Of course, you now know that MS is going to spin this in the PR, with comments like "Windows has fewer security holes than UNIX systems according to a recent survey of security experts..."
Unless it's proven in court that fair use demands that CDs be copyable, the issue that we've had in the past few weeks on these copy-protected CDs being compliant with the CDDA specs has been null-and-voided by the labeling issue, which I predicted would happen after the first lawsuit on mislabeling fraud. This, beyond ethical and moral reasons, is a CYA move by RIAA for any potental lawsuits.
It's now important to legally define what constitutes fair use when one purchases a CD (which unfortunately will have to be decided in a court of law); does fair use cover personal backups? Ripping to any format? Playing in a CD?
Remember, fair use only currently stands thanks to the generosity of the court in numerous cases (Sony vs Betamax, for example), but there is no legal standing for it, and it's doubtful in this climat that there will be one defined ever.
At least with Majordomo (I'm *sure* that similar features have to be in the MLM), you can force replies to go only to the send (forcing that messages back to the list have to be changed before sent), catch most administravia requests and direct them to the list admin, and limit the size of messages that can be sent. Of course, specifically limiting attachments is not in there, but I would not be surprised to see newer mailers have this feature.
However, it should be noted that typically, by default, new lists are created with "reply to list" enabled, no administravia checks, and no message limit.
In other words, these common problems with mailing lists are a result of poor list management and not from stupid users (at least most of the time). It takes but a few seconds to prepare these configurations in Majordomo, and thus there's no reason to not have them if that is something you want to enforce on your list.
I'm glad that W3C extended this period; given that the period was open for about 1.5 months across the Sept 11 events, it only makes sense to extend it a bit.
One thing that concerns me about RAND is related to the issue of SSSCA. Undoubtably, if SSSCA is passed, those that are in control of patents regarding digital right authenication methods are going to push heavily for inclusion of their property into the specs. That means every piece of hardware and software will have an added 'tax' akin to the RAMBUS memory tax, and will drastically increase the price of hardware and software.
Similarly , if RAND passes, not only would the cost of software go up because of payments, but it would be very hard for open-source programmers to get their foot in the door. Sure, this won't affect the core functionality of the web (HTML and XML), but who knows what the next future technology will be that will make a big difference on the web? I strongly urge everyone that cares about open development to reply to this.
My bad on the FCC/FTC mixup; I know I read the article thinking that it would make more sense that the FCC did it, and screwed up on the write-up. Sorry for that, folks.
Nevertheless, some TLA organization of the gov't is putting the smackdown on some guy.:-)
Actually, it's not that the US has passed any (the only anti-spam like law on the federal level is the UCE 'junk FAX' law, which has yet to be applied to email); several states have tried to pass laws, some working and some not; I think the only one that's been successful is Washington state, but only because it applies to spammers in WA that spam WA state residents, and not to anyone outside (otherwise it because a Commerce issue and the state's power is overruled).
If anything, in the US, there's a common idea in most government's that any unsoliciated communication (telemarketing, spam, junk mail) is that a one-shot rule is applied; the end company may contact you once; if you wish to recieve no more from them, you can opt out at any time. However, the problem currently stems from the lack of significant enforcement of the opt-out rules; since particularly for email, the opt-out addresses can be invalid, and some marketers use the addresses on the opt-out lists to seed other lists, it's rather ineffective. Given the corporate nature of America, I very much doubt we'll see opt-in marketing, but a few effective rules for controlling opt-out will make good in the long run.
I'd love to see something like this encorporated into a shower screen; assuming that one can have some wireless connection to a local transmitter, it would be great to have something that you can read news and surf the web while you shower (at least, given that most people I know spend upwards of 20 minutes in the shower...).
I agree, that there needs to be something to balance the need to push ads to pay for bandwidth, and the ability of the user to block ads.
However, I would suspect that most people are blocking ads not such that they don't see them, but to prevent them from being tracked, and thus, my arguement is more along the lines of "The right of the user not to be tracked by blocking ads" and "The right of the web site to make money". Thus, I first imply that we take the web site out of the picture, and only focus on the end user and the ad content deliever.
If ads did not have any way to track users save through click-thrus, then I would probably not block ads in the first place; ads simply ought to pay based on the number of hits the ad gets. Unfortunately, because some sites way back in the early days (1996ish) found ways to falsing increase hits or similar steps to make ad numbers seem overblown, the ad content companies felt they had to go to a unique impression model, which means they HAVE to track you at some point in order to determine the value of an ad. Unfortunately, too many ad companies have used this to also create large databased of browsing and surfing histories; not necessarily associated with a given user, but it would take very little work for someone with a names database to connect to a browsing database, and get your full browsing history through ad servers. I believe that this type of situation is a fair violation of privacy (Particularly since most sites that use ad banners and have privacy policies do NOT consider the privacy invasions of ad servers in their policies), and thus there is a right of users (at least in the US) to block anything that they might feel is harming their privacy.
Again, if you can serve me ads that do not track me, I'll happy get them (and ignore them, but I'll still get them so the end site gets that fractional cent they have coming). I believe that this is that attitude that most people that use ad blocking software have, in addition to ads being too large/using JS/Flash/etc.
Some browsers don't support JS, and cannot download images (eg: lynx, or browsers for
sight-impared people). At least in the latter case, there's a legit reason for them to not have images.
In addition, in today's age of worms upon virus upon other nasty things, there is a sufficiently significant (probably around 10%) of users that have turned off Active Scripting in IE or the equivalent in NS to avoid such problems. I very much believe that these users have more of a right to keep this off than an advertizer has to force you to look at an ad.
Surviellence methods need to have oversight
on
Biometrics in Airports
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
To me, I don't have a big problem with survellience at places like airports or other places where you have already given up your anonymousity in order to use the service (banks, etc). I'd rather see them stop and check more people, maybe only catching 1 in 10000 that are wanted for something, than stopping only those that fit exactly, catching 1 in 10, and missing a few that might slip through.
The important thing is that the surviellence information must be handled in the right way; it's way too easy nowadays for companies in the name of profits to pool customer databases together and generate a large profile on you without you knowing. If surviellence is being used for government purposes, then only the government should have access to it; furthermore, if you are detained only because the computer indicated a match but you are otherwise innocent, there should be no record about this made in the computer beyond doing a $missed++ increment on the global database.
Thus, any sort of increased surviellence absolutely needs some sort of public oversight to make sure the information is not abused or that information that should not be stored isn't. Frequent inspections of the use of biometrics, unrestricted access to the computer files and data collected, all done by private citizens with NDAs, is necessary before these systems should be in place.
Re:What's up with fileplanet requiring a login?...
on
Quake3 v1.30 Final Is Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Fileplanet *used* to be a good mirroring of many popular game files. Then Gamespy got greedy, and started to change everything; the number of FP mirrors dropped significantly, and then of late, they *require* you to log in to download something, and even then, you have to wait in their so-called queue because their FTP servers are so slow and heavily used. And unfortunately a lot of game companies release their patches through FilePlanet exclusively (at least for the first week), presumably because of their 'mirroring' abilitiy.
Fileplanet needs to take a less from a site like Tucows; mirror and mirror often. Even if there were only 10 US mirrors instead of 3 or 4, they'd be much better off and I'd have less of a problem with them requiring a login. But as it stands, many alternative gaming sites are picking up the slack, such as www.3dgamers.com, which while not having the polish of FP, does have the files and capacity of it.
I'd have no problem with keeping ads on a site *IF* they didn't try to track me at the same time. Most of these ads are coming from third party servers and have sufficently ability to at least track your IP, and can possibly be used to identify surfing patterns. The main reason that I block ads is not to see them, but to protect my privacy.
Note that this case involved the publishers & songwriters (as represented by the NMPA), as opposed to Universal's rivals in the RIAA distribution group. This is similar to the recent Napster story in that they have agreed to terms for NMPA, but not yet to RIAA.
Throughout all these talks and other stories, we're seeing a bigger problem in the music industry that relates to copyrights and royalities; namely, that for any one song, there are 3 people and/or groups that can claim some form of ownership on it, legally or ethically. These are the performers themselves, the distributors that typically own the copyrights on the performce over the performers, and the publishers and songwriters that typically own the copyrights on the lyrics and sheet music but not the performance itself.
Too many cooks can easily spoil the broth.
This is why I think indy artists are gaining more and more attention. First, they typically are their own performers and publishers, which means they at least own the copyright on the lyrics and music. Secondly, most indy labels have much more lax contracts in that the label itself doesn't own the copyright on the performed work, and it is still held by the indy group. These situations allow the indy group to have full control on how to distribute and publish their work. And most good indy groups appear to understand that if they write good songs and yet release some of their works on the net, they will still take in a modest profit from touring and CD sales with the increase in their fan base. Only with that amount of control can situations like that happen.
If there is any other group beyond the performaces that are trying to get their hands in the honeypot as well, then all bets are off for strong control of distribution of their works.
This situation also calls for the development of music 'publishers' that are basically people that can help to press and burn CDs, and get them into distribution channel, but otherwise do nothing else with copyright, much like how people can get custom T-shirts made in large quantities; the t-shirt shop owns none of the copyrights on any logos or sayings, only does the job they are paid for. A shop that could offer a band to print, for example, a buck a copy for each CD, with $.10 being a profit for the shop, the rest into materials, operation, and distribution, could easily win out in such a situation. I'd also expect the shop to collect royalities, but again, most of these would go back to the band, the shop maybe taking only 10% of that as well.
Hopefully, more bands in the future will see that going indy, or at least staying away from RIAA, will earn them not only more respect from their fans, but possibly more money than they would have seen from signing with RIAA.
I consider myself a fast learner; I rarely learn anything in the lecture that wasn't in the day's prior reading or the like. Particularly with some of my undergraduate classmates, who would need concepts repeated over and over again.
Yet I still want to attend the lectures in order to possibly learn something I might miss, or to get information on something that wasn't covered in the book. So what I would do was to do the homework that was assigned for that class for the next week, or for a different class, while still listening and taking notes.
While students like me are the minority, I think those that are understand that if we are going to do anything else during a lecture that we'll do it with minimal disruption in the class. I'd still favor blocking internet access and the like, only because what's on my computer screen can be seen by people behind and to the sides of me, and that can cause a disruption if it's the wrong type of images, and there are other ways of keeping oneself busy without disrupting others in a class.
First, given the lateness of this bid (Now that the FCC has officially allowed Rhythms to shutdown), it's very apparent that WorldCom doesn't want the customers, just the hardware. While Rhythms did sell their own ISP, most of their customers were resold Rhythms lines to ISPs like Telocity, who have been helping customers switch to alternate LECs when available (mostly to the ILECs as opposed to Covad or other CLECs), and had originally argued for the FCC to prevent a Rhythms shutdown for 2+ weeks from schedule.
Secondly, DSL will not bounce back until there is more action taken against the ILECs like Verizon and SBC/Ameritech. The 4-6 weeks to set up a DSL line to a CLEC is typically to allow the amount of time for the ILEC to go out and switch it over; since this means a loss of a potental customer to the ILEC, they drag their heels as much as possible, despite threats of gov't intervention or penality. Here in the mid-west, Ameritech land, we're just getting over our hundreds-of-million-dollar spanking of Ameritech for poor customer service and repairwork of normal phone lines (with further penalties for future incompenticies), but nothing to cover the broadband market. $100M may seem like a lot, but that's chump change to SBC/Ameritech; it's probably cheaper for them to incure these fines than to spend more to bump up service.
Note that the $26 million settlement is only with publishers and songwriters; there is still the distributers (aka RIAA) that have ligitigation against Napster that must be overcome before Napster can continue with the subscription service.
There's the Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), which I'm still waiting for the results of the interview that were posted, unfortunately before the recent events. That is a lobbying group on many tech issues, and they appear to be pro-Slashdot-manta in several cases.
With MS now legally declared as a monopoly, they no longer have the right to set whatever price they want for their product, because a monopoly suggests that there are no market forces in place that will cause a supply-demand-like effect to take place. (Again, it's not illegal to hold a monopoly, only to abuse it's position). It's expected that the next legal phase of the MS/DOJ will include looking at the licensing costs; if it is determined that at the current costs, MS is earning more than a reasonable profit per copy sold, someone's going to have hell to pay.
Did that OEM computer come with recovery disks or with an installable version of XP?
True, since this sounds like a small shop in NZ, it's probably the full XP version, but what will happen when Dell or Gateway release their XP machines?
The entire idea of the recovery disk which typically requires one to reformat their hard drives (and note that most OEM machines come with only one HD with one partition), is a really stupid idea in the first place; I'm sure it's great for OEM support since they know how they can get back to a completely fresh, working machine, but it sucks for even a semi-literate computer user. And if I remember correctly, MS pushed for some of that in recent years. I'm sure it's going to continue with XP.
Also conspicuously missing from DVD releases are two major triologies: Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. You'd think having both of these out as well as SW on DVD, all in maximum featuritis, would help to improve the acceptance of DVD.
If there's a possibility that others can run services equilvalent to Hailstorm, would this not also lead to the possibility that individual users with sufficient technical know-how (namely anyone using Linux:-) could run their own Hailstorm-like server on their own box with their own security safegaurds?
Yes, this is MS, so they might only provide a WinXX client. Yes, this is MS, so they might require you to register your client with some central authority with the ability to 'audit' the server to make sure it's up to specs.
But it may also be as simple as having a client conform to certain specs (hopefully open), and that's it. Average Joe would probably never worry themselves with this, so they'd not lose that many customers in the first place.
But in the end, I think it's very important that Hailstorm cannot be a necessity for web sites and that there must be a manual entry level for data when it is needed.
Every time we encourage other/.'ers to send mail to their congresspersons, it's been pointed out that email is typically read by an aide, and has less of an impact than snail mail, faxing, or a phone call.
In the past, I've used the fax service provided by ACLU to contact my reps, and have gotten (most likely form letter) replies back from them, but it does tell me someone at least read it and understood my concerns.
It's understandable to drop, in the short term, these shows, given the content about terrorism. But the question becomes now of how soon will they be back , if ever.
As an example of previous CN dealings, the short-lived but excellent show Freakazoid had 4 episodes with reverences (both satire and just off the cuff) to Princess Di. When she died in the car accident, those 4 episodes were completely pulled from the schedule understandable; however, they did not return to the schedule for at least 6 months. I understand being sensitive for something recent in the current events, but that seems excessively overkill.
What bothers me more than much else right now is that Hollywood, all aspects of it, seem to be taking steps above and beyond what ought to be done for the short-term sensitivitly. Anything involving the WTC, even if made years ago, seems to be getting some sort of post-censoring. We cannot deny that the WTC ever existed and shows were made about it, and to do so is only giving the terrorists more of a victory.
Just like several other things like loss of civil liberties and increased security at places, extended news coverage is yet another victory for terrorism. It's very understandable that for few days from the incident for the major networks to be filled with news as the events break, but we're at the point were 1) we're very unlikely to find any new survivors, and 2) any investigation and future planning should be done without much public information as to maintain state secrecy. Thus, news coverage since Friday has been simply repeating the same events over and over and filling the screen with talking heads. In addition, the net equivalent seems to be happening at the major news sites; too many analysis, very little pro-active stories. And yet as the base article indicates, we're too much drawn to it. At least up to Friday, my productivity at work for the week and at home is way down since I feel like I'm continually checkign these sites, but as news is no longer flowing as fast as it did Weds, I think I'm over that bilge.
The longer that these news outlets contrinue to push this 24/7 news schedule, the longer it will take the rest of the american (and other countries as well) people to return to a sense of normalicy, which is what we ought to be striving for to show the terrorists that this attack did little to stiffle the American spirit. Sure, I'd expect to have soem expanded news coverage as events break, but we should be watching regular programming at this point. Particularly this weekend, as families have a chance for family time, it's important that the networks offer fare that the entire family can enjoy as opposed to more news coverage.
And yet another sign that terrorism has won a bit is the fact that several movies, TV shows, and video games are being pulled for the time being or revamped in the short term to accommodate the loss. In some cases, such as Anrold's new movie or FOX's "24" or the video game Majesty, this makes sense; events are too close to reality that pulling them for the short term just makes sense. I also being not holding the bulk of sports events this weekend is also a reasonable step (both emotionally and technically; how do you get all those people from one side of the country to other with air travel only just starting to get back to normal?) But then you also have cases where, for example, a new Tim Allen comedy in NYC is pulled since it simply involves the WTC, a new Jackie Chan movie being pulled and revamped completely despite the amount of footage already shot since Chan's character in it was a window washer for the WTC, C&C Red Alert 2 being pulled since it shows NYC on fire on the cover of the box, Microsoft immediately altering the next version of it's Flight Sim to remove the WTC from the NYC area (and in the UK, the flight sim being removed from shelves as it was claimed that the terrorists could have learned to fly from that), and numerous other examples which are more knee-jerk than thought out. Again, each of these knee-jerk actions are wins for terrorism, because that's the type of lifestyle that we've come to enjoy and expect, and now, at best for the short term, that's gone.
Yes, at least according to the President, we're in a National Emergancy, so I expect some parts of our lives to be distrupted. But it is much more important to show that the American resolve and spirit cannot be broken as easily as it was, and thus, we must strive to get back to normalacy in our lives, and unfortunately, the constant barrage of news is not helping.
Slashdot Mirror
It's now important to legally define what constitutes fair use when one purchases a CD (which unfortunately will have to be decided in a court of law); does fair use cover personal backups? Ripping to any format? Playing in a CD? Remember, fair use only currently stands thanks to the generosity of the court in numerous cases (Sony vs Betamax, for example), but there is no legal standing for it, and it's doubtful in this climat that there will be one defined ever.
However, it should be noted that typically, by default, new lists are created with "reply to list" enabled, no administravia checks, and no message limit.
In other words, these common problems with mailing lists are a result of poor list management and not from stupid users (at least most of the time). It takes but a few seconds to prepare these configurations in Majordomo, and thus there's no reason to not have them if that is something you want to enforce on your list.
One thing that concerns me about RAND is related to the issue of SSSCA. Undoubtably, if SSSCA is passed, those that are in control of patents regarding digital right authenication methods are going to push heavily for inclusion of their property into the specs. That means every piece of hardware and software will have an added 'tax' akin to the RAMBUS memory tax, and will drastically increase the price of hardware and software.
Similarly , if RAND passes, not only would the cost of software go up because of payments, but it would be very hard for open-source programmers to get their foot in the door. Sure, this won't affect the core functionality of the web (HTML and XML), but who knows what the next future technology will be that will make a big difference on the web? I strongly urge everyone that cares about open development to reply to this.
Nevertheless, some TLA organization of the gov't is putting the smackdown on some guy. :-)
If anything, in the US, there's a common idea in most government's that any unsoliciated communication (telemarketing, spam, junk mail) is that a one-shot rule is applied; the end company may contact you once; if you wish to recieve no more from them, you can opt out at any time. However, the problem currently stems from the lack of significant enforcement of the opt-out rules; since particularly for email, the opt-out addresses can be invalid, and some marketers use the addresses on the opt-out lists to seed other lists, it's rather ineffective. Given the corporate nature of America, I very much doubt we'll see opt-in marketing, but a few effective rules for controlling opt-out will make good in the long run.
However, I would suspect that most people are blocking ads not such that they don't see them, but to prevent them from being tracked, and thus, my arguement is more along the lines of "The right of the user not to be tracked by blocking ads" and "The right of the web site to make money". Thus, I first imply that we take the web site out of the picture, and only focus on the end user and the ad content deliever.
If ads did not have any way to track users save through click-thrus, then I would probably not block ads in the first place; ads simply ought to pay based on the number of hits the ad gets. Unfortunately, because some sites way back in the early days (1996ish) found ways to falsing increase hits or similar steps to make ad numbers seem overblown, the ad content companies felt they had to go to a unique impression model, which means they HAVE to track you at some point in order to determine the value of an ad. Unfortunately, too many ad companies have used this to also create large databased of browsing and surfing histories; not necessarily associated with a given user, but it would take very little work for someone with a names database to connect to a browsing database, and get your full browsing history through ad servers. I believe that this type of situation is a fair violation of privacy (Particularly since most sites that use ad banners and have privacy policies do NOT consider the privacy invasions of ad servers in their policies), and thus there is a right of users (at least in the US) to block anything that they might feel is harming their privacy.
Again, if you can serve me ads that do not track me, I'll happy get them (and ignore them, but I'll still get them so the end site gets that fractional cent they have coming). I believe that this is that attitude that most people that use ad blocking software have, in addition to ads being too large/using JS/Flash/etc.
In addition, in today's age of worms upon virus upon other nasty things, there is a sufficiently significant (probably around 10%) of users that have turned off Active Scripting in IE or the equivalent in NS to avoid such problems. I very much believe that these users have more of a right to keep this off than an advertizer has to force you to look at an ad.
The important thing is that the surviellence information must be handled in the right way; it's way too easy nowadays for companies in the name of profits to pool customer databases together and generate a large profile on you without you knowing. If surviellence is being used for government purposes, then only the government should have access to it; furthermore, if you are detained only because the computer indicated a match but you are otherwise innocent, there should be no record about this made in the computer beyond doing a $missed++ increment on the global database.
Thus, any sort of increased surviellence absolutely needs some sort of public oversight to make sure the information is not abused or that information that should not be stored isn't. Frequent inspections of the use of biometrics, unrestricted access to the computer files and data collected, all done by private citizens with NDAs, is necessary before these systems should be in place.
Fileplanet needs to take a less from a site like Tucows; mirror and mirror often. Even if there were only 10 US mirrors instead of 3 or 4, they'd be much better off and I'd have less of a problem with them requiring a login. But as it stands, many alternative gaming sites are picking up the slack, such as www.3dgamers.com, which while not having the polish of FP, does have the files and capacity of it.
I'd have no problem with keeping ads on a site *IF* they didn't try to track me at the same time. Most of these ads are coming from third party servers and have sufficently ability to at least track your IP, and can possibly be used to identify surfing patterns. The main reason that I block ads is not to see them, but to protect my privacy.
Throughout all these talks and other stories, we're seeing a bigger problem in the music industry that relates to copyrights and royalities; namely, that for any one song, there are 3 people and/or groups that can claim some form of ownership on it, legally or ethically. These are the performers themselves, the distributors that typically own the copyrights on the performce over the performers, and the publishers and songwriters that typically own the copyrights on the lyrics and sheet music but not the performance itself.
Too many cooks can easily spoil the broth.
This is why I think indy artists are gaining more and more attention. First, they typically are their own performers and publishers, which means they at least own the copyright on the lyrics and music. Secondly, most indy labels have much more lax contracts in that the label itself doesn't own the copyright on the performed work, and it is still held by the indy group. These situations allow the indy group to have full control on how to distribute and publish their work. And most good indy groups appear to understand that if they write good songs and yet release some of their works on the net, they will still take in a modest profit from touring and CD sales with the increase in their fan base. Only with that amount of control can situations like that happen.
If there is any other group beyond the performaces that are trying to get their hands in the honeypot as well, then all bets are off for strong control of distribution of their works.
This situation also calls for the development of music 'publishers' that are basically people that can help to press and burn CDs, and get them into distribution channel, but otherwise do nothing else with copyright, much like how people can get custom T-shirts made in large quantities; the t-shirt shop owns none of the copyrights on any logos or sayings, only does the job they are paid for. A shop that could offer a band to print, for example, a buck a copy for each CD, with $.10 being a profit for the shop, the rest into materials, operation, and distribution, could easily win out in such a situation. I'd also expect the shop to collect royalities, but again, most of these would go back to the band, the shop maybe taking only 10% of that as well.
Hopefully, more bands in the future will see that going indy, or at least staying away from RIAA, will earn them not only more respect from their fans, but possibly more money than they would have seen from signing with RIAA.
While students like me are the minority, I think those that are understand that if we are going to do anything else during a lecture that we'll do it with minimal disruption in the class. I'd still favor blocking internet access and the like, only because what's on my computer screen can be seen by people behind and to the sides of me, and that can cause a disruption if it's the wrong type of images, and there are other ways of keeping oneself busy without disrupting others in a class.
Secondly, DSL will not bounce back until there is more action taken against the ILECs like Verizon and SBC/Ameritech. The 4-6 weeks to set up a DSL line to a CLEC is typically to allow the amount of time for the ILEC to go out and switch it over; since this means a loss of a potental customer to the ILEC, they drag their heels as much as possible, despite threats of gov't intervention or penality. Here in the mid-west, Ameritech land, we're just getting over our hundreds-of-million-dollar spanking of Ameritech for poor customer service and repairwork of normal phone lines (with further penalties for future incompenticies), but nothing to cover the broadband market. $100M may seem like a lot, but that's chump change to SBC/Ameritech; it's probably cheaper for them to incure these fines than to spend more to bump up service.
Note that the $26 million settlement is only with publishers and songwriters; there is still the distributers (aka RIAA) that have ligitigation against Napster that must be overcome before Napster can continue with the subscription service.
There's the Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), which I'm still waiting for the results of the interview that were posted, unfortunately before the recent events. That is a lobbying group on many tech issues, and they appear to be pro-Slashdot-manta in several cases.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
With MS now legally declared as a monopoly, they no longer have the right to set whatever price they want for their product, because a monopoly suggests that there are no market forces in place that will cause a supply-demand-like effect to take place. (Again, it's not illegal to hold a monopoly, only to abuse it's position). It's expected that the next legal phase of the MS/DOJ will include looking at the licensing costs; if it is determined that at the current costs, MS is earning more than a reasonable profit per copy sold, someone's going to have hell to pay.
True, since this sounds like a small shop in NZ, it's probably the full XP version, but what will happen when Dell or Gateway release their XP machines?
The entire idea of the recovery disk which typically requires one to reformat their hard drives (and note that most OEM machines come with only one HD with one partition), is a really stupid idea in the first place; I'm sure it's great for OEM support since they know how they can get back to a completely fresh, working machine, but it sucks for even a semi-literate computer user. And if I remember correctly, MS pushed for some of that in recent years. I'm sure it's going to continue with XP.
Also conspicuously missing from DVD releases are two major triologies: Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. You'd think having both of these out as well as SW on DVD, all in maximum featuritis, would help to improve the acceptance of DVD.
Yes, this is MS, so they might only provide a WinXX client. Yes, this is MS, so they might require you to register your client with some central authority with the ability to 'audit' the server to make sure it's up to specs.
But it may also be as simple as having a client conform to certain specs (hopefully open), and that's it. Average Joe would probably never worry themselves with this, so they'd not lose that many customers in the first place.
But in the end, I think it's very important that Hailstorm cannot be a necessity for web sites and that there must be a manual entry level for data when it is needed.
In the past, I've used the fax service provided by ACLU to contact my reps, and have gotten (most likely form letter) replies back from them, but it does tell me someone at least read it and understood my concerns.
As an example of previous CN dealings, the short-lived but excellent show Freakazoid had 4 episodes with reverences (both satire and just off the cuff) to Princess Di. When she died in the car accident, those 4 episodes were completely pulled from the schedule understandable; however, they did not return to the schedule for at least 6 months. I understand being sensitive for something recent in the current events, but that seems excessively overkill.
What bothers me more than much else right now is that Hollywood, all aspects of it, seem to be taking steps above and beyond what ought to be done for the short-term sensitivitly. Anything involving the WTC, even if made years ago, seems to be getting some sort of post-censoring. We cannot deny that the WTC ever existed and shows were made about it, and to do so is only giving the terrorists more of a victory.
The longer that these news outlets contrinue to push this 24/7 news schedule, the longer it will take the rest of the american (and other countries as well) people to return to a sense of normalicy, which is what we ought to be striving for to show the terrorists that this attack did little to stiffle the American spirit. Sure, I'd expect to have soem expanded news coverage as events break, but we should be watching regular programming at this point. Particularly this weekend, as families have a chance for family time, it's important that the networks offer fare that the entire family can enjoy as opposed to more news coverage.
And yet another sign that terrorism has won a bit is the fact that several movies, TV shows, and video games are being pulled for the time being or revamped in the short term to accommodate the loss. In some cases, such as Anrold's new movie or FOX's "24" or the video game Majesty, this makes sense; events are too close to reality that pulling them for the short term just makes sense. I also being not holding the bulk of sports events this weekend is also a reasonable step (both emotionally and technically; how do you get all those people from one side of the country to other with air travel only just starting to get back to normal?) But then you also have cases where, for example, a new Tim Allen comedy in NYC is pulled since it simply involves the WTC, a new Jackie Chan movie being pulled and revamped completely despite the amount of footage already shot since Chan's character in it was a window washer for the WTC, C&C Red Alert 2 being pulled since it shows NYC on fire on the cover of the box, Microsoft immediately altering the next version of it's Flight Sim to remove the WTC from the NYC area (and in the UK, the flight sim being removed from shelves as it was claimed that the terrorists could have learned to fly from that), and numerous other examples which are more knee-jerk than thought out. Again, each of these knee-jerk actions are wins for terrorism, because that's the type of lifestyle that we've come to enjoy and expect, and now, at best for the short term, that's gone.
Yes, at least according to the President, we're in a National Emergancy, so I expect some parts of our lives to be distrupted. But it is much more important to show that the American resolve and spirit cannot be broken as easily as it was, and thus, we must strive to get back to normalacy in our lives, and unfortunately, the constant barrage of news is not helping.