was intended for companies like Sony, Columbia, and the RIAA. Note that this implies it also wasn't intended for the artists.
What's that you say? Some large group of people with some common interests are online? Why, it's a revolution! The whole face of the internet is about to change!
A word for the wise: Open source is a trend, and arguably a movement. Women are NOT a trend.
OK, let's first of all drag out the obvious points.
1) You are only liable for $50 if your credit card is used fraudulently, i.e. if someone steals the number and uses it without your permission.
2) Every time you hand a wait(er/ress) your card in a restaurant, they can steal the number REALLY easily. Same with every other shop that you use your card in. Anytime, anywhere.
Given those, I wouldn't worry much about the security of online transactions.
Regardless, the publically available encryption is FAR more than secure enough to protect your card, especially with its tiny limit. (no offense--I just doubt you have a $10M limit, which might make it worthwhile)
On the other hand, do the browsers use particularly secure encryption? Not great, and outside the US, not good at all. Also, lots of sites are badly written or designed, are full of security holes, etc. There's no guarantee of safety no matter how good the encryption is, because as often as not, the encryption can be bypassed.
But go back to #1 for a second. That $50 limit is pretty reassuring, and you can only be held liable for that under certain circumstances. If there's a massive and documented theft of a thousand numbers, then you probably won't be liable.
So relax, but don't be stupid about giving out your card #. In other words, buy from companies you trust--after all, the easiest way to defraud people is to actually run an 'ecommerce' website where people will send you cards!
I knew someone was going to bring this up. It's a valid point. However, I should mention that the whole 'recommendation' went as follows:
They were looking for a way of integrating mail, word processing, spreadsheets, and (ideally) browsing for their XTerm users. That limited their choices.
I told them that I had never used StarOffice, but that it was free, and if they were interested, we could do a pilot project for one of their users, to see how it would work for them. They knew full well that it would be a learning experience for both of us.
The client is pleased as punch with StarOffice. It does things they've never been able to do before. After the test pilot was in place and functional, they asked me to deploy it company-wide, and are happy with it now.
The client is happy, and I never promised (or implied) anything other than the truth. I'm just not so impressed with it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got a fair point. The guy just may (likely) have not been able to hold it together under the conditions, which were pretty adversarial.
That said, though, take a good look at his record. For years he has consistently spoken against copying of any sort so stridently as to come across like a militant psychopath. The guy is pretty damned hardcore. THAT behaviour has (justly) earned him some serious disgust. Attacking him for that behaviour is quite justified.
RealNetworks have proven themselves to be liars, thieves, spammers, and dirtballs. I couldn't care less what they come out with--I won't support them. Not now, not then.
On slashdot? Never there, never meant to be there. It's annoying at times, though.
Well I only read the first paragraph, but I think it gives me a good idea of the rest of the article.
I certainly can't imagine that this is news to anyone. Tech stocks have traditionally been high-risk, high-return. In recent years, things have gotten totally out of hand. Almost the entire market valuation of computer-related stocks (especially the "dot-coms") is now based on air and hype. The companies aren't designed to be stable, and in many cases, not even to generate a profit. (possibly not even offer a product, which is really sad)
Ultimately, there's going to have to be a severe revaluation of the market. If it happens in a short period, it's going to be close to a full blown crash. Expect the Dow-Jones to drop 50% or more in a single day if panic sets in.
In the meantime, some people are going to get stinkingly rich on the market instability. That's what the stock market is all about!
So, um....where's the news again?
Some interesting points. Some very good ones, too.
Some conterarguements, though. IDG has such a large market that they don't really have much concern with dilution. Furthermore, they've made a large point of going after non-profit groups, as well as mailing list administrators for off-the-cuff comments that submitters have made.
IDG has, just as Ambrose Bierce should have had, the full right to prosecute groups that compete, or legitimately threaten to dilute their trademark. (if, for instance, the bookstores were filled with "for dummies" books not published by IDG) This doesn't, however, give them license to attack all occurrences of the words "for" and "dummies" used in conjunction.
Also, while stealing the trademarked bits of the title is neither essential nor clever, it is sometimes an effective form of satire. (esp. things like "corporate standovers for dummies.")
I just handed an envelope containing DOS5.0 on six floppies to my wife. I asked her to read the shrinkwrap agreement and give me her opinion, without any other input.
She suggested cutting the envelope in half, leaving the agreement intact.
In other words, I can buy software, I can install software, I can do whateverthefuck I want with software, WITHOUT BREAKING THE SEAL THAT SUPPOSEDLY INDICATES MY IMPLICIT AGREEMENT!!!!!!
And best of all, all we need is ONE person to buy some software and cut the box in half to prove that the shrink-wrap agreement is null and void. No huge lawyer fees (much as I understand them at times), no subtleties, just a clear example of behaving appropriately.
Folks, if this goes as far as it should, please acknowledge my wife--Nancy B.. She may have just given us the ammo we need.
CB.
I mean, come ON folks!
RealNetworks has been invading your privacy for years. About eight months ago (I'm guessing), they were caught recording your every move, as far as it related to RealWhatthefuckplayer. The day I heard that was the day I removed RealEverything from my computer, and the day that I started laughing at people who should have known better, but didn't.
They're a sleazy company, they produce a sleazy product, and they track you as well as they can. Can you even PRETEND to be surprised?
Hey, got an answer for you!
/., beyond salon.com, and into mainstream media. Get their attention, and they'll occasionally listen to you--I found the CBC surprisingly happy to cover Mattel's shite. The thing to do is CARRY THE MESSAGE TO THE MEDIA! BRING THE CRIMES TO THE ATTENTION OF THE PUBLIC!
A few weeks ago (or so) the cyberpatrol thing came out. Pissed me off enough that I wrote to the media. Surprise surprise, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) interviewed me and Matt Skala, largely as a result of my letter. We were on national TV, here in the great white north.
Your job, in order to make this relevant, is to carry the story beyon
That's all.
Simple: Being a musician is a profession. It is no different in this respect than administrators, lawyers, or cops. They're jobs, they expected to get paid.
And although raising kids is a substantially different venture, parents still get some amount of money back from the government in most countries, sometimes even moreso to stay at home fulltime to raise the kids. Pretty close to the same idea.
"And how exactly do you get the MAC address from the card without a driver?"
:-)
Easy! Pull it out of the computer, and read the sticky label on it.
Well, you asked...
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The drivers themselves do it. Think about it. You need a driver to be able to query the card to find it's address. But if you tell the driver to instead return some other value instead of quering the card, how can you (or a user-space application) tell the difference? So ifconfig tells the driver to return the value you give it instead of the actual value. How do I know that this is the case? If you reboot, the address returns to it's former (permanent) value. You never touch the hardware.
Yikes! I stand corrected, although this strikes me as a Bad Way of doing things. I admit that I wasn't speaking from linux experience here, but HP-UX, which actually polls the card for an address when requested. On some of their cards, it can be changed in hardware (and thus is entirely stable across reboots), and on the others can't be changed at all (showing that they don't set it in software).
Hmmmm....
Oh, so it's THAT Phillip Greenspun.
I remember reading TwS when it first hit the fledgeling web, and was one of the first truly cool things therein. Great layout, great design, and pretty damned well written. The only problem was that I eventually came to the conclusion that PG was the exception to the rule that travel broadens the mind.
I hope he's grown up a bit since then.
As an aside, has he made sure that the American Chemical Society (registered as ACS) is OK with his choice of acronyms?
MAC addresses, AS ASSIGNED, definitely are unique. Changing them without a very good reason (and there aren't many very good reasons!) is a Bad Thing. Furthermore, some cards actually have the address burned into them, meaning that ifconfig doesn't do a damned bit of good.
Those comments aside, you're right. You can change your MAC address. Furthermore, if you have stuff to do that you don't want traced, you can just unplug the ethernet cable and use that old 56k modem! (or alternatively, get a few extra ethernet cards)
That's right, I said good for Apple!
Apple had a potentially great design idea. (although the execution of the iMac sucked in a lot of ways) Other companies should be free to borrow some ideas and innovate with that information, but they shouldn't be allowed to rip off ideas directly.
In other words, if you look at a machine and think, "Hey--looks like Apple has a new machine out!" then they've violated Apple's trademark/patent rights. If you look at a machine and think, "Hey--looks like they stole Apple's design!" then they've violated Apple. If you look at a machine and think, "Hey--looks like they didn't have many original ideas" then things start to get grey. Of course, if you look at a machine and think, "Now THAT'S a unique design!" then they're obviously in the clear. Unless Apple disagrees, in which case you go to court.
Honestly, Apple came up with one of the only original not-a-beige-box ideas available, and nobody's had enough creativity to figure out that different design doesn't HAVE to mean rounded corners, transluscent colours, and friendly logos just like Apple's.
Here's the short test: Is this company's design riding on the coattails of Apple? In my mind, the answer is YES!
Well this is interesting.
:-)
My fiancee (wife in five days!) and I were talking about cartoons last week. We grew up with the tail end of the 'classics' from Warner et. al. Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner (all before they got polite, I might add), and so forth.
Then came the really awful awful awful trash cartoons which were nothing but cheap rip-offs to promote games. The stories...weren't, the drama...wasn't, and the animation averaged about 2 frames/sec. They were SUCKY! Awful, in fact!
Now, with the aid of computers, animation quality has gotten much better again, and best of all--the cartoons out there now are being done by people my age, and half of the stuff out there is a great big tongue-in-cheek parody/tribute to those classics!
Now today I see that the cartoons I expect will be recognised as the worst in history are being reshown, and even more surprisingly, to appreciative audiences!
Ah well. Que sera, sera. Makes me feel old, though.
I'm sorry, and I don't care how badly I get moderated down, but WHAT AN AWFUL REVIEW!!!
Sam is a hacker. Harry is a hacker. Terry is a hacker. Everyone's a hacker, and it's absolutely astounding because they didn't even consult with 'us' first!
GET A FUCKING GRIP! You brats didn't invent this idea of hacking, it doesn't apply solely to computer-related life, and in fact you didn't even invent the term. The only thing original you've done with regards to 'hacking' is to overuse, abuse, and dilute the term.
My dad took apart watches when he was a kid. Also made NI3 to torment the bully upstairs in university. Oh my god, he's a hacker and he didn't even read the official hacker manifesto. (if it doesn't exist yet, it will) Neither did Newton. It's amazing! They were, like, our spiritual forefathers, dudez!
Ah, fuck it. I only hope that Terry Gilliam doesn't get wind of this interview. It'll probably make him sick.
"The C compiler backdoor mentioned affected only people who installed the binary, instead of recompiling the compiler themselves"
<p>No! That was the point--the only way you could guarantee a clean compile from clean source was to have a clean compiler to begin with. And the ONLY way to have a clean compiler to begin with is to hand code it in machine code--if you're using a compiler that you obtained somewhere to compile a compiler, there's no guarantee (ever!) that it's going to be clean.
<p>Actually, that was only half of his point. He also pointed out that the C compiler example was only one of a nearly infinite number of places one could plant a trojan horse in a computer. Once you get above the level of bare logic gates, you're forced to trust people when dealing with computers.
Well, let's see here:
:-)
1) Games. Most still aren't available for linux at all.
2) Apps. Please, let's not talk about StarOffice here. Maybe when 5.2 is released, it'll be stable enough, but it's still too slow to use comfortably.
3) Config. I have too many things that I want to
'eventually' set up under Linux, but until I do, I can't make the complete switch.
4) Maintenance. Like it or don't, Win95/98 neither requires nor allows the same level of maintenance and customisation that Unix in general does. Linux with its thousand different competing desktops is too damned confusing in that respect.
5) Time out! I'm a Unix admin during the day, and I can _ignore_ my OS at home when I'm running '98. Can't do that if I've got Linux. (come to think of it, this might be the same point as 3 and 4
OK, first of all, JON KATZ IS A TERRIBLE WRITER!!!
/. continue to support (and maybe even pay? That's never been clear.) a writer who can't write concisely and explicitly refuses to self-edit his works?
/. and its ilk can do something--we're a fairly significant voice folks!
God this was painful. He did something quite significant (meet with Pinkerton's as a result of his previous article), and had a lot of interesting stuff to report about the meeting. However, it was almost impossible to get through his rambling, repetitive, obtuse verbal diarrhea to find the interesting bits.
Why does
OK, rant off. This story could have been written so much better by so many others, though.
That aside, there were some surprises. I would have thought, for instance, that the idea of corporations being inherently amoral is pretty obvious. Corporations make money. They'll behave ethically if they can make (more) money doing so. That's about it. There are a few ethical companies out there, but there'd be a lot fewer if they didn't get tax breaks for it.
Then again, I suspect Jon is naive in the very best sense of the word. He wants to change the world. He thinks (and I agree entirely with him) that companies _should_ care about what they're doing. Maybe that's where
If anything, I was a bit surprised at how flexible the Pinkerton's people seemed to be. While the WAVE project won't go away as a result of our actions (at least not this quickly) some of the suggestions seem to be getting incorporated. Rewards getting dropped, for one example. Changing the criteria (NB: singular ~ion; plural ~ia) used for another.
Finally, a note to all revolutionaries: The only way to get your ideas taken seriously by companies is to distill them into financial terms.
Damn!!! I read a post like this, and I think, "I wish I had moderator points to give this guy." Then I realise that I DO have moderator points! Then I realise that I've already posted to this thread, and can't moderate in it.
Oh well. Maybe by posting a followup, more people will see the original.
OK, here's some thoughts:
"Artists, music studios and the recording industry are angry they don't get proceeds from the swapped files"
That's interesting. I have yet to hear of any artists complaining. In fact, most of the new technology out there has been embraced by the musicians, who would be just as happy getting free of The Industry.
"All the new software could have been done by the record companies. But what you see is the industry trying to preserve the old model as opposed to it taking advantage of the new model and being innovative and cutting-edge."
This man (Jonathan Band) may be a genius. It's a PERFECT description of what's going on, all in two clear sentences.
Finally...
"The DMCA was never intended for companies like Napster."
He may not have intended it this way, but Neil Rosini is quite right. The DMCA was intended for companies like Sony, Columbia, and the RIAA. Note that this implies it also wasn't intended for the artists.
Easy there tex.
A service provider is one who provides a service.
My phone company is a service provider. So is my
dry cleaner.
OR...
service provider != ISP necessarily
What's that you say? Some large group of people with some common interests are online? Why, it's a revolution! The whole face of the internet is about to change!
A word for the wise: Open source is a trend, and arguably a movement. Women are NOT a trend.
OK, let's first of all drag out the obvious points.
1) You are only liable for $50 if your credit card is used fraudulently, i.e. if someone steals the number and uses it without your permission.
2) Every time you hand a wait(er/ress) your card in a restaurant, they can steal the number REALLY easily. Same with every other shop that you use your card in. Anytime, anywhere.
Given those, I wouldn't worry much about the security of online transactions.
Regardless, the publically available encryption is FAR more than secure enough to protect your card, especially with its tiny limit. (no offense--I just doubt you have a $10M limit, which might make it worthwhile)
On the other hand, do the browsers use particularly secure encryption? Not great, and outside the US, not good at all. Also, lots of sites are badly written or designed, are full of security holes, etc. There's no guarantee of safety no matter how good the encryption is, because as often as not, the encryption can be bypassed.
But go back to #1 for a second. That $50 limit is pretty reassuring, and you can only be held liable for that under certain circumstances. If there's a massive and documented theft of a thousand numbers, then you probably won't be liable.
So relax, but don't be stupid about giving out your card #. In other words, buy from companies you trust--after all, the easiest way to defraud people is to actually run an 'ecommerce' website where people will send you cards!
I knew someone was going to bring this up. It's a valid point. However, I should mention that the whole 'recommendation' went as follows:
They were looking for a way of integrating mail, word processing, spreadsheets, and (ideally) browsing for their XTerm users. That limited their choices.
I told them that I had never used StarOffice, but that it was free, and if they were interested, we could do a pilot project for one of their users, to see how it would work for them. They knew full well that it would be a learning experience for both of us.
The client is pleased as punch with StarOffice. It does things they've never been able to do before. After the test pilot was in place and functional, they asked me to deploy it company-wide, and are happy with it now.
The client is happy, and I never promised (or implied) anything other than the truth. I'm just not so impressed with it yet.