"Ask Slashdot" NLE and video capture comparisons?
on
X On OSX Now Free
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· Score: 2
Anyone know of any hard benchmarks for video processing/capture/editing.
I've pretty much given up on the PC (be it Windows, BeOS, or Linux) for video capture and editing and will probably get a powerbook for that application simply to avoid the headaches PC video capture/editing always entails (unless Linux video editing has matured by then, which is a very distinct possibility), but I would be curious if anyone has any pointers to hard benchmarks or in-depth, relatively unbiased comparisons of the two platforms vis-a-vis video and NLE.
Oh, yes they have. I just happen to be one of them. I'm lots of money in the hole due to litigation taken against me from these guys... my attorney's fees alone (not counting the reparations I now owe them due to an FTP site I used to run) were over $5,000.
I would be very interested in more info on this (without you having to give up your anonymoty, of course). It sounds like you were probably guilty, but I'll reserve judgement as I know for a fact that very innocent people have been found against, such as Superpimp.org, makiers of the PAN newsreader.
I noticed this when downloading Pan (a newsreader for gnome and the BEST USENET newsreader I've ever come across or had the pleasure of using) -- On Oct 11, 2000 an either corrupt or clueless court found in favor of the RIAA against the small startup, simply because some users MIGHT possibly misuse the software to save copies of MP3 files posted to USENET to their local hard drives.
Disgusting. This is like finding against ACE Hardware for selling hammers, one of which might, somewhere, by somebody, be misused to konk someone over the head with (hopefully an RIAA/MPAA lawyer). What is more appalling by this decision, is that this functionality has existed in newsreaders and stand alone programs since at least 1987 (when I first got on the internet). Superpimp wasn't doing anything revolutionary in making their newsreader that hadn't been done for the last 13 years or more, with perfectly legitimate application (such as allowing users to easilly download and save pictures of my vacation I post to one of the bin newsgroups).
We all comfort ourselves that this will be overturned in appeals, but sometimes I wonder if we aren't behaving very much like many Jews in Germany did prior to World War II, telling ourselves that this will pass and sanity will prevail while standing on the brink of a pending age of darkness. I'll believe the optomism when I see an actual case overturned in appeals -- in the meantime, I think we would all do well to look at this entire War Against the Internet which the Old Media are waging (and winning) with a little more realism and concern, and get involved politically and do something about it.
What happened? The 2.4 kernel slipped enough for RFS to catch up. (This isn't meant as a troll, just my reading of the facts.)
The kernel did slip, because of some awesome improvements in the VM code that were "too good to pass up." Others may argue that this was inappropriate -- personally I find it encouraging that Linus and the developers are flexible enough to go ahead and do something they feel is important, even if it offends the dogma of "how things are to be done" or even just the impatience of the rest of us.
I think little has changed. Reiserfs will NOT go into 2.4.0 because the developers don't want to cloud the issue while working to get a new release out the door. It will probably go into 2.4.1 if 2.4.0 is stable, which may be due to the "slippage" you refer to. OTOH if the kernel hadn't "slipped" it probably would have gone into 2.4.8 or something.
In short, ReiserFS would have worked its way into the kernel regardless. At most the minor version number changed due to the schedule slippage, nothing more.
In an effort to provide a more balance translation, I've taken the last couple of hours to piece this together. I've taken a (very few) liberties with the verbiage to try and preserve the tone and meaning, and think I've done a better job than the original.
Comments, criticisms, improvements are defintely welcome!
--- BEGIN HERE ---
POLICY STATEMENT
Very Well. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been asked to write a Policy
Statement. Indeed I was asked by a Newspaper which, I am told, is
read mostly in governmental circles.
I am to write a Governmental Policy Statement. I, who never could
stand governments. I have only my mothers vigilance to thank that
I, as a child at the age of 11, did not join the Red Army Faction.
Admittedly, I was a bit young at the time.
Nevertheless I had in some fashion sympathy for the terrorists. At
the local police station I requested and received a "most wanted"
poster. At last, pictures of people I could relate to, who obviously
disliked Suits as much as I did. For some reason my mother didn't
approve of my hanging a "most wanted" poster between pictures of
German pop bands. So my mother took it away, and this intrusion into
my own autonomy annoys me to this day.
Later I seem to have grown up, although critics insist this hasn't
yet happened. Well, they have to make their own judgements. In
any event I have now been elected into a World Government. What, you
don't believe me? That is why I am writing this Government Policy
Statement. Some governments must make clear their policies, some more
than others.
In the minds of some people, reality is being increasingly
influenced by media content that can be accessed via electronic
networks. The Internet is not just one of these networks that are
based on protocols, standards, address assignments and rules. It
is first and foremost a cultural area where participants are not
committed to being either senders or receivers. Net reality is
defined by the users.
ICANN regulates the distribution of Names, Numbers, the introduction of
protocols and their applicable rules - i.e. the internet's architecture.
In other words, it governs the internet.
Since I am supposed to explain the policy of this government to you, I
need to explain it in terms of media with which your cultural circle is
familiar. The generation of those currently in government grew up with
vacuum tube radios. Back then one could easilly distinguish between
the broadcaster and the receiver. This is called the Broadcast Model,
and is a thing of the past. Today, the internet defines a communcation
space, which we refer to as the Network Model. And anyone
who is connected can enter this space, have a look around and take or
contribute something. On the internet we call this the Gift Culture. A
small, electronic paradise. Who did I just hear muttering "social
romantic?"
Wonderful things have developed in the time, as this network of
networks comprised of many diverse people engaged in energetic exchange
created a new, global culture. One could find anything on the
internet, for the planet is big, the aliens were already among us
and, well, the lawyers were far away. They were busy making new
laws against terrorsts and building huge security and police
bureacracies.
Please understand, blowing up newly constructed prisons is all well and
good, but moving into the internet was a much more fundamental form of
liberation. Our thoughts were finally free! Admittedly, even on the
internet there were a few people who tried to place boundries of the
freedom of thought. Then money came into the picture, and if the
internet were truly without boundries, then naturally that meant boundless
wealth.
Since I don't want to offend the religious feelings of certain people,
and certainly not in a Government Policy Statement, I won't say anything
with regards to "eCommerce" or "eBusiness." Believe in whatever or whomever
you wish. Faith is said to move mountains.
But tell your lawyers to leave us alone. The Businesspeople have
unfortunately brought lawyers along, who see a
potential contract even in the purchase of a bag of gummy bears
and apply such horrid terms as "piratecy" to the natural act
of reproducing bits of data.
And now that the Internet is beginning to flourish globally, they suddenly
want to declare "intellectual property." And then scream loudly when
they discover, that all day long and on every computer on the planet what
they call "theft" occurs. And of course, they want to build in anti-theft
anti-theft devices -- filters, policemen and jails.
OK, that is the current situation. And we, as netizens, have to respond.
Some of us have concentrated more on the money side, while those with
more foresight have rented spaceports, South Sea islands and servers
in satellites in preparation for the coming confrontation.
The Internet was essentially based on one common language for
computers to talk to each other and one address domain for
contacting each other. The U.S. government, however, was involved
in the development of the language, the assignment of addresses
and the creation of the name domain. At some point, when the
governments of other countries and the generation of
suits discovered the World Wide Web, they also wanted a voice. But
this is really a different, long story, which I'll skip over, even
though it did ultimately result in the foundation of ICANN as a
business entity.
So, we now have ICANN, a company originally founded by the United States
government under California Law, that not only regulates the worldwide
distribution of Names, numbers, and the implimentation of protocols, but
also (almost) controls the critical components of the centralized,
heiarchical namespace. I say "almost" because the American government
does not want to give up control of the key component, namely the
root-Zone file.
ICANN wishes to govern, but doesn't wish to admit this openly. The
company has always been very careful to remain "just" a technical
committee that regulated "only" technical questions and created "only"
the assignment rules for names and numbers. It was no use. What
happened is what always happens when centralized bodies expand --
whether they regulate things on a supposedly "representative"
basis or not. The era of greed began.
Which brings us back to the lawyers, the suits and other governments.
Ignoring for the moment the fact that ICANN's understatement was of course
defined by business interests -- and there are occasional,
unpleasant stories about the mafia-like connection between ICANN
and Network Solutions, the registrar of the original birth -- the
lawyers suddenly wanted to declare property rights on names.
There were already cases of legal disputes between trademark and
domain owners.
The lawyers had discovered the Internet and it annoyed them -- a lot.
Such is their overpowering greed, hidden behind law. At this point
the government really should have intervened. One could have said:
let's create a new domain where trademark law applies. But because
the government (ICANN) is itself comprised of lawyers, it didn't want
to do this. And of course these lawyers wore neckties, which are
known to restrict the flow of oxygen to the brain. Thus they had no
imagination and couldn't understand why we would need an open space,
or what a "parallel universe" is.
And because they were Americans, they of course preferred American
trademark law, with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
as the potential arbitrater (the plaintiff's choice), thereby giving the
entire name heiarchy to other lawyers to devour.
This is not just annoying, this is a crime. A crime outright, as
well as a crime against the nature of the internet as a public
cultural domain. What the lawyers call "Intellectual Property" is,
as every student of Latin knows, nothing more than theft from the
public domain. And we, as netizens, have no desire to allow this
theft to destroy the public domain and must, therefor, begin to
address this issue proactively.
So everyone goes their own way and is networked together.
Through this public space, through the collective subconscious, and
through the Goddess of Conflict, of Discord, and Argument, Eris,
rampaging between the lines. But before you misunderstand this as
esoteric rhetoric, back to matters of government.
OK, I am now nominally a part of the government, starting sometime
in November. I want to keep the public space free of commercial
rules, to protect the free flow of information and give the bits
space to roam freely. We want endless gardens of data, where it can
be bloom, flourish and reproduce. So there you have the cultural
aspects of my upcoming governmental policy.
Then there are also a couple of organizational questions, and because the
centralized, hierarchical nature of governments invites abuse and
poses an obstacle to progress, I hope to ensure everything runs as
decentralized as possible, which means it must be transparent and open
to the public eye. And the United States government, well, it should
be more concerned with its own educational system instead of trying to
rule over the internet's name space. Just look at the geographical
understanding of ICANN, it speaks volumes.
The remaining tasks of this government consists of creating interconnected
"parallel universes" of diverse, coexisting cultures, each with its own rules.
Then almost everyone will be able to do whatever they like.
Even the suits can have their own domains. They can then play
their trademark law games (not standardized universally, but who
cares), sue each other over differing interpretations of freedom
of expression or just go up in smoke.
As long as they accept other cultures, it's fine. I will work hard to
do so as well, so that this peaceful coexistence may work.
Thus I have explained to you the government, which means I have explained
to you that the future should, please, govern itself. Simply do whatever
you like. I will do the same.
In the case of copyright infringement, making money off of somebody else's copyrighted work is legally defined as copyright infringement, and is explicitly (and with good reason) not equated to theft.
Making money by reverse engineering a product was never, before the DMCA, defined as copyright infringement, and most certainly not theft.
Now we have the DMCA, and the dawning of an age of verticle monopolies enforced at the end of a government gun the likes of which we haven't seen before. Why. Because the only damn way anything is going to interoperate in the future is going to be via controlled, licensed standards, which will always put competitors at a disadvantage and, probably quite quickly, lead to their demise.
The DMCA pays lipservice to "interoperability," but only as a sole purpose, and as any engineer will tell you, very little if anything on this planet can ever be said to have a "sole" purpose -- applications for products are always found which suprise the original maker. As the courts have said "interoperability" as merely one of several possible applications does not suffice to fall under the "interoperability" exclusion of the DMCA, this effectively means no reverse engineering at all, even for interoperability. End of story.
Fools like you will continue to scream "theft" where no such thing exists, and the even greater fools who run our government will probably listen. And thus ends the age of exponential growth in knowledge and technology, not with a bang, but with a wimper beneath the authoritarian thumb spawned of the greed of own corporate industry and the government which whored itself out to them, and the myopic short sightedness of folks like you.
My girlfreind and I both enjoy watching porn immensly. It hasn't harmed our relationship at all. Indeed, it has at times added some rather interesting spice to our lives.
And yes, we're both quite addicted to sex.:-)
For all we know, it may have been your friend's wife's intolerance of porn that ruined their relationship, not the husbands "addiciton." Even if it wasn't, the notion that a few losers can't control themselves or are so narcissistic that they can only get off to pornography does not even remotely imply that sych would be true for the rest of us, who enjoy healthy lives and relationships while enjoying a little hardcore from time to time.
No need to defend yourself
on
Deja For Sale
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· Score: 2
Throughout history, female authors have been denied recognition for their work, because it was commonly assumed that women were incapable of creating what they created.
As a guy whose name (Jean-Michel) often causes USENET readers to mistakenly believe they are corresponding with a woman, I can relate in some small fashion. The behavior of some of the cretins on the internet (be it USENET, irc, or slashdot) is enough to make one ill.
Nevertheless, I would implore you to consider the source. These are Anonymous Cowards, the keyword being Coward. Were they confronted with an actual woman showing any interest in their sorry existence whatsoever, they would almost certainly soil their pants with fear before stuttering something inane and descending hopelessly into a seizure of insecurity and general social cluelessness.
You have no need to defend yourself or your gender. The offensive posts to which you refer speak for themselves and identify their posters as the penultimate losers of society, whose only chance at either a sexual or interpersonal relationship is limited to their right hand.
I know it probably doesn't make you feel any better to read this, being the target of such purile harassment, but it is nevertheless true: your value as a contibuter is in no way diminished or tarnished by these idiots.
And throughout history, women have been spat upon, threatened, battered, and gangraped by the same men you'll find here on slashdot.
I know you're angry, but this comment is very unfair to the vast, vast majority of men on slashdot.
Throughout history women have seduced, betrayed, and murdered men for cheap material gain, to grasp power, to avenge a wrong (real or imagined), or even out of simple spite and jealousy.
The sexes have a long history of using and abusing one another, just as they have an equally long history of nurturing and sustaining one another.
It would be as wrong for me to paint the women who post to slashdot as "gold digging cunts" (or some other equally offensive characterization) as it is for you to paint the men here as would-be rapists, batterers, etc.
Put simply, some human beings are scum, irrespective of sex. Most are not. And while I don't blame you for being angry, please try to resist the very natural, human tendency to overgeneralize about an entire population of people based upon the behavior of a few mysogenist losers who will almost certainly remain sexually frustrated for the duration of their small, pitiful lives.
Yeah, I don't know much about the german legal system, but I know that in the US you have to actually NAME all defendants (at least in civil suits).
Have you forgotten the DeCSS lawsuit already?
When the MPAA decided to persue its (illegetimate) persecution of persons unnamed for posting links to DeCSS, many (If I recall correctly, the vast majority) of the defendents were listed as "John Doe #1" Through "John Doe #N", where N was some rediculous number like 90 or so.
In other words, a whole bunch of "unknowns" are being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The German verbiage is simply more explicit, honestly stating that the offending parties are not known, rather than merely implying it by listing a fictitious name. (I've always found the assumption in using the name "John Doe" that the offendor is male rather amusing).
From what I have been able to learn, both systems appear to allow lawsuits against unidentified parties, if the harm done can be identified, documented, and proven. Should the parties later be positively identified, they will be held liable.
Now, you can cut that up like a lawyer, but to anybody whole is familiar with the English language, Gore was taking a granule of truth and exaggerating it out of proportion.
He was overemphesizing his congressional record, in which he actively supported and promoted the creation of the internet. He in no way claimed or implied that he invented the internet, any more than Jed Bush's statements that he was instrumental in creating Florida's voucher program imply that he invented the notion of vouchers or was the first to implement them. At worst he was guilty of exaggerating his congressional record, nothing more.
They have diametrically opposing views of the role of government. They could not be more contrary! Their only similarity is that neither one has the remotest chance of being elected. Your simultaneous interest in both these candidates says a lot about your political knowledge.
No, it says nothing about my political knowledge. What is says is two things:
* The individual is being marginalized in favor of large special interest and corporate influence in government, and both candidates offer a solution
* I remain undecided on whether the best approach is government regulation of industry (which can and does work quite well in some instances) or very, very small government and corresponding freedom (both for individuals and corporations) that implies.
Why am I undecided? Because freedom for corporations often translates directly into less freedom for individuals (e.g. up until a few years ago people with medical conditions were effectively locked into their jobs because they would lose medical insurance if they went to another employer with a pre-existing condition. Later regulation which decreased the freedom and discretion of the insurance industry had a direct and immediate effect in enhancing the freedom of the individual. One may make sophist arguments such as "people were free to leave and aren't entitled to basic medical anyway, so they shouldn't complain" but the reality was, if your life depended on medical care and you would lose it if you changed jobs or were fired, you had the freedom any prisoner or slave has ever had: comply or die). The Libertarians make some compelling arguments, but they also gloss over a number of important and very complex details.
As with nearly everything in life, the ideal situation will probably end up being somewhere in the middle, though probably more in the libertarian direction than the Green direction (hence my leaning toward Brown).
I will say this, however. Your inflexibility in considering two differing points of view on a number of complex issues says a great deal about the openness of your mind, and the simplicity with which you appear to view the political world.
Uh, if you're gonna vote 3rd party, vote for Browne. Nader only wants to imprison the populace in a Green/Red New-Communist state.
That is an absolute load of crap.
I happen to have very strong libertarian leanings (with a couple of minor reservations, such as their stance on anti-trust, etc.), but with spokespeople like you the libertarians don't need enemies.
If you want to do the Libertarian Party a favor, change your tone and stop spouting nonesense.
In the meantime, I will resist the gut level reaction to your comments which would sway me away from Brown and continue to weigh the "empower the individual through very small, limited, and strictly constitutional government" argument of Mr. Brown against the "reduce corporate influence and reempower the individual" argument of Nader. My decision will come in due course according to facts, not diatribe, innuendo, and most especially not as a result of the outright nonesense you are spouting.
gore has been long touting his invention of the internet..
Al Gore never claimed to invent the Internet. That story was started by none other then Declan McCallugh (of LiViD defamation fame and in no small part responsible for inciting the persecution of DeCSS and css-auth developers).
For the story debunking the myth that Al Gore claimed to have invent the internet see this ; Salon story.
Caveat: I am voting for either Ralph Nader or Harry Brown (currently leaning toward Mr. Brown). If you oppose Gore (or Bush) that is fine, but be sure you do so for factual reasons, not myths propogated by yellow journalists.
With any luck, the finding against them will keep them from doing it again. But maybe not.
E*Trade made out very well on this scam.
They lost one arbitration. Maybe, now that this has been published on slashdot, others will step forward and they'll lose more. I certainly hope so.
However, unlike many small investors they likely rolled out of the RHAT stock fairly quickly, locking in some huge profits and eliminating their risk.
At $26k / arbitration they would have to lose a huge number of arbitrations before they would be in the red on the deal, and while that might happen if everyone filed grievances against them, that is unlikely.
It was a good trade. Fuck a few hundred people, make tens of millions, and be forced to pay back a few thousand here and there to the annoying gnats which actually stand up to their chicanery.
Until somebody goes to jail for this, there will not be any true justice, and certainly no incentive whatsoever to prevent E*Trade from doing the same thing all over again to somebody else.
I'm also bothered by a government that either doesn't see campaign contributions as a way of currying favor for a significant merger, or who doesn't consider it significant.
The government may not see (or admit seeing) that campaign contributions and softmoney are nothing other than blatent, legalized bribery, but We The People have no trouble recognizing this for what it is.
It is common knowledge that our senators, representatives, and presidents routinely sell themselves to business and special interests like cheap whores on a Saturday night. Unfortunately people feel very powerless to do anything about it, since they correctly identify this behavior with both the Democratic and Republican branches of the Corporate Party and fail to realize that their vote, were it cast for a third party (such as the Greens or the Libertarians), would not only speak out loudly against this behavior, but quite probably have a much greater influence on the public agenda and public policy than the sheeplike votes cast for the two main parties.
Until people realize how much power they do hold in their hands, and begin exercising it by voting non-Corporate, they will remain impotent, and our elected "leaders" will continue shamelessly turning sleazy tricks for cash in the full and confident knowledge that they, in truth, have nothing to fear from a disgruntled, but apathetic and thus powerless, constituency.
There is a group of activists and tagalongs (I fall in the latter category, as I haven't actually sued anyone myself yet) who have combined into an organization called Private Citizen.
If you join they will, on your behalf, send cease and desist letters to several hundred direct marketing companies, including telemarketers. The cost for both the telemarketing and junk mail service was, I think, $30.00 US. That was the best $30.00 I ever spent: my junk phone calls went to zero and my junk mail to just a trickle.
In addition, they have extensive information on how to combat telemarketers, how to go about suing them in small claims court (and winning), and other guarilla tactics individuals can use to get some of their privacy back.
I am a very satisfied, paying member of that group, and highly recommend it to anyone who seriously wants this shit to end, now. They were highly effective in ending it for me (I had been getting harassed multiple times/week, now I haven't been bothered in months).
And where do you propose we find someone who is an expert in computer software, and electronics, and electrical systems, and mechanics, and biotech, and chemistry, and materials science, etc., etc.?
We don't. The people handing out these patents (in most if not all of these areas) have already demonstrated their incompetence. My solution doesn't do anything to eliminate the incompetence (one could reasonably argue that a competent patent office would be even more dangerous), it simply limits the harm the patent office can cause to those patents an individual patent advocate can process and approve in a single day.
If we can't eliminate the USPTO (which should be our first priority) we should at least limit its ability to lock up and corden off vast areas of intellectual and business endeavor.
The head of the patent office could review each one personally. This is obviously impossible today.
No it isn't.
Indeed, I think you may have hit on a possible solution to the absurdly patent-happy frenzy we are seeing. Require the head of the US Patent Office to personally review and critique any patent application before it is granted. Disallow any and all deligation of this task.
That might, just might, reduce the explosion of patents sufficiently to allow our high-tech economy to survive another few years.
I guarantee, if something isn't done about this absurdity real soon now, we are going to have the dubious distinction of having watched first hand while the IP lawyers flush our most promising industry down the drain.
But then, maybe that is what the politicians want: technological progress slowed to a crawl so they can keep up, and keep lining their pockets with our hard work.
That petition is needlessly limited. Patents are harmful to every industry and every product they touch, be it software, hardware, pharmaceuticals, or anything else. The harmful impact of software patents are most obvious to us because we are familiar with the industry, and can remember a time when they either didn't exist at all, or had a smaller impact.
Patents harm every other area of intellectual endeavor just as badly, but we tend to see it less redilly in no small part because it affects us less directly, and because no one remembers a time when new knowledge about, say, a hydrogen fuel cell, could emerge into the market immediately and spawn a whole new series of quick inventions. Why? Because for the last 200 years in this country (and longer elsewhere) this hasn't been the case -- we've had generations to get used to the slowdown of technological progress the patent system inflicts upon us. Indeed, most of us never question the slow pace of progress with respect to automobiles, airplanes, or power generation -- we've lived with artifically restrained technological progress all our lives. It is only the threat to the one area, software, which had been free to progress and evolve at as fast a pace as new, unfettered ideas would allow, that the harm becomes obvious. We have a unique opportunity to wake up, question, and perhaps even change the entire paradigm. If we don't, how much time do you think will pass before people become used to the slow change in computer software, as new ideas (many obvious, some not) get locked up for twenty years at a time (then renamed, and locked up again).
The patent office doesn't need to be reformed or revamped. It needs to be shut down. Period.
Perhaps, if and when people start pondering and waking up to the destructive impact so-called intellectual property laws have, then maybe, just maybe, something will be done about it.
Of course, a constitutional amendment banning patents and copyrights isn't something we can hope for any time soon, more's the pity.
Perhaps it will evolve in the way another package did in regard to strong encryption. (sorry, it's been a while so I don't recall exactly which one. Maybe Eudora.)
The "Package" you are thinking of is the export version of Netscape, to which strong encryption can be patched by downloading and running the internationally developed (and availabel) Fortify program.
Ob DivX Deux: I have no intention of using it for illegal purposes. I want to record episodes of my favorite TV shows (Babylon 5, Sliders, etc.) and store them in a high quality compressed format using my CDR and cheap CDR blanks. I want to do the same for home videos I have made, and a couple of small movie projects I'm working on.
All of this is legal, legitimate, and exactly what the DVD Forum and the MPAA wish to prevent.
This leads one to a conclusion: a vote for Nader is a vote against Gore.
This is a gross and inaccurate oversimplification.
It is a myth that a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote, and past time for this harmful and destructive myth to be debunked.
First, your assumption (most people voting for Nader would vote for Al Gore) is flawed. While I do not have scientifically valid statistics to fall back on, of the seven people I know who are planning to vote for Ralph Nader, four of them would vote for Bush, not Al Gore, if they were less concerned with the corporate coopting of our government. In each case they are not only socially conservative, they absolutely loath Clinton and anyone associated with him. The other three are, like myself, more centrist or left of center, and probably would vote for Gore over Bush, were we truly a two party system.
This is similar to Ross Perot, who, contrary to public myth (and Republican propoganda), drew as many votes from would democratic voters as he did Republican voters. Bill Clinton's win against Bush Sr. has often been blamed, erroneously, on Ross Perot, despite the fact that this has been shown to be false, both by the voting demographic itself and the reelection of Clinton for a second term, in which Ross Perot played a marginal part.
Ross Perot is an example worth citing for another, much more important reason, however. In the first election he ran in, against both Bush Senior and Bill Clinton, he got 20% of the vote, despite no one believing he had a chance in hell of winning (an erroneous belief -- had he not dropped out of the race in the face of alleged intimidation from the Right he would certainly have done better, quite possibly even beating out both Bill Clinton and Bush Senior. Indeed, that is a rather powerful motive for either the Republicans or Democrats to employ the methods of threat and intimidation Mr. Perot has alleged).
That aside, something vastly more important happened. Perot's agenda, balancing the budget, was not even a point of discussion for either major party before he entered the race, and only paid lip-service by both once he did. (Bush's proposal for limiting spending, voted down, was designed specifically to not kick in until after he left office, while the democrats in turn would offer only the vaguest proposals for controlling spending).
Simply by winning 20% of the vote, both parties were forced to sit up and take notice. Those of us who are liberal may not like the direction Bill Clinton and the Democrats went, but their eagerness to balance the budget, and in so doing go against some of their most traditional powerbase, was influenced in no small part by Ross Perot's good showing. The same is true of the Republicans, who set aside their promises of tax cuts and actually sent Clinton legislation which raised taxes, in order to reduce and ultimately eliminate the budget deficit.
Now both sides claim the surplus is of their making, and in one respect they are both correct: it was republican and democratic lawmakers, and a democratic president, that drafted and enacted the legislation and budget which made it happen. However, it is Ross Perot's presence and performance in the elections which were the real catalyst. Those 20% who voted for Perot had a vastly more profound and direct impact on public policy than the other 80% of us who voted for one or the other major candidate, even though their candidate didn't get elected.
Now we have Ralph Nader, who addresses an issue which concerns us all deeply (the increasing power of corporations in our government and the corresponding weakening of the individual's rights and influence), and which neither major party will address because of the powerful interests they are both beholden to.
On the one hand, our individual votes can help bolster a third party candidate's showing into a respectable, perhaps even dramatic, showing, making his rhetoric and platform a part of mainstream political debate. On the other hand, our individual votes can bolster one or the other candidate most think have a chance of winning, thereby reinforcing many policies we disagree with vehemently, but both so-called mainstream parties unfortunately agree upon.
The question is, will we vote to impact policy, or merely choose our next figurehead?
The ironic thing is that F*cked Company IS in violation of various trademarks whose owners would have a legitimate right to complain, such as GoTo.com and eToys. THEIR logos remain intact and unparodied in the spoof page.
Well, actually those logos/trademarks have been "modified" by having other logos placed in front of them, overlapping and clipping their edges, etc.
However, since taken as a whole, together, it is obvious that no single company, logo, or trademark is being represented as "fuckedcompany.com" or even "fuckedideas.com" or whoever the complaining jerks are who are being paradied, and the use is noncommercial to boot, the law is clearly in favor of the defendents. Should the antagonists then try to employ copyright law, fair use will become relevant, and blow them right out of the water.
Idealab! are indeed jumorless jerks -- soon to be penniless jerks as well as their dotcom dreams go the way of so many others: into the toilet.
The implosion will be lent additional humor in context of their current, aggressively hypocritical behavior. I shall enjoy watching it immensly, chortling "Bzzt! Thank you for playing!" when it is all over.
Music is watermarked for that user (s device?), who has filled out name and address details correctly for music company.
If I had moderator access, I'd be torn whether to mark your comment as funny or insightful, since your sarcasm ("there's no way it can fail!") is both.
Please provide the RIAA with your name, physical address and email address below:
Mr. U. Suck
1234 Fuck The Recording Industry Drive
Suite B-1TE-ME
Chicago, IL 60619
email: throw-away-account@someip.com
I'm sure you and others have thougth up equally, if not more, create responses to expeditions fishing for personal invitation, but if not, I cordially invite you to make use of the above on any RIAA/MPAA questionaire or registration form. I certainly plan to.
It isn't an attack on the Cato institute. It is a bit of context, in order to provide people with a sense of Cato's political and social agenda. This is valuable information if one is to read the report and weigh its value appropriately.
The Cato Institute is a very conservative, libertarian thinktank of sorts. They have some interesting ideas and arguments, and a lot with which I take personal issue (and disagree). Nevertheless I have a copy of the constitution in my home, published by the Cato Institute (and given to me by a friend who is running for congress on the Libertarian ticket).
I am not a supporter or opponent of Cato, although I think it fair to say I disagree with them more than I agree with them.
My point? It is important to know the agenda and slant behind the argument, whether it is my slant with respect to Cato (noted above), or Cato's slant with respect to Microsoft.
The Cato Institute opposes anti-trust law in general and the DOJ trial against Microsoft in particular. This is relevant information, when one is reading an allegedly unbiased report aimed at the Findings of Fact and Law in the DOJ trial.
To describe a post pointing these biases out as an "attack on Cato" is IMHO very erroneous.
It has been about five years since I did the vinyl to CD thing (I've since converted the resulting CDs to MP3 and OGG), so I don't recall exactly what program I used at the time. It may have been a command line utility.
I did not dd from/dev/dsp -- I don't know if that would work or not.
However, there are any number of small X utilities that will allow one to capture audio from the microphone or line-in and save in some format (which, if not.wav already, can be converted). A number of audio editing tools allow recording (select the record input device using your mixer program). SLAB is one possibility, others include a command line utility which someone else wrote to do exactly what I did (convert vinyl to digital), a simple command line recorder (this might be what I used), another recorder SCAR, another tape/LP converter kit, Vsound (allows you to capture audio from apps like realplayer). Finally there's "yarec" and "xwav" (which I also used as I recall), but I cannot find URLs for either right now.
Discussion question: How do you explain this to business people (who run the country) OR build it into the economy?
You don't.
You let them tie their own rope and hang themselves with it.
The United States, as the world's current sole superpower, is enjoying unprecendented economic prosperity. Unprecendented. In this climate I have found it impossible to discuss, much less make clear, a number of topics, all of which seem obvious to those of us who read slashdot and are informed on the issue, and are apparently unfathonable by most of those who do not:
The very real structural and systemic threats against our democratic system and the concerted efforts to undermine the same by certain corporate interests
The threats to our rights as citizens incorporated in new legislation such as the DMCA
The attack on our rights to fair use current MPAA and RIAA litigation poses, and the threat that in turn poses to free (as in speach) education and dissemination of information
The attacks on our privacy via key escrow, etc.
The profound political corruption at all levels that is allowing such an attack, unprecidented in both width and depth, on our very constitution itself
Like the people of Philidelpha in the 1970s who refused to believe their mayor and police could do any wrong because crime was down (mainly as a result of their torturing prisoners and witnessess alike to coerce testimony and insure convictions, and the fact that they were terrorizing disadvantaged groups into submission), no one wants to hear negative or unsettling commentary on This Great Nation(tm) when things are so good. Add to that the specter of being considered "unamerican" or "unpatriotic" if you should be so uppitty as to criticize Our Leaders(tm), and you have an environment in which people are adamantly unwilling to listen to, much less believe, anything which even smacks of a pessimistic commentary on what is going on.
I can't even get friends who are activists in other areas of life to listen (and you would thing, as politically active and motivated people, they would at least be willing to ponder the topic). The degree of denial and unwillingness to look at and consider evidence that runs contrary to the common meme of "America is the greatest place on earth bar none!" is probably impossible for those to grasp who haven't been confronted with it directly. It is truly remarkable!
In a very real way we are being fattened for the slaughter.
I am slowly concluding that you simply cannot make people hear what they do not wish to hear. Soon enough the consiquences of this unwillingness to be informed will make themselves felt.
More importantly, if other countries are smart enough to persue more intelligent intellectual property policies, they will quickly become more competetive than the United States and economic fortunes will shift. Then, and only then, will Americans sit up and take notice.
On the other hand, if the rest of the world follows America to hell, well then, we can all roast marshmellows over the brimstone together.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone know of any hard benchmarks for video processing/capture/editing.
I've pretty much given up on the PC (be it Windows, BeOS, or Linux) for video capture and editing and will probably get a powerbook for that application simply to avoid the headaches PC video capture/editing always entails (unless Linux video editing has matured by then, which is a very distinct possibility), but I would be curious if anyone has any pointers to hard benchmarks or in-depth, relatively unbiased comparisons of the two platforms vis-a-vis video and NLE.
1.5. Did the RIAA really sue Pan?
No. It's just a joke.
Ouch! I fell for that one hook, line, and sinker. I haven't been taken like that since an April Fools joke on the 'net back in 1987
*wipes egg from face*
(I never had any reason to look at the FAQ, as PAN was trivial to compile and install -- mae culpa)
However, the RIAA hasn't gone after individuals.
Oh, yes they have. I just happen to be one of them. I'm lots of money in the hole due to litigation taken against me from these guys... my attorney's fees alone (not counting the reparations I now owe them due to an FTP site I used to run) were over $5,000.
I would be very interested in more info on this (without you having to give up your anonymoty, of course). It sounds like you were probably guilty, but I'll reserve judgement as I know for a fact that very innocent people have been found against, such as Superpimp.org, makiers of the PAN newsreader.
I noticed this when downloading Pan (a newsreader for gnome and the BEST USENET newsreader I've ever come across or had the pleasure of using) -- On Oct 11, 2000 an either corrupt or clueless court found in favor of the RIAA against the small startup, simply because some users MIGHT possibly misuse the software to save copies of MP3 files posted to USENET to their local hard drives.
Disgusting. This is like finding against ACE Hardware for selling hammers, one of which might, somewhere, by somebody, be misused to konk someone over the head with (hopefully an RIAA/MPAA lawyer). What is more appalling by this decision, is that this functionality has existed in newsreaders and stand alone programs since at least 1987 (when I first got on the internet). Superpimp wasn't doing anything revolutionary in making their newsreader that hadn't been done for the last 13 years or more, with perfectly legitimate application (such as allowing users to easilly download and save pictures of my vacation I post to one of the bin newsgroups).
We all comfort ourselves that this will be overturned in appeals, but sometimes I wonder if we aren't behaving very much like many Jews in Germany did prior to World War II, telling ourselves that this will pass and sanity will prevail while standing on the brink of a pending age of darkness. I'll believe the optomism when I see an actual case overturned in appeals -- in the meantime, I think we would all do well to look at this entire War Against the Internet which the Old Media are waging (and winning) with a little more realism and concern, and get involved politically and do something about it.
What happened? The 2.4 kernel slipped enough for RFS to catch up. (This isn't meant as a troll, just my reading of the facts.)
The kernel did slip, because of some awesome improvements in the VM code that were "too good to pass up." Others may argue that this was inappropriate -- personally I find it encouraging that Linus and the developers are flexible enough to go ahead and do something they feel is important, even if it offends the dogma of "how things are to be done" or even just the impatience of the rest of us.
I think little has changed. Reiserfs will NOT go into 2.4.0 because the developers don't want to cloud the issue while working to get a new release out the door. It will probably go into 2.4.1 if 2.4.0 is stable, which may be due to the "slippage" you refer to. OTOH if the kernel hadn't "slipped" it probably would have gone into 2.4.8 or something.
In short, ReiserFS would have worked its way into the kernel regardless. At most the minor version number changed due to the schedule slippage, nothing more.
Comments, criticisms, improvements are defintely welcome!
--- BEGIN HERE ---
POLICY STATEMENT
Very Well. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been asked to write a Policy Statement. Indeed I was asked by a Newspaper which, I am told, is read mostly in governmental circles.
I am to write a Governmental Policy Statement. I, who never could stand governments. I have only my mothers vigilance to thank that I, as a child at the age of 11, did not join the Red Army Faction. Admittedly, I was a bit young at the time.
Nevertheless I had in some fashion sympathy for the terrorists. At the local police station I requested and received a "most wanted" poster. At last, pictures of people I could relate to, who obviously disliked Suits as much as I did. For some reason my mother didn't approve of my hanging a "most wanted" poster between pictures of German pop bands. So my mother took it away, and this intrusion into my own autonomy annoys me to this day.
Later I seem to have grown up, although critics insist this hasn't yet happened. Well, they have to make their own judgements. In any event I have now been elected into a World Government. What, you don't believe me? That is why I am writing this Government Policy Statement. Some governments must make clear their policies, some more than others.
In the minds of some people, reality is being increasingly influenced by media content that can be accessed via electronic networks. The Internet is not just one of these networks that are based on protocols, standards, address assignments and rules. It is first and foremost a cultural area where participants are not committed to being either senders or receivers. Net reality is defined by the users.
ICANN regulates the distribution of Names, Numbers, the introduction of protocols and their applicable rules - i.e. the internet's architecture. In other words, it governs the internet.
Since I am supposed to explain the policy of this government to you, I need to explain it in terms of media with which your cultural circle is familiar. The generation of those currently in government grew up with vacuum tube radios. Back then one could easilly distinguish between the broadcaster and the receiver. This is called the Broadcast Model, and is a thing of the past. Today, the internet defines a communcation space, which we refer to as the Network Model. And anyone who is connected can enter this space, have a look around and take or contribute something. On the internet we call this the Gift Culture. A small, electronic paradise. Who did I just hear muttering "social romantic?"
Wonderful things have developed in the time, as this network of networks comprised of many diverse people engaged in energetic exchange created a new, global culture. One could find anything on the internet, for the planet is big, the aliens were already among us and, well, the lawyers were far away. They were busy making new laws against terrorsts and building huge security and police bureacracies.
Please understand, blowing up newly constructed prisons is all well and good, but moving into the internet was a much more fundamental form of liberation. Our thoughts were finally free! Admittedly, even on the internet there were a few people who tried to place boundries of the freedom of thought. Then money came into the picture, and if the internet were truly without boundries, then naturally that meant boundless wealth.
Since I don't want to offend the religious feelings of certain people, and certainly not in a Government Policy Statement, I won't say anything with regards to "eCommerce" or "eBusiness." Believe in whatever or whomever you wish. Faith is said to move mountains.
But tell your lawyers to leave us alone. The Businesspeople have unfortunately brought lawyers along, who see a potential contract even in the purchase of a bag of gummy bears and apply such horrid terms as "piratecy" to the natural act of reproducing bits of data.
And now that the Internet is beginning to flourish globally, they suddenly want to declare "intellectual property." And then scream loudly when they discover, that all day long and on every computer on the planet what they call "theft" occurs. And of course, they want to build in anti-theft anti-theft devices -- filters, policemen and jails.
OK, that is the current situation. And we, as netizens, have to respond. Some of us have concentrated more on the money side, while those with more foresight have rented spaceports, South Sea islands and servers in satellites in preparation for the coming confrontation.
The Internet was essentially based on one common language for computers to talk to each other and one address domain for contacting each other. The U.S. government, however, was involved in the development of the language, the assignment of addresses and the creation of the name domain. At some point, when the governments of other countries and the generation of suits discovered the World Wide Web, they also wanted a voice. But this is really a different, long story, which I'll skip over, even though it did ultimately result in the foundation of ICANN as a business entity.
So, we now have ICANN, a company originally founded by the United States government under California Law, that not only regulates the worldwide distribution of Names, numbers, and the implimentation of protocols, but also (almost) controls the critical components of the centralized, heiarchical namespace. I say "almost" because the American government does not want to give up control of the key component, namely the root-Zone file.
ICANN wishes to govern, but doesn't wish to admit this openly. The company has always been very careful to remain "just" a technical committee that regulated "only" technical questions and created "only" the assignment rules for names and numbers. It was no use. What happened is what always happens when centralized bodies expand -- whether they regulate things on a supposedly "representative" basis or not. The era of greed began.
Which brings us back to the lawyers, the suits and other governments. Ignoring for the moment the fact that ICANN's understatement was of course defined by business interests -- and there are occasional, unpleasant stories about the mafia-like connection between ICANN and Network Solutions, the registrar of the original birth -- the lawyers suddenly wanted to declare property rights on names. There were already cases of legal disputes between trademark and domain owners.
The lawyers had discovered the Internet and it annoyed them -- a lot. Such is their overpowering greed, hidden behind law. At this point the government really should have intervened. One could have said: let's create a new domain where trademark law applies. But because the government (ICANN) is itself comprised of lawyers, it didn't want to do this. And of course these lawyers wore neckties, which are known to restrict the flow of oxygen to the brain. Thus they had no imagination and couldn't understand why we would need an open space, or what a "parallel universe" is.
And because they were Americans, they of course preferred American trademark law, with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as the potential arbitrater (the plaintiff's choice), thereby giving the entire name heiarchy to other lawyers to devour.
This is not just annoying, this is a crime. A crime outright, as well as a crime against the nature of the internet as a public cultural domain. What the lawyers call "Intellectual Property" is, as every student of Latin knows, nothing more than theft from the public domain. And we, as netizens, have no desire to allow this theft to destroy the public domain and must, therefor, begin to address this issue proactively.
So everyone goes their own way and is networked together. Through this public space, through the collective subconscious, and through the Goddess of Conflict, of Discord, and Argument, Eris, rampaging between the lines. But before you misunderstand this as esoteric rhetoric, back to matters of government.
OK, I am now nominally a part of the government, starting sometime in November. I want to keep the public space free of commercial rules, to protect the free flow of information and give the bits space to roam freely. We want endless gardens of data, where it can be bloom, flourish and reproduce. So there you have the cultural aspects of my upcoming governmental policy.
Then there are also a couple of organizational questions, and because the centralized, hierarchical nature of governments invites abuse and poses an obstacle to progress, I hope to ensure everything runs as decentralized as possible, which means it must be transparent and open to the public eye. And the United States government, well, it should be more concerned with its own educational system instead of trying to rule over the internet's name space. Just look at the geographical understanding of ICANN, it speaks volumes.
The remaining tasks of this government consists of creating interconnected "parallel universes" of diverse, coexisting cultures, each with its own rules. Then almost everyone will be able to do whatever they like. Even the suits can have their own domains. They can then play their trademark law games (not standardized universally, but who cares), sue each other over differing interpretations of freedom of expression or just go up in smoke.
As long as they accept other cultures, it's fine. I will work hard to do so as well, so that this peaceful coexistence may work. Thus I have explained to you the government, which means I have explained to you that the future should, please, govern itself. Simply do whatever you like. I will do the same.
That is legally defined as theft.
No, it is not.
In the case of copyright infringement, making money off of somebody else's copyrighted work is legally defined as copyright infringement, and is explicitly (and with good reason) not equated to theft.
Making money by reverse engineering a product was never, before the DMCA, defined as copyright infringement, and most certainly not theft.
Now we have the DMCA, and the dawning of an age of verticle monopolies enforced at the end of a government gun the likes of which we haven't seen before. Why. Because the only damn way anything is going to interoperate in the future is going to be via controlled, licensed standards, which will always put competitors at a disadvantage and, probably quite quickly, lead to their demise.
The DMCA pays lipservice to "interoperability," but only as a sole purpose, and as any engineer will tell you, very little if anything on this planet can ever be said to have a "sole" purpose -- applications for products are always found which suprise the original maker. As the courts have said "interoperability" as merely one of several possible applications does not suffice to fall under the "interoperability" exclusion of the DMCA, this effectively means no reverse engineering at all, even for interoperability. End of story.
Fools like you will continue to scream "theft" where no such thing exists, and the even greater fools who run our government will probably listen. And thus ends the age of exponential growth in knowledge and technology, not with a bang, but with a wimper beneath the authoritarian thumb spawned of the greed of own corporate industry and the government which whored itself out to them, and the myopic short sightedness of folks like you.
My girlfreind and I both enjoy watching porn immensly. It hasn't harmed our relationship at all. Indeed, it has at times added some rather interesting spice to our lives.
:-)
And yes, we're both quite addicted to sex.
For all we know, it may have been your friend's wife's intolerance of porn that ruined their relationship, not the husbands "addiciton." Even if it wasn't, the notion that a few losers can't control themselves or are so narcissistic that they can only get off to pornography does not even remotely imply that sych would be true for the rest of us, who enjoy healthy lives and relationships while enjoying a little hardcore from time to time.
Throughout history, female authors have been denied recognition for their work, because it was commonly assumed that women were incapable of creating what they created.
As a guy whose name (Jean-Michel) often causes USENET readers to mistakenly believe they are corresponding with a woman, I can relate in some small fashion. The behavior of some of the cretins on the internet (be it USENET, irc, or slashdot) is enough to make one ill.
Nevertheless, I would implore you to consider the source. These are Anonymous Cowards, the keyword being Coward. Were they confronted with an actual woman showing any interest in their sorry existence whatsoever, they would almost certainly soil their pants with fear before stuttering something inane and descending hopelessly into a seizure of insecurity and general social cluelessness.
You have no need to defend yourself or your gender. The offensive posts to which you refer speak for themselves and identify their posters as the penultimate losers of society, whose only chance at either a sexual or interpersonal relationship is limited to their right hand.
I know it probably doesn't make you feel any better to read this, being the target of such purile harassment, but it is nevertheless true: your value as a contibuter is in no way diminished or tarnished by these idiots.
And throughout history, women have been spat upon, threatened, battered, and gangraped by the same men you'll find here on slashdot.
I know you're angry, but this comment is very unfair to the vast, vast majority of men on slashdot.
Throughout history women have seduced, betrayed, and murdered men for cheap material gain, to grasp power, to avenge a wrong (real or imagined), or even out of simple spite and jealousy.
The sexes have a long history of using and abusing one another, just as they have an equally long history of nurturing and sustaining one another.
It would be as wrong for me to paint the women who post to slashdot as "gold digging cunts" (or some other equally offensive characterization) as it is for you to paint the men here as would-be rapists, batterers, etc.
Put simply, some human beings are scum, irrespective of sex. Most are not. And while I don't blame you for being angry, please try to resist the very natural, human tendency to overgeneralize about an entire population of people based upon the behavior of a few mysogenist losers who will almost certainly remain sexually frustrated for the duration of their small, pitiful lives.
Yeah, I don't know much about the german legal system, but I know that in the US you have to actually NAME all defendants (at least in civil suits).
Have you forgotten the DeCSS lawsuit already?
When the MPAA decided to persue its (illegetimate) persecution of persons unnamed for posting links to DeCSS, many (If I recall correctly, the vast majority) of the defendents were listed as "John Doe #1" Through "John Doe #N", where N was some rediculous number like 90 or so.
In other words, a whole bunch of "unknowns" are being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The German verbiage is simply more explicit, honestly stating that the offending parties are not known, rather than merely implying it by listing a fictitious name. (I've always found the assumption in using the name "John Doe" that the offendor is male rather amusing).
From what I have been able to learn, both systems appear to allow lawsuits against unidentified parties, if the harm done can be identified, documented, and proven. Should the parties later be positively identified, they will be held liable.
Now, you can cut that up like a lawyer, but to anybody whole is familiar with the English language, Gore was taking a granule of truth and exaggerating it out of proportion.
He was overemphesizing his congressional record, in which he actively supported and promoted the creation of the internet. He in no way claimed or implied that he invented the internet, any more than Jed Bush's statements that he was instrumental in creating Florida's voucher program imply that he invented the notion of vouchers or was the first to implement them. At worst he was guilty of exaggerating his congressional record, nothing more.
They have diametrically opposing views of the role of government. They could not be more contrary! Their only similarity is that neither one has the remotest chance of being elected. Your simultaneous interest in both these candidates says a lot about your political knowledge.
No, it says nothing about my political knowledge. What is says is two things:
* The individual is being marginalized in favor of large special interest and corporate influence in government, and both candidates offer a solution
* I remain undecided on whether the best approach is government regulation of industry (which can and does work quite well in some instances) or very, very small government and corresponding freedom (both for individuals and corporations) that implies.
Why am I undecided? Because freedom for corporations often translates directly into less freedom for individuals (e.g. up until a few years ago people with medical conditions were effectively locked into their jobs because they would lose medical insurance if they went to another employer with a pre-existing condition. Later regulation which decreased the freedom and discretion of the insurance industry had a direct and immediate effect in enhancing the freedom of the individual. One may make sophist arguments such as "people were free to leave and aren't entitled to basic medical anyway, so they shouldn't complain" but the reality was, if your life depended on medical care and you would lose it if you changed jobs or were fired, you had the freedom any prisoner or slave has ever had: comply or die). The Libertarians make some compelling arguments, but they also gloss over a number of important and very complex details.
As with nearly everything in life, the ideal situation will probably end up being somewhere in the middle, though probably more in the libertarian direction than the Green direction (hence my leaning toward Brown).
I will say this, however. Your inflexibility in considering two differing points of view on a number of complex issues says a great deal about the openness of your mind, and the simplicity with which you appear to view the political world.
Uh, if you're gonna vote 3rd party, vote for Browne. Nader only wants to imprison the populace in a Green/Red New-Communist state.
That is an absolute load of crap.
I happen to have very strong libertarian leanings (with a couple of minor reservations, such as their stance on anti-trust, etc.), but with spokespeople like you the libertarians don't need enemies.
If you want to do the Libertarian Party a favor, change your tone and stop spouting nonesense.
In the meantime, I will resist the gut level reaction to your comments which would sway me away from Brown and continue to weigh the "empower the individual through very small, limited, and strictly constitutional government" argument of Mr. Brown against the "reduce corporate influence and reempower the individual" argument of Nader. My decision will come in due course according to facts, not diatribe, innuendo, and most especially not as a result of the outright nonesense you are spouting.
gore has been long touting his invention of the internet..
Al Gore never claimed to invent the Internet. That story was started by none other then Declan McCallugh (of LiViD defamation fame and in no small part responsible for inciting the persecution of DeCSS and css-auth developers).
For the story debunking the myth that Al Gore claimed to have invent the internet see this ; Salon story.
Caveat: I am voting for either Ralph Nader or Harry Brown (currently leaning toward Mr. Brown). If you oppose Gore (or Bush) that is fine, but be sure you do so for factual reasons, not myths propogated by yellow journalists.
With any luck, the finding against them will keep them from doing it again. But maybe not.
E*Trade made out very well on this scam.
They lost one arbitration. Maybe, now that this has been published on slashdot, others will step forward and they'll lose more. I certainly hope so.
However, unlike many small investors they likely rolled out of the RHAT stock fairly quickly, locking in some huge profits and eliminating their risk.
At $26k / arbitration they would have to lose a huge number of arbitrations before they would be in the red on the deal, and while that might happen if everyone filed grievances against them, that is unlikely.
It was a good trade. Fuck a few hundred people, make tens of millions, and be forced to pay back a few thousand here and there to the annoying gnats which actually stand up to their chicanery.
Until somebody goes to jail for this, there will not be any true justice, and certainly no incentive whatsoever to prevent E*Trade from doing the same thing all over again to somebody else.
I'm also bothered by a government that either doesn't see campaign contributions as a way of currying favor for a significant merger, or who doesn't consider it significant.
The government may not see (or admit seeing) that campaign contributions and softmoney are nothing other than blatent, legalized bribery, but We The People have no trouble recognizing this for what it is.
It is common knowledge that our senators, representatives, and presidents routinely sell themselves to business and special interests like cheap whores on a Saturday night. Unfortunately people feel very powerless to do anything about it, since they correctly identify this behavior with both the Democratic and Republican branches of the Corporate Party and fail to realize that their vote, were it cast for a third party (such as the Greens or the Libertarians), would not only speak out loudly against this behavior, but quite probably have a much greater influence on the public agenda and public policy than the sheeplike votes cast for the two main parties.
Until people realize how much power they do hold in their hands, and begin exercising it by voting non-Corporate, they will remain impotent, and our elected "leaders" will continue shamelessly turning sleazy tricks for cash in the full and confident knowledge that they, in truth, have nothing to fear from a disgruntled, but apathetic and thus powerless, constituency.
There is a group of activists and tagalongs (I fall in the latter category, as I haven't actually sued anyone myself yet) who have combined into an organization called Private Citizen .
If you join they will, on your behalf, send cease and desist letters to several hundred direct marketing companies, including telemarketers. The cost for both the telemarketing and junk mail service was, I think, $30.00 US. That was the best $30.00 I ever spent: my junk phone calls went to zero and my junk mail to just a trickle.
In addition, they have extensive information on how to combat telemarketers, how to go about suing them in small claims court (and winning), and other guarilla tactics individuals can use to get some of their privacy back.
I am a very satisfied, paying member of that group, and highly recommend it to anyone who seriously wants this shit to end, now. They were highly effective in ending it for me (I had been getting harassed multiple times/week, now I haven't been bothered in months).
Good Luck!
And where do you propose we find someone who is an expert in computer software, and electronics, and electrical systems, and mechanics, and biotech, and chemistry, and materials science, etc., etc.?
We don't. The people handing out these patents (in most if not all of these areas) have already demonstrated their incompetence. My solution doesn't do anything to eliminate the incompetence (one could reasonably argue that a competent patent office would be even more dangerous), it simply limits the harm the patent office can cause to those patents an individual patent advocate can process and approve in a single day.
If we can't eliminate the USPTO (which should be our first priority) we should at least limit its ability to lock up and corden off vast areas of intellectual and business endeavor.
The head of the patent office could review each one personally. This is obviously impossible today.
No it isn't.
Indeed, I think you may have hit on a possible solution to the absurdly patent-happy frenzy we are seeing. Require the head of the US Patent Office to personally review and critique any patent application before it is granted. Disallow any and all deligation of this task.
That might, just might, reduce the explosion of patents sufficiently to allow our high-tech economy to survive another few years.
I guarantee, if something isn't done about this absurdity real soon now, we are going to have the dubious distinction of having watched first hand while the IP lawyers flush our most promising industry down the drain.
But then, maybe that is what the politicians want: technological progress slowed to a crawl so they can keep up, and keep lining their pockets with our hard work.
Put your name against software patents
That petition is needlessly limited. Patents are harmful to every industry and every product they touch, be it software, hardware, pharmaceuticals, or anything else. The harmful impact of software patents are most obvious to us because we are familiar with the industry, and can remember a time when they either didn't exist at all, or had a smaller impact.
Patents harm every other area of intellectual endeavor just as badly, but we tend to see it less redilly in no small part because it affects us less directly, and because no one remembers a time when new knowledge about, say, a hydrogen fuel cell, could emerge into the market immediately and spawn a whole new series of quick inventions. Why? Because for the last 200 years in this country (and longer elsewhere) this hasn't been the case -- we've had generations to get used to the slowdown of technological progress the patent system inflicts upon us. Indeed, most of us never question the slow pace of progress with respect to automobiles, airplanes, or power generation -- we've lived with artifically restrained technological progress all our lives. It is only the threat to the one area, software, which had been free to progress and evolve at as fast a pace as new, unfettered ideas would allow, that the harm becomes obvious. We have a unique opportunity to wake up, question, and perhaps even change the entire paradigm. If we don't, how much time do you think will pass before people become used to the slow change in computer software, as new ideas (many obvious, some not) get locked up for twenty years at a time (then renamed, and locked up again).
The patent office doesn't need to be reformed or revamped. It needs to be shut down. Period.
Perhaps, if and when people start pondering and waking up to the destructive impact so-called intellectual property laws have, then maybe, just maybe, something will be done about it.
Of course, a constitutional amendment banning patents and copyrights isn't something we can hope for any time soon, more's the pity.
Perhaps it will evolve in the way another package did in regard to strong encryption. (sorry, it's been a while so I don't recall exactly which one. Maybe Eudora.)
The "Package" you are thinking of is the export version of Netscape, to which strong encryption can be patched by downloading and running the internationally developed (and availabel) Fortify program.
Ob DivX Deux: I have no intention of using it for illegal purposes. I want to record episodes of my favorite TV shows (Babylon 5, Sliders, etc.) and store them in a high quality compressed format using my CDR and cheap CDR blanks. I want to do the same for home videos I have made, and a couple of small movie projects I'm working on.
All of this is legal, legitimate, and exactly what the DVD Forum and the MPAA wish to prevent.
This leads one to a conclusion: a vote for Nader is a vote against Gore.
This is a gross and inaccurate oversimplification.
It is a myth that a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote, and past time for this harmful and destructive myth to be debunked.
First, your assumption (most people voting for Nader would vote for Al Gore) is flawed. While I do not have scientifically valid statistics to fall back on, of the seven people I know who are planning to vote for Ralph Nader, four of them would vote for Bush, not Al Gore, if they were less concerned with the corporate coopting of our government. In each case they are not only socially conservative, they absolutely loath Clinton and anyone associated with him. The other three are, like myself, more centrist or left of center, and probably would vote for Gore over Bush, were we truly a two party system.
This is similar to Ross Perot, who, contrary to public myth (and Republican propoganda), drew as many votes from would democratic voters as he did Republican voters. Bill Clinton's win against Bush Sr. has often been blamed, erroneously, on Ross Perot, despite the fact that this has been shown to be false, both by the voting demographic itself and the reelection of Clinton for a second term, in which Ross Perot played a marginal part.
Ross Perot is an example worth citing for another, much more important reason, however. In the first election he ran in, against both Bush Senior and Bill Clinton, he got 20% of the vote, despite no one believing he had a chance in hell of winning (an erroneous belief -- had he not dropped out of the race in the face of alleged intimidation from the Right he would certainly have done better, quite possibly even beating out both Bill Clinton and Bush Senior. Indeed, that is a rather powerful motive for either the Republicans or Democrats to employ the methods of threat and intimidation Mr. Perot has alleged).
That aside, something vastly more important happened. Perot's agenda, balancing the budget, was not even a point of discussion for either major party before he entered the race, and only paid lip-service by both once he did. (Bush's proposal for limiting spending, voted down, was designed specifically to not kick in until after he left office, while the democrats in turn would offer only the vaguest proposals for controlling spending).
Simply by winning 20% of the vote, both parties were forced to sit up and take notice. Those of us who are liberal may not like the direction Bill Clinton and the Democrats went, but their eagerness to balance the budget, and in so doing go against some of their most traditional powerbase, was influenced in no small part by Ross Perot's good showing. The same is true of the Republicans, who set aside their promises of tax cuts and actually sent Clinton legislation which raised taxes, in order to reduce and ultimately eliminate the budget deficit.
Now both sides claim the surplus is of their making, and in one respect they are both correct: it was republican and democratic lawmakers, and a democratic president, that drafted and enacted the legislation and budget which made it happen. However, it is Ross Perot's presence and performance in the elections which were the real catalyst. Those 20% who voted for Perot had a vastly more profound and direct impact on public policy than the other 80% of us who voted for one or the other major candidate, even though their candidate didn't get elected.
Now we have Ralph Nader, who addresses an issue which concerns us all deeply (the increasing power of corporations in our government and the corresponding weakening of the individual's rights and influence), and which neither major party will address because of the powerful interests they are both beholden to.
On the one hand, our individual votes can help bolster a third party candidate's showing into a respectable, perhaps even dramatic, showing, making his rhetoric and platform a part of mainstream political debate. On the other hand, our individual votes can bolster one or the other candidate most think have a chance of winning, thereby reinforcing many policies we disagree with vehemently, but both so-called mainstream parties unfortunately agree upon.
The question is, will we vote to impact policy, or merely choose our next figurehead?
The ironic thing is that F*cked Company IS in violation of various trademarks whose owners would have a legitimate right to complain, such as GoTo.com and eToys. THEIR logos remain intact and unparodied in the spoof page.
Well, actually those logos/trademarks have been "modified" by having other logos placed in front of them, overlapping and clipping their edges, etc.
However, since taken as a whole, together, it is obvious that no single company, logo, or trademark is being represented as "fuckedcompany.com" or even "fuckedideas.com" or whoever the complaining jerks are who are being paradied, and the use is noncommercial to boot, the law is clearly in favor of the defendents. Should the antagonists then try to employ copyright law, fair use will become relevant, and blow them right out of the water.
Idealab! are indeed jumorless jerks -- soon to be penniless jerks as well as their dotcom dreams go the way of so many others: into the toilet.
The implosion will be lent additional humor in context of their current, aggressively hypocritical behavior. I shall enjoy watching it immensly, chortling "Bzzt! Thank you for playing!" when it is all over.
Music is watermarked for that user (s device?), who has filled out name and address details correctly for music company.
If I had moderator access, I'd be torn whether to mark your comment as funny or insightful, since your sarcasm ("there's no way it can fail!") is both.
Please provide the RIAA with your name, physical address and email address below:
Mr. U. Suck
1234 Fuck The Recording Industry Drive
Suite B-1TE-ME
Chicago, IL 60619
email: throw-away-account@someip.com
I'm sure you and others have thougth up equally, if not more, create responses to expeditions fishing for personal invitation, but if not, I cordially invite you to make use of the above on any RIAA/MPAA questionaire or registration form. I certainly plan to.
Kind of a silly attack...
It isn't an attack on the Cato institute. It is a bit of context, in order to provide people with a sense of Cato's political and social agenda. This is valuable information if one is to read the report and weigh its value appropriately.
The Cato Institute is a very conservative, libertarian thinktank of sorts. They have some interesting ideas and arguments, and a lot with which I take personal issue (and disagree). Nevertheless I have a copy of the constitution in my home, published by the Cato Institute (and given to me by a friend who is running for congress on the Libertarian ticket).
I am not a supporter or opponent of Cato, although I think it fair to say I disagree with them more than I agree with them.
My point? It is important to know the agenda and slant behind the argument, whether it is my slant with respect to Cato (noted above), or Cato's slant with respect to Microsoft.
The Cato Institute opposes anti-trust law in general and the DOJ trial against Microsoft in particular. This is relevant information, when one is reading an allegedly unbiased report aimed at the Findings of Fact and Law in the DOJ trial.
To describe a post pointing these biases out as an "attack on Cato" is IMHO very erroneous.
It has been about five years since I did the vinyl to CD thing (I've since converted the resulting CDs to MP3 and OGG), so I don't recall exactly what program I used at the time. It may have been a command line utility.
/dev/dsp -- I don't know if that would work or not.
.wav already, can be converted). A number of audio editing tools allow recording (select the record input device using your mixer program). SLAB is one possibility, others include a command line utility which someone else wrote to do exactly what I did (convert vinyl to digital), a simple command line recorder (this might be what I used), another recorder SCAR, another tape/LP converter kit, Vsound (allows you to capture audio from apps like realplayer). Finally there's "yarec" and "xwav" (which I also used as I recall), but I cannot find URLs for either right now.
I did not dd from
However, there are any number of small X utilities that will allow one to capture audio from the microphone or line-in and save in some format (which, if not
You don't.
You let them tie their own rope and hang themselves with it.
The United States, as the world's current sole superpower, is enjoying unprecendented economic prosperity. Unprecendented. In this climate I have found it impossible to discuss, much less make clear, a number of topics, all of which seem obvious to those of us who read slashdot and are informed on the issue, and are apparently unfathonable by most of those who do not:
Like the people of Philidelpha in the 1970s who refused to believe their mayor and police could do any wrong because crime was down (mainly as a result of their torturing prisoners and witnessess alike to coerce testimony and insure convictions, and the fact that they were terrorizing disadvantaged groups into submission), no one wants to hear negative or unsettling commentary on This Great Nation(tm) when things are so good. Add to that the specter of being considered "unamerican" or "unpatriotic" if you should be so uppitty as to criticize Our Leaders(tm), and you have an environment in which people are adamantly unwilling to listen to, much less believe, anything which even smacks of a pessimistic commentary on what is going on.
I can't even get friends who are activists in other areas of life to listen (and you would thing, as politically active and motivated people, they would at least be willing to ponder the topic). The degree of denial and unwillingness to look at and consider evidence that runs contrary to the common meme of "America is the greatest place on earth bar none!" is probably impossible for those to grasp who haven't been confronted with it directly. It is truly remarkable!
In a very real way we are being fattened for the slaughter.
I am slowly concluding that you simply cannot make people hear what they do not wish to hear. Soon enough the consiquences of this unwillingness to be informed will make themselves felt.
More importantly, if other countries are smart enough to persue more intelligent intellectual property policies, they will quickly become more competetive than the United States and economic fortunes will shift. Then, and only then, will Americans sit up and take notice.
On the other hand, if the rest of the world follows America to hell, well then, we can all roast marshmellows over the brimstone together.