Let us consider the following items Apple, Amazon, and Slashdot.
Now let's face it. Regardless of patent issues, it seems more and more retailers have simply copied Amazon.com's site in it's entirety. That somehow strikes me as unfair.
Now let's consider Apple. I'm not going to go through the sortid history of who stole what from whom but let's simply say that by the time Windows 95 came out, many of us had seen that desktop a few times before. As for the Mac cases, it's not like many of us haven't been hunting for a cool case for awhile. The only difference is that we want a floppy drive and don't want a new monitor every time we upgrade.
And let's face it. The first place that tries to copy Slashdot in a non parody form will die a horrible death.
So why this claim? Apparently the United States Supreme Court might agree with Slashdotters in an appropriate case. " Please, don't presume to speak for me.
Look is look. MTV is MTV. Mountain Dew and Jolt are a way of life, other caffine is just imitation.
And in a hype marketing world, I'm tired of cheap knock offs.
I belive that censorware could be a good thing. The problem is not the censorware, the problem is the list. Afterall, many of us use the the Proxomitron and love it. Isn't that censorware of a sort?
What we hate is a list that someone else runs, wont reveal, and expects us to use. I want the freedom to turn off my own channels. I don't need someone else to do it for me.
Imagine this: What if everyone had the ability to create and maintain their own censorware list. What if we had the ability to let it reference other lists dynamicly? What if it was a common standard, like HTML, and supported by open source censorware? What could we do? Well, let's consider the following commands: (HTML's <> have been changed to [] in order to make typing easier)
blk would block out anything where the destination address contained the text in question.
[a blk="http://www.badporn.com"]badporn[/a] - blocks all html from www.badporn.com
[a blk="ftp://3733t.org"]Cracks[/a] - blocks ftp (but not hypertext) from 3733t.org (but not it's subdomains).
[a blk="doubleclick.com"]Doubleclick[/a] - blocks anything containing "doubleclick.com" - note that the ".com" is important or files such as "doubleclick.htm" would also be blocked. This means no ftp, no html, no subdomains. Nothing gets through.
alw would always allow sites containing a string to be put through.
[a alw="slashdot"]Slashdot[/a] - even http://www.badporn.com/slashdot/nakedhemos.gif would get through your filter. Hmmm. We need a better filter. Maybe I should put a [a blk="nakedhemos"]EEK![/a] just in case...
[a alw=".edu"]Compus Crusade for Cthulhu[/a] - unblock all edu sites.
lnk would include another file in your blocking. Anything blocked by that file or by a file called by that file would be blocked.
[a lnk="http://www.virtualsurreality.com/popupads.htm "]Ken's list of annoying popups[/a]
The order of operations is easy. No rule overrules a previous rule. i.e. The top rule can never be broken. Rules at the bottom can be overturned repeatedly. The last alw or blk (working from bottom to top) that applies wins.
Ok. This is inane, but unfortunately I moderated someone down as redundant by accident and I needed to kill that. I figured posting to the article would do that for me. [please let me know if I'm wrong.] If there's a better way to undo stupidity in my own moderation, please let me know.
Ok. I'm stumped. Hopefully you can help me. How am I supposed to find out that my site is on the CyberNOt list? Do I need to purchase a copy of every site blocker software just to verify that I haven't been put on a blacklist by accident? Usually, I check out peacefire to see if anyone has decrypted the list, just so I can verify that my site has not been mislabled. (It contains no violence, profanity, or nudity, and I even took the Latin off just because the software was banning sites with the word "cum". [Which means anything containing Latin is normally mislabled as porn.])
Now your company has brought a lawsuit to people who tried to decrypt it's list so that it can be verified. Why? Do your company want your list to be unverifiable? Up until now, I have dealt peacefully with web blockers as I understand it's purpose. However, your company's desire to use legal force has left me with no choice. Should I find my site mislabled in the future I will not just notify you. I will sue you for libel, and attempt recovery for damages in the form of lost hits, and therefore advertising in court.
Ok. A new search engine. (hum) Uses Google (so do I, what's your point?) Hmm. Going away soon, according to a poster on Slashdot. (so why should I use them?) ... Well, lets see what it's got under the hood... Search for Top Click BWAHAHAHAHA I love it. A search engine that can't find itself!
Think about what you're saying instead of how you're saying it.
Ok. We're not talking firewall in any sense, but instead we're talking about the ability to gather information about a customer easily. In this case, we're talking about the ability to locate a person geographically through unknown means. I don't know if they're tracking people by their physical location, their server's physical location, or one of the locations on record. I really could have used some more links (even one might have been useful) to verify your statements. Unfortunately, you've proven that you don't like to have your assumptions questioned.
But let's put this into perspective. If iCrave can determine that you live in Washington State then spammers need to use that tool in order to identify people in Washington State. How many people wished they could have been presented in court recently?
Determining region has it's uses. I want my Congressman to know that I am from his state and I expect him to react to my requests because of that fact.
Every increase in technology can be misused. I won't argue that. But I swear Jon, you're becoming a luddite, and I really have to question the need for a luddite on a board that advertises itself as "News for Nerds".
I mean, there are several Cds that I had bought, and have subsequently "lost" Does making copies of them from someone else's physical media make me an outlaw? Hell, I PAID for a copy, dammit! Am I a fugitive now?
You paid for a copy. You are entitled to a copy. If you broke, damaged or lost that copy, you no longer have a copy. If you steal a copy to replace the one you lost, then you are a theif.
Should you be allowed to take a car off the dealers lot because you crashed yours? Are you given a free computer because you left yours at the last lan party? Can you take and keep a copy of a book from the library, because you loaned yours to a friend who didn't return it? So why is music all that different?
Now if you want, you could have been smart and made a copy of the one you owned for personal use. People have done this for ages. A number of people used to buy albums, record them on tape, and then store that baby lovingly so it wouldn't get scratched. They would only bring it out again when the tape finally wore out.
You have legal and moral options, but theft isn't one of them.
I really used to like Jon's articles, but let's face it, a lot of people have grown tired of him, his attitude, and his conclusions. I think the problem really is with his assumptions.
Jon is a master at picking what seems like a reasonable set of assumptions until you look at them. Normally, I'm willing to pass that by, but in this case he's actively hurting the position he's arguing for, one I happen to believe in. I used to make the mistake of thinking that he was a man of principles, but I've come to the conclusion that he's just a well paid troll, who does not care about the results of his statements, only that he causes something to happen. He is a mad bomber with a word processor, causing explosions for the sake of explosions.
Let's look at this paragraph. From there you can sort out the rest of the article by yourself. So the Congressional aide, part of an institution responsible for governing issues like this, is demonstrating that he lives in a completely different universe than he's supposedly helping to represent. For him and the lawmaker he works for, the downloading of music is simple theft, in the same way a bank robber commits a crime. But a generation of Net users will never view property that way again. A rational legislature grasping this will would seek laws that reflect the new reality, rather than an outdated one.
What makes a bank robbery different from downloading copyrighted music without permission? Hmmm. In the case of the music, the original item is still there, and in the base of the bank theft the original item is.. hey wait... it's still there. Who got hurt?
Well, in the case of the bank robbery that money is insured through various means, and much like stupid lawsuits, we all end up footing a small part of the bill. Face it, when your doctor is sued, his insurance picks it up, passes the cost onto your insurance who pass the cost onto your employer, who pass the cost onto their clients, who pass the cost onto... Well, you get the picture. The bank robbery and music theft work the same way. Anyone with a yellow sheet knows the game.
There seems to be an attitude in this country that anyone who has been sucessful doesn't deserve it. Even worse there's a serious "the world owes this to me" attitude taking root on the net. There's always been a "us" against "them" attitude but nowadays it seems like everyone thinks of themselves as "us" just for having been born.
Jon, the problem is not with congress or with business, or with people who don't understand the internet. The problem is with people who were raised without any morals whatsoever. Until today I had thought that you were not one of them. I had given you the benefit of the doubt. I see now that I was wrong.
(Please read all the way through, there's some good stuff at the bottom I'd like you to think about.) It's actually very sad that this project is underfunded. This project was one of our last hopes for the government to come up with a decent filtering scheme. After all, the government does have the power to make ICANN create a.XXX tld and enforce that TLD (since ICANN only enforces half of the TLDs it has,.edu,.gov, and.mil). Creating a TLD for porn would go a long way to removing a decent chunk of the problem. Namely, it would make it easy to censor all those who are willing to be censored. Those who aren't willing to be censored will, of course, still be a problem. However, they're a problem regardless of the solution, much like spammers, they "know" that they're right, and that somehow gives them the right to behave as they choose to everyone else. It's almost impossible to stop someone who keeps playing against the rules in a playground this big. As a parent, I do feel that there is a need for censorship. It does not belong in my home, simply because it is my job as a parent to watch over my son and help him grow to be a decent man.
However, my son will probably go a school, and that school will have to have internet access if he's to have any hope of an education. Now I kow that I will answer any questions he brings home, but I can't say that his teacher will be qualified to answer those questions in school. I can't even say if the teacher will be allowed to answer those questions out of fear of being sued by someone.
Schools, Libraries, and other places where children can log on (mall kiosks, cyber coffee shops, open lan parties) should probably have some sort of method available for filtering. After all, I can't be a parent if I'm not there, and a child does need to be away from his parent every now and then, to explore the world on his own and to expand his boundardaries.
The problem is what to filter and how to filter it. I think we can all agree on three things:
Current censorware sucks. It just isn't good at doing it's job. It's like a blind man with a shotgun trying to stop a robbery.
It's easy enough to censor sites that are voluntarily willing to be censored.
It's also easy enough to censor sites that don't care if they're censored, but who don't want to go to the trouble of tracking down all the censorware sites and identifying themselves.
It's close to impossible to stop the ones that actively do not want to be censored. (Luckily these are almost always clueless gits who think that Pam Anderson is a porn queen)
The problem is choosing what to censor in a particular area. The standards for Omaha, Ne are puritan compared to the standards for New York City. Add Amsterdam to the mix and you really don't have a standard at all. perhaps the most interesting place to look at community standards would be New Orleans, where the community standards drop once you enter the Quarter and change depending on the time of year and the time of day.
I think the answer is to have a standard method of identifying sites that should be blocked, and a number of publicly accessable databases to choose from. These databases should be able to point to one another in the same fashion that web pages do today. For example: /porn.blk is a well know directory that porn sites can voluntarily add themselves to. /nudity.blk is a directory of sites that contain nudity. It also points to porn.blk. When you use nudity.blk it automaticly means you're using porn.blk. You could call nudity.blk with a nofollow parameter ond only get the nudity.blk listings. gay.blk is a religious list that lists all gay sites, including gay rights sites. pagan.blk is another religious list that lists all wiccan, satanism, santaism, and other cool sites. For some obscure reason it has overlaps with gay.blk:) gore.blk is Tipper Gore's personal list to hide all of the sites that should have never made it on her husband's internet. It points to all record lables, lyrics sites, and just about every.blk in existance. cthulhu.blk is a campus list thar lists all the.blk sites thereby preventing your machine from using existing filters.
See, once you get a standard and let us all create.blk lists, much like we all create.htm files with hrefs galore, the internet will return to it's wonderful chaotic state, and everyone will be happy.
This post and the contents thereof are not patented and should be considered prior art if someone tries to patent it. Thank you.
I have to admit it. I loved certain lines in Jeff's letter. They point out what's really wrong with the patent system: 4. That for business method and software patents there be a short (maybe 1 month?) public comment period before the patent number is issued. This would give the Internet community the opportunity to provide prior art references to the patent examiners at a time when it could really help. (Thanks to my friend Brewster Kahle for this suggestion.) and On a related issue, to further try to help with the prior art problem, I've also agreed to help fund a prior art database. This was Tim's idea, and I'm grateful for it. Tim is poking around to find the right people to run with that project.
Now be real, has anyone here not heard these items repeatedly out of many people? I swear to god, as much as I think Tim is a really cool guy if I hear him called "the inventor of the prior art database", I'm going to barf.
And that's the problem. Patents don't go to inventors or innovators. They go to the first rich person with enough lawyers. That's where the patent office went wrong.
In a related humor note, I'm considering getting a trademark just so I can deal with ICANN. It may be worth it at this rate. The new rules indicate to me that if they ever do create.per or.sum TLDs anyone who's hasn't trademarked their name is screwed.
S2105 would make it a crime to tamper with identification codes put in place by manufacturers. With a Pentium, this law would make it a crime to use the disable function. Probably end result: losses for Pentium and anyone else who uses ID codes.
Online music laws humor:
We have to pay you?
And we can only play the song how often?
So you're limiting how much we can pay you?
And you encouraging us to play your competition?
Ok. Let's play some decent music, screw the labels.
When I think of how much money the DVD industry has saved me, I can't thank them enough.
The final result. There will, in my opinion, be three nets.
The first network is for those people who currently live off of and feed these corporations. The people who want their music fed to them. Hopefully they'll take over the new AOL.
The second network will be for the theives and pirates. Those who want what the megacorps put out and think they shouldn't have to pay. Unfortunately, I think they'll take Freenet as well.
The final net will be where it always was, out in the public and hard to find. It will be the college radio stations and the small bars like the old el&gee club I used to frequent. It will resemble the way things used to be here, where some.plan or.project pointed you to a cool gopher file somewhere.
The truth is, the corporations can sue us only as long as we buy their stuff. Once we realize that it's just glitter without substance, we're free from them.
Here's a fun situation. I work for a large financial company. We use IBM mainframes (gotta love COBOL). Here's how the negotiations seem to have worked out:
Thanks for buying our mainframe
Now you need our emulator to access the mainframe from your personal computers.
We'll sell you the emulators if you only run them on our PC's.
But look, you only have to deal with us. No incompatability!
You should upgrade your PC's. Our emulators won't run well on something that slow.
Of course you need to buy new monitors. We don't sell computers without monitors!
So, the vendor gave us a decent price, all we ended up paying for was a lot of new 17 inch monitors to replace our year old 17 inch monitors, which replace the perfectly good 15 inch monitors. For obvious reason, the used monitor market in this town is doing a good business (We're not the only game in town, Some companies are giving them away...)
The PC's are another story. We have been sold the worst chunks of hardware I can imagine. These motherboards are designed to never have a single component upgraded, so they're useless to anyone who gets our old ones. (Our last batch had microchannel...) At this point we could always get smart and say no and keep using the current system. However, when the vendor, under UTICA, can turn your system off, you are really at his mercy.
The frightening thing is that if a vendor can turn you off from a remote location, so can a hacker...
I wait for the day when a company's major competitor signs an exclusive contract with a vendor and the vendor turns off that client's software...:)
Bwahahaha. Forced into redundancy by my slow typing... Only a minute difference! hahahah!
What's cools is the fact that both of us had the same thught with a completely different style. Oh well, that's what I get for going for humor.. No karma:) (like I care at this point...###! hehehe)
I'll admit it though. Eventually, they'll finally implant the cellphone in my head and the cam in my eyeball and sell my body to some large corporation who will still want me to maintain COBOL.
By adding doubleclick to current wireless cellphone technology, we've found a way to improve your life, at a new total disregard for your privacy. Just look at these benefits!
No click entry of your friends and family into your database. We'll track them for you as you call.
Improved advertisement targeting. By tracking your cell phone location we can direct you to the stores nearest you.
Improved emergency service. Why should you have to choose a tow truck service, we know your location, and can choose the service for you.
Improved targeted incoming advertisements. For your convenience, our clients will call you with their best offers on your cell phone, regardless of what you're doing at the time.
Telemarketer forwarding. Our database will insure that if your home or out at the movies, you'll never miss a valuable telemarketing call.
Doubleclick. We're there for you when we need you.
I think where Amazon went wrong is that it forgot it had the ability to talk to it's customers. In fact, it not only has the ability to talk to us, it has a responsibility to talk to us.
If I had seen a serious statement as to WHY they were taking action against Barnes and Noble, what their opinions and beliefs were, and if they had presented a case on why Barnes and Noble were wrong in doing what they did in the manner in which they did it, I might well have been boycotting B&N now instead of Amazon. Lord knows I loved Amazon when they first came online. But I have lost my faith in them, and at this point Jeff Bezos needs to do something to restore that faith.
And here's where I'm out of luck. It's not an issue of cost, it's a matter of customer service. In my opinion, Amazon's site has always been and will always be much more informative than their competitors. That's why I would shop there, even if it cost an extra buck or two. I did not mind paying for that service. But I cannot condone a corporation who appears to be building a monopoly through lawsuits.
If Amazon wants to impress me, it can create a small non profit organization whose sole purpose is to patent and hold the patents for the things required for the internet. This organization will be based upon the concept that it will NEVER use these to initiate a lawsuit against another company. (They can be used as evidence in a countersuit for all I care.) This organization will handle and hold patents for all companies who are serious about patenting for defensive purposes only. Any companies patenting outside of this organization can be assumed to be patenting for agressive purposes.
Do it Jeff, and you'll have me as a customer forever.
My page has been moved for some reason or another.
The old page no longer exists at all, i.e. I don't have a redirect on it. (side note, surprisingly enough, many providers will be happy to keep your redirects around for an almost infinate length of time. It's not like they take up a lot of space or bandwidth.)
I built the first page with a specific set of keywords and I kept those keywords on the new page
The search engines FINALLY got around to spidering/accepting my site. (Note that it can currently take up to 6 months to be spidered and Yahoo may not reaccept you site.)
And this allows us what?
Well, it means we have to make sure we register with all the possible search engines, including the ones we usually don't care about.
It means someone will come up with a "find that 404" search engine that you'll have to submit to as well.
Meanwhile, people will notice that you've moved and will create redirect porn pages with your keywords and register them with the 404 search engine.
Microsoft will add something to Front page to create default keywords that send your 404 to microsoft.com
The new stardards are not part of the official Web Standards so Mozilla will not support it and w3.org will barf errors out about your HTML code.
Someone will figure out how to use this technology so that they can set up emergency/. effect mirror sites.
Someone will get smart and figure that trick out really quick and take advantage of it."I'm sorry, the page you want has been slashdotted, welcome to geocities."
I still have the t-shirt "Don't tell me no lies and keep your hands to yourself." and a lot of fond memories. You can still find my name if you dig up a copy of Hacker2 (the card game) [revenge is sweet] or I.O. University.
I haven't seen most of them in years. Dana has a webcam and is currently the 13th sexiest geek the whole world. Unfortunately, I've lost track of most everyone else.
The raid is what introduced me to io.com, Dana, and the rest of the coolest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.
A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think that it wasn't much of a victory. I guess they don't understand what happened then. The supreme court decided that computers were printing presses. The supreme court decided that what happened was wrong. This doesn't mean that it can't and won't happen again but it does mean that it's not acceptable. When it does happen, it's a newsworthy event, not a daily fact of life. For that alone, I consider it a victory.
There are those who think SJG should have gotten more. I don't think they understand what the fight was about in the first place. The fight was about the ability to communicate. Could we talk to people and have a right to privacy? Could we print what we wanted to in an electronic forum? Did the government have the right to harass us for doing so? These were important decisions in those days. Without that case, the Internet as we know it, may well have not come to be. The freedoms we use to post on Slashdot came from that incident.
Yeah. It's been 10 years. Some of the stuff never was returned. Rumors said that we were killed during that whole purple Nike' sneaker suicide bit. My fanzine (Second Church of Ultimate wisdom) is gone. Dana is a sexy geek, instead of just being a brilliant sexy person. And the government is still performing illegal raids.
What saddens me is what they'll accomplish. Humorously enough, it's what a majority of Slashdot seems to want, the abolishment of the patent system.
The constant creation of these silly patents can only result in litigation. After all, a patent serves only two purposes; to put a process or invention in a publicly accessable database, and to give you ammo to sue your competitors.
Once this goes to court, there's very little chance it will stand up. Unfortunately, as more of these stupid patents go to court, the courts will require better evidence than they do now, until eventaully patents become worthless.
And despite the Slashdot concensus, this is NOT a good thing.
Software patents are usually bogus, however I seriously believe that there are exceptions. The problem is, it's easy to look at a solution an say how easy it must have been to find. It's much more difficult to look at a problem and come up with a decent solution.
Google is a tricky piece of work. Macromedia Flash is an amazing bit of programming. I only wish that someone had patented HTTP, GPLed it, and then refused to let Amazon play, effectively kicking them out of the sandbox.
There are deserving patents out there. Amazon however seems to be "patent squatting", i.e. sitting on obvious patents and hoping they become valuable. Meanwhile the Patent Office understands just as little about the Internet as ICANN, which is an impressively small amount.
[Any errors or stupidity in this document is the result of not sleeping. Goodnight.]
"The United States government has tightly controlled the export of "supercomputers" to certain other nations (i.e., China, Pakistan, India, etc.)"
Yes, and the easter bunny visits my house and leaves golden eggs on my porch.
Try the following: ""The United States government has enacted legislation that attempts to tightly control the export of "supercomputers" to certain other nations (i.e., China, Pakistan, India, etc.)". Even then you mislead people, simply because of the word "export". The vast majority of the required parts are not made in the US. (Is there a single necessary part where all possible components that could be used are manufactured in the U.S.?)
To keep a product like that in the hands of the U.S. only would require the creating corporation agreeing to do the following.
Keeping all manufacturing in the U.S. at U.S. wages.
Refusing to patent the technology.
Keeping a very expensive security lid on the entire facility.
Not releasing any details that would allow anyone with the resources of China to come up with an equivilent technology
Yeah. Right.
In a way, it seems silly to refuse to sell certain nations supercomputers when we still hire their citizens to work on our supercomputers...
If there is anything the portable electronics industry needs, it's the ability to get these devices to communicate with each other. I've planned on picking up the new Palm Pilot just because I can get a camera and keyboard attachment.
What I cannot figure out from the web site, however, is if the new standards include physical connections as well as data. I would not mind in the least if all the devices came with some varient of a USB port, which would mean I could connect all of them with the same cable, especially as I can see using something like a flash drive with all of them. (Store MP3s for my rio, photos from my camera, numbers for my cell phone, software for my mindstorms, and backup my palm pilot.)
Hopefully Lego joins the group....:)
Hmmm. It's be nice if Sony did something with the Aibo along these lines. Attach the cable so it looked like the leash, throw a huge flash drive in that monster, and let it follow you around, especially if you could store all the equipment in saddlebags on the Aibo...
Local Papers are commonly biased in their reporting. Online papers are too. The advantage with online papers is that you can either find one that matches your bias or compare and contrast in an effort to find the truth. Papers from a foreign country are extremely important, as they'll allow you a perspective on your own country that is impossible to get from non-imported print media.
The process of printing means the news is old (by modern standards) by the time I read it. Why would I want to read old news? (Or as Wired put it a few years ago, "Wired is Tired.")
I live in Omaha. The paper used to be close to useless due to biased content, however they have adapted nicely. I can search and find news articles and, more importantly, search the classifieds. The last one makes my ad much more valuable and it makes looking for an item or a job much easier. If I want an exercise bike, I can search a few weeks of newspapers quickly and easily.
I'll read the newsmagazines (such as Time and Newsweek) when someone can convince me they've started to put out issues without faked photos and with accurate content. The last few times I looked at one they were covering Columbine and the Seattle W.T.O. events. The bias and partial coverage of the events in their reporting made the article worthless.
If print news wants to compete with online news they must base themselves off of the two advantages they have over the online community. Those advantages are portability and locality. This means that they need to quit paying for news feeds (a.p., etc.), improve local editorials and news articles, and decrease the size and cost of the paper. In addition, an online mirror (as described above) has its uses, especially for classifieds. Finally, there are services a paper can do well that the internet doesn't. Comics, crosswords, and Advice columns (bathroom reading) are still better in papers than online. Expand your comics/crossword section. Cover local sports and local politics heavily. Contain content aimed at your entire community. Contain editorials that are controversial.
Newspapers have long held an effective monopoly in many areas. They have grown weak and really are not good at dealing with competition. Some papers are wonderful, but many are utter drek.
Realize that many local news teams have used humor to stay sucessful. Consider it.
News is news. It is a list of the facts regarding a situation. They should not contain opinions. Editorials are editorials. They are opinions that contain news as a basis for the opinions. John Katz writes editorials that use news as support. (good). Taco writes news that contains editorials (bad). If newspapers could learn to remove bias and sensationalism from their reporting they would do a lot better. (And if they think we don't see it then their only blinding themselves.)
A friend of mine has gone out on a camera crew with the Daily Show. The method is simple. Interview someone for 2 to three hours and throw in a really oddball question after the first hour or so and every half hour after that. The person doesn't realize that the whole purpose of the interview is the few odd questions so they do their best to answer them and end up looking like an idiot. What's sad is that it seems that the real news does much the same thing. They blow rolls of film, including a number of staged shots for many articles. As a result, we've grown used to it and it has ceased to have an impact on us. Papers do it. We know they do it. We've seen them do it. Therefore we cease to trust them. Why would I pay to read news I don't trust?
Color is a necessity to me. I've resisted buying a Palm for years, but I'm planning on finding a way to get enough money together to get one of these. Why?
I do web page design, programming, and have a number of outdoor interests. Since I haven't replaced my last digital camera (stolen), I'm in the market for a new one.
With Kodak offering a VGA camera (a.k.a. the Palm Pix) I see an all in one solution.
With the two combined I can take photos of a disc golf course or event, label them, make notes about the photos and upload the page as soon as I get home. Using a portable keyboard makes the whole thing much easier and allows me to carry the whole production on the course.
One final comment: "Remember, when color film came out, the quality of motion pictures went down." - Yeah, the Wizard of OZ sucked until Pink Floyd released a new sountrack...:)
I find it humorous that a source for education is claiming the net is keeping people apart while a home for the occasionally ignorant (aol) is advertising using the net to keep people together.
Oddly enough, despite the often held belief that computers and internet are for the young, it's the elderly who are really getting their money's worth. The internet allows those people unable to get around easily to meet and talk to people of similar ages and with similar experiences. When you reach an age where most of your friends have passed on it's nice to have a place where you can make new friends.
Yes. I no longer meet my neighbors. Thanks to the internet I am able to keep in touch with friends who actually know who Voltaire is. I can discuss my latest problems with my child with my friends two time zones away, who also have a child of the same age. I can communicate with people of a similar mind and IQ regardless of their age, race, religion, profession, or location. I can have my opinions challenged and even rated on Slashdot.
I met my wife on a WWIV BBS. If it hadn't been for the interaction we obviously didn't have over the modem lines I would have never married her...
I live in Nebraska. My son (age 7 months) has grandparents in Washington and Seattle. We have friends and family all over the U.S. (plus a few Aussies). I can put his latest photos on his web page and everyone can see him without me trying to send photos all over heck and creation.
I have come to a conclusion. The study at Standford was done by human beings, and published on the interent. As I have not had physical contact with these human beings, I cannot possibly be considered to have interacted with them. Therefore I cannot have been influenced by them. Therefore I cannot consider myself to have been informed by their research. Therefore their study is meaningless to me and to all others who have seen it.
<RANT> I need to get something off my chest a minute. If you don't care, just skip this (don't bother moderating) and start reading more comments having nothing to do with this article.
Why is it that some moderators are such asses (and please note, that "some" is perhaps just one a week) about having their opinions become part of unrelated articles on Slashdot? Last week Slashdot posted about 75 stories and two of them contained offtopic opinions in the article. So why is it that sometimes when someone gets the ability to write an article, they have to go attack Slashdot users? It becomes a conspiracy: favoritism, Rob not caring, Slashdot really sucking these days, the list goes on and on, but it never mentions the real reason.
The fact is that posters are allowed to post their opinions, just like the authors. The moderators can only moderate down a fraction of all submissions. But they can't moderate down any submission that comes from the Author of the article. Just because a user can't understand why Slashdot rejected a submission doesn't mean there was a reason, it just means that when it was submitted, no one felt like posting it. |Everyone want Slashdot to be a fun mix: stuff that matters. Legos? Linux? Black Holes? Nanotech? If Slashdot was all serious, many of us wouldn't enjoy reading it or posting to it.
But I see articles all over with these childish little notes on them: "Why is it that some people are such asses...)".
The personal attacks get old Taco; they hurt because we all work so hard making Slashdot happen each day... and attacking us because we didn't agree with your attitude doesn't make our visits filled with joy.
And that's why I like Jon Katz. If he wants to rant he does it in a separate article. He doesn't subvert a decent piece of news like a Grits poster.
-----
Did the stock fall have anything to do with toywar
on
etoy.com Returns
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm. Let's mull this over.
First we have this wonderful timeline of events and eToys' stock price. But perhaps that's all propaganda...
Who is eToys target customer? That would be net-savvy or at least net-capable people. The kind of people that would be bound to come across the massive amount of unfavorable eToys press. The kind of people who would have to be blind to miss half the protest sites if they did a search on eToys.
Who is eToys target investor? People who are subject to all of the above but also get to read all the bad investor news.
To top it all off, you have people who realize that if Etoys is looking at controlling the etoy.com content we should wonder what kind of content they have. Now the FCC does too. Hmmm, I wonder who sent the information on over 350 mismarketed products?
No. Toywar had nothing to do with the fall of eToys, and Slashdot is a powerless entity as well. The only people who want you to believe that is companies who don't want to face their own toywar.
I would like an email account through any e-mail provider based in any of the states that have so far passed a law. I am willing to add this addenum onto any standard (such as hotmail's) contract.
In return for this free service I hereby grant spam-free-email-for-life.com whatever legal thing they need in order to sue spammers in my name and they can keep the $10. In return they agree to keep all my spam to mynamespam@spam-free-email-for-life.com and the rest of my mail to myname@spam-free-email-for-life.com.
They can have the money. I don't get the spam. Good enough for me.
By the way, tracing SPAM is often easy. If they want your money then they have to give you a way to contact them, don't they?
Slashdot Mirror
Now let's face it. Regardless of patent issues, it seems more and more retailers have simply copied Amazon.com's site in it's entirety. That somehow strikes me as unfair.
Now let's consider Apple. I'm not going to go through the sortid history of who stole what from whom but let's simply say that by the time Windows 95 came out, many of us had seen that desktop a few times before. As for the Mac cases, it's not like many of us haven't been hunting for a cool case for awhile. The only difference is that we want a floppy drive and don't want a new monitor every time we upgrade.
And let's face it. The first place that tries to copy Slashdot in a non parody form will die a horrible death.
So why this claim? Apparently the United States Supreme Court might agree with Slashdotters in an appropriate case. " Please, don't presume to speak for me.
Look is look. MTV is MTV. Mountain Dew and Jolt are a way of life, other caffine is just imitation.
And in a hype marketing world, I'm tired of cheap knock offs.
- Ken Boucher http://www.virtualsurreality.com
-----
What we hate is a list that someone else runs, wont reveal, and expects us to use. I want the freedom to turn off my own channels. I don't need someone else to do it for me.
Imagine this:
What if everyone had the ability to create and maintain their own censorware list. What if we had the ability to let it reference other lists dynamicly? What if it was a common standard, like HTML, and supported by open source censorware? What could we do?
Well, let's consider the following commands: (HTML's <> have been changed to [] in order to make typing easier)
- blk would block out anything where the destination address contained the text in question.
- [a blk="http://www.badporn.com"]badporn[/a] - blocks all html from www.badporn.com
- [a blk="ftp://3733t.org"]Cracks[/a] - blocks ftp (but not hypertext) from 3733t.org (but not it's subdomains).
- [a blk="doubleclick.com"]Doubleclick[/a] - blocks anything containing "doubleclick.com" - note that the ".com" is important or files such as "doubleclick.htm" would also be blocked. This means no ftp, no html, no subdomains. Nothing gets through.
- alw would always allow sites containing a string to be put through.
- [a alw="slashdot"]Slashdot[/a] - even http://www.badporn.com/slashdot/nakedhemos.gif would get through your filter. Hmmm. We need a better filter. Maybe I should put a [a blk="nakedhemos"]EEK![/a] just in case...
- [a alw=".edu"]Compus Crusade for Cthulhu[/a] - unblock all edu sites.
- lnk would include another file in your blocking. Anything blocked by that file or by a file called by that file would be blocked.
- [a lnk="http://www.virtualsurreality.com/popupads.ht
m "]Ken's list of annoying popups[/a]
The order of operations is easy. No rule overrules a previous rule. i.e. The top rule can never be broken. Rules at the bottom can be overturned repeatedly. The last alw or blk (working from bottom to top) that applies wins.Think about it.
-----
If there's a better way to undo stupidity in my own moderation, please let me know.
Posted this on :http://www.cyberpatrol.com/forms/siter ev.asp
Ok. I'm stumped. Hopefully you can help me. How am I supposed to find out that my site is on the CyberNOt list? Do I need to purchase a copy of every site blocker software just to verify that I haven't been put on a blacklist by accident?
Usually, I check out peacefire to see if anyone has decrypted the list, just so I can verify that my site has not been mislabled. (It contains no violence, profanity, or nudity, and I even took the Latin off just because the software was banning sites with the word "cum". [Which means anything containing Latin is normally mislabled as porn.])
Now your company has brought a lawsuit to people who tried to decrypt it's list so that it can be verified. Why? Do your company want your list to be unverifiable?
Up until now, I have dealt peacefully with web blockers as I understand it's purpose. However, your company's desire to use legal force has left me with no choice. Should I find my site mislabled in the future I will not just notify you. I will sue you for libel, and attempt recovery for damages in the form of lost hits, and therefore advertising in court.
Thank you.
Kenneth D. Boucher
-----
Ok. A new search engine. (hum)
...
Uses Google (so do I, what's your point?)
Hmm. Going away soon, according to a poster on Slashdot. (so why should I use them?)
Well, lets see what it's got under the hood...
Search for Top Click
BWAHAHAHAHA
I love it. A search engine that can't find itself!
-----
- Get an education in the subject matter.
- Think about what you're saying instead of how you're saying it.
Ok. We're not talking firewall in any sense, but instead we're talking about the ability to gather information about a customer easily. In this case, we're talking about the ability to locate a person geographically through unknown means. I don't know if they're tracking people by their physical location, their server's physical location, or one of the locations on record. I really could have used some more links (even one might have been useful) to verify your statements. Unfortunately, you've proven that you don't like to have your assumptions questioned.But let's put this into perspective. If iCrave can determine that you live in Washington State then spammers need to use that tool in order to identify people in Washington State. How many people wished they could have been presented in court recently?
Determining region has it's uses. I want my Congressman to know that I am from his state and I expect him to react to my requests because of that fact.
Every increase in technology can be misused. I won't argue that. But I swear Jon, you're becoming a luddite, and I really have to question the need for a luddite on a board that advertises itself as "News for Nerds".
-----
You paid for a copy. You are entitled to a copy. If you broke, damaged or lost that copy, you no longer have a copy. If you steal a copy to replace the one you lost, then you are a theif.
Should you be allowed to take a car off the dealers lot because you crashed yours? Are you given a free computer because you left yours at the last lan party? Can you take and keep a copy of a book from the library, because you loaned yours to a friend who didn't return it? So why is music all that different?
Now if you want, you could have been smart and made a copy of the one you owned for personal use. People have done this for ages. A number of people used to buy albums, record them on tape, and then store that baby lovingly so it wouldn't get scratched. They would only bring it out again when the tape finally wore out.
You have legal and moral options, but theft isn't one of them.
-----
Jon is a master at picking what seems like a reasonable set of assumptions until you look at them. Normally, I'm willing to pass that by, but in this case he's actively hurting the position he's arguing for, one I happen to believe in. I used to make the mistake of thinking that he was a man of principles, but I've come to the conclusion that he's just a well paid troll, who does not care about the results of his statements, only that he causes something to happen. He is a mad bomber with a word processor, causing explosions for the sake of explosions.
Let's look at this paragraph. From there you can sort out the rest of the article by yourself.
So the Congressional aide, part of an institution responsible for governing issues like this, is demonstrating that he lives in a completely different universe than he's supposedly helping to represent. For him and the lawmaker he works for, the downloading of music is simple theft, in the same way a bank robber commits a crime. But a generation of Net users will never view property that way again. A rational legislature grasping this will would seek laws that reflect the new reality, rather than an outdated one.
What makes a bank robbery different from downloading copyrighted music without permission? Hmmm. In the case of the music, the original item is still there, and in the base of the bank theft the original item is.. hey wait... it's still there. Who got hurt?
Well, in the case of the bank robbery that money is insured through various means, and much like stupid lawsuits, we all end up footing a small part of the bill. Face it, when your doctor is sued, his insurance picks it up, passes the cost onto your insurance who pass the cost onto your employer, who pass the cost onto their clients, who pass the cost onto... Well, you get the picture. The bank robbery and music theft work the same way. Anyone with a yellow sheet knows the game.
There seems to be an attitude in this country that anyone who has been sucessful doesn't deserve it. Even worse there's a serious "the world owes this to me" attitude taking root on the net. There's always been a "us" against "them" attitude but nowadays it seems like everyone thinks of themselves as "us" just for having been born.
Jon, the problem is not with congress or with business, or with people who don't understand the internet. The problem is with people who were raised without any morals whatsoever. Until today I had thought that you were not one of them. I had given you the benefit of the doubt. I see now that I was wrong.
-----
However, my son will probably go a school, and that school will have to have internet access if he's to have any hope of an education. Now I kow that I will answer any questions he brings home, but I can't say that his teacher will be qualified to answer those questions in school. I can't even say if the teacher will be allowed to answer those questions out of fear of being sued by someone.
Schools, Libraries, and other places where children can log on (mall kiosks, cyber coffee shops, open lan parties) should probably have some sort of method available for filtering. After all, I can't be a parent if I'm not there, and a child does need to be away from his parent every now and then, to explore the world on his own and to expand his boundardaries.
The problem is what to filter and how to filter it. I think we can all agree on three things:
- Current censorware sucks. It just isn't good at doing it's job. It's like a blind man with a shotgun trying to stop a robbery.
- It's easy enough to censor sites that are voluntarily willing to be censored.
- It's also easy enough to censor sites that don't care if they're censored, but who don't want to go to the trouble of tracking down all the censorware sites and identifying themselves.
- It's close to impossible to stop the ones that actively do not want to be censored. (Luckily these are almost always clueless gits who think that Pam Anderson is a porn queen)
The problem is choosing what to censor in a particular area. The standards for Omaha, Ne are puritan compared to the standards for New York City. Add Amsterdam to the mix and you really don't have a standard at all. perhaps the most interesting place to look at community standards would be New Orleans, where the community standards drop once you enter the Quarter and change depending on the time of year and the time of day.I think the answer is to have a standard method of identifying sites that should be blocked, and a number of publicly accessable databases to choose from. These databases should be able to point to one another in the same fashion that web pages do today. For example:
/porn.blk is a well know directory that porn sites can voluntarily add themselves to.
/nudity.blk is a directory of sites that contain nudity. It also points to porn.blk. When you use nudity.blk it automaticly means you're using porn.blk. You could call nudity.blk with a nofollow parameter ond only get the nudity.blk listings. :) .blk in existance. .blk sites thereby preventing your machine from using existing filters.
gay.blk is a religious list that lists all gay sites, including gay rights sites.
pagan.blk is another religious list that lists all wiccan, satanism, santaism, and other cool sites. For some obscure reason it has overlaps with gay.blk
gore.blk is Tipper Gore's personal list to hide all of the sites that should have never made it on her husband's internet. It points to all record lables, lyrics sites, and just about every
cthulhu.blk is a campus list thar lists all the
See, once you get a standard and let us all create .blk lists, much like we all create .htm files with hrefs galore, the internet will return to it's wonderful chaotic state, and everyone will be happy.
This post and the contents thereof are not patented and should be considered prior art if someone tries to patent it. Thank you.
-----
4. That for business method and software patents there be a short (maybe 1 month?) public comment period before the patent number is issued. This would give the Internet community the opportunity to provide prior art references to the patent examiners at a time when it could really help. (Thanks to my friend Brewster Kahle for this suggestion.)
and
On a related issue, to further try to help with the prior art problem, I've also agreed to help fund a prior art database. This was Tim's idea, and I'm grateful for it. Tim is poking around to find the right people to run with that project.
Now be real, has anyone here not heard these items repeatedly out of many people? I swear to god, as much as I think Tim is a really cool guy if I hear him called "the inventor of the prior art database", I'm going to barf.
And that's the problem. Patents don't go to inventors or innovators. They go to the first rich person with enough lawyers. That's where the patent office went wrong.
In a related humor note, I'm considering getting a trademark just so I can deal with ICANN. It may be worth it at this rate. The new rules indicate to me that if they ever do create .per or .sum TLDs anyone who's hasn't trademarked their name is screwed.
-----
- The first network is for those people who currently live off of and feed these corporations. The people who want their music fed to them. Hopefully they'll take over the new AOL.
- The second network will be for the theives and pirates. Those who want what the megacorps put out and think they shouldn't have to pay. Unfortunately, I think they'll take Freenet as well.
- The final net will be where it always was, out in the public and hard to find. It will be the college radio stations and the small bars like the old el&gee club I used to frequent. It will resemble the way things used to be here, where some
.plan or .project pointed you to a cool gopher file somewhere.
The truth is, the corporations can sue us only as long as we buy their stuff. Once we realize that it's just glitter without substance, we're free from them.-----
Thanks for buying our mainframe
- Now you need our emulator to access the mainframe from your personal computers.
- We'll sell you the emulators if you only run them on our PC's.
- But look, you only have to deal with us. No incompatability!
- You should upgrade your PC's. Our emulators won't run well on something that slow.
- Of course you need to buy new monitors. We don't sell computers without monitors!
So, the vendor gave us a decent price, all we ended up paying for was a lot of new 17 inch monitors to replace our year old 17 inch monitors, which replace the perfectly good 15 inch monitors. For obvious reason, the used monitor market in this town is doing a good business (We're not the only game in town, Some companies are giving them away...)The PC's are another story. We have been sold the worst chunks of hardware I can imagine. These motherboards are designed to never have a single component upgraded, so they're useless to anyone who gets our old ones. (Our last batch had microchannel...) At this point we could always get smart and say no and keep using the current system. However, when the vendor, under UTICA, can turn your system off, you are really at his mercy.
The frightening thing is that if a vendor can turn you off from a remote location, so can a hacker...
I wait for the day when a company's major competitor signs an exclusive contract with a vendor and the vendor turns off that client's software...:)
-----
What's cools is the fact that both of us had the same thught with a completely different style. Oh well, that's what I get for going for humor.. No karma :) (like I care at this point...###! hehehe)
I'll admit it though. Eventually, they'll finally implant the cellphone in my head and the cam in my eyeball and sell my body to some large corporation who will still want me to maintain COBOL.
-----
- No click entry of your friends and family into your database. We'll track them for you as you call.
- Improved advertisement targeting. By tracking your cell phone location we can direct you to the stores nearest you.
- Improved emergency service. Why should you have to choose a tow truck service, we know your location, and can choose the service for you.
- Improved targeted incoming advertisements. For your convenience, our clients will call you with their best offers on your cell phone, regardless of what you're doing at the time.
- Telemarketer forwarding. Our database will insure that if your home or out at the movies, you'll never miss a valuable telemarketing call.
Doubleclick. We're there for you when we need you.-----
If I had seen a serious statement as to WHY they were taking action against Barnes and Noble, what their opinions and beliefs were, and if they had presented a case on why Barnes and Noble were wrong in doing what they did in the manner in which they did it, I might well have been boycotting B&N now instead of Amazon. Lord knows I loved Amazon when they first came online. But I have lost my faith in them, and at this point Jeff Bezos needs to do something to restore that faith.
And here's where I'm out of luck. It's not an issue of cost, it's a matter of customer service. In my opinion, Amazon's site has always been and will always be much more informative than their competitors. That's why I would shop there, even if it cost an extra buck or two. I did not mind paying for that service. But I cannot condone a corporation who appears to be building a monopoly through lawsuits.
If Amazon wants to impress me, it can create a small non profit organization whose sole purpose is to patent and hold the patents for the things required for the internet. This organization will be based upon the concept that it will NEVER use these to initiate a lawsuit against another company. (They can be used as evidence in a countersuit for all I care.) This organization will handle and hold patents for all companies who are serious about patenting for defensive purposes only. Any companies patenting outside of this organization can be assumed to be patenting for agressive purposes.
Do it Jeff, and you'll have me as a customer forever.
-----
- My page has been moved for some reason or another.
- The old page no longer exists at all, i.e. I don't have a redirect on it. (side note, surprisingly enough, many providers will be happy to keep your redirects around for an almost infinate length of time. It's not like they take up a lot of space or bandwidth.)
- I built the first page with a specific set of keywords and I kept those keywords on the new page
- The search engines FINALLY got around to spidering/accepting my site. (Note that it can currently take up to 6 months to be spidered and Yahoo may not reaccept you site.)
And this allows us what?-----
I haven't seen most of them in years. Dana has a webcam and is currently the 13th sexiest geek the whole world. Unfortunately, I've lost track of most everyone else.
The raid is what introduced me to io.com, Dana, and the rest of the coolest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.
A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think that it wasn't much of a victory. I guess they don't understand what happened then. The supreme court decided that computers were printing presses. The supreme court decided that what happened was wrong. This doesn't mean that it can't and won't happen again but it does mean that it's not acceptable. When it does happen, it's a newsworthy event, not a daily fact of life. For that alone, I consider it a victory.
There are those who think SJG should have gotten more. I don't think they understand what the fight was about in the first place. The fight was about the ability to communicate. Could we talk to people and have a right to privacy? Could we print what we wanted to in an electronic forum? Did the government have the right to harass us for doing so? These were important decisions in those days. Without that case, the Internet as we know it, may well have not come to be. The freedoms we use to post on Slashdot came from that incident.
Yeah. It's been 10 years. Some of the stuff never was returned. Rumors said that we were killed during that whole purple Nike' sneaker suicide bit. My fanzine (Second Church of Ultimate wisdom) is gone. Dana is a sexy geek, instead of just being a brilliant sexy person. And the government is still performing illegal raids.
But at least now they're illegal.
-----
The constant creation of these silly patents can only result in litigation. After all, a patent serves only two purposes; to put a process or invention in a publicly accessable database, and to give you ammo to sue your competitors.
Once this goes to court, there's very little chance it will stand up. Unfortunately, as more of these stupid patents go to court, the courts will require better evidence than they do now, until eventaully patents become worthless.
And despite the Slashdot concensus, this is NOT a good thing.
Software patents are usually bogus, however I seriously believe that there are exceptions. The problem is, it's easy to look at a solution an say how easy it must have been to find. It's much more difficult to look at a problem and come up with a decent solution.
Google is a tricky piece of work. Macromedia Flash is an amazing bit of programming. I only wish that someone had patented HTTP, GPLed it, and then refused to let Amazon play, effectively kicking them out of the sandbox.
There are deserving patents out there. Amazon however seems to be "patent squatting", i.e. sitting on obvious patents and hoping they become valuable. Meanwhile the Patent Office understands just as little about the Internet as ICANN, which is an impressively small amount.
[Any errors or stupidity in this document is the result of not sleeping. Goodnight.]
-----
Yes, and the easter bunny visits my house and leaves golden eggs on my porch.
Try the following: ""The United States government has enacted legislation that attempts to tightly control the export of "supercomputers" to certain other nations (i.e., China, Pakistan, India, etc.)". Even then you mislead people, simply because of the word "export". The vast majority of the required parts are not made in the US. (Is there a single necessary part where all possible components that could be used are manufactured in the U.S.?)
To keep a product like that in the hands of the U.S. only would require the creating corporation agreeing to do the following.
- Keeping all manufacturing in the U.S. at U.S. wages.
- Refusing to patent the technology.
- Keeping a very expensive security lid on the entire facility.
- Not releasing any details that would allow anyone with the resources of China to come up with an equivilent technology
Yeah. Right.In a way, it seems silly to refuse to sell certain nations supercomputers when we still hire their citizens to work on our supercomputers...
-----
What I cannot figure out from the web site, however, is if the new standards include physical connections as well as data. I would not mind in the least if all the devices came with some varient of a USB port, which would mean I could connect all of them with the same cable, especially as I can see using something like a flash drive with all of them. (Store MP3s for my rio, photos from my camera, numbers for my cell phone, software for my mindstorms, and backup my palm pilot.)
Hopefully Lego joins the group.... :)
Hmmm. It's be nice if Sony did something with the Aibo along these lines. Attach the cable so it looked like the leash, throw a huge flash drive in that monster, and let it follow you around, especially if you could store all the equipment in saddlebags on the Aibo...
-----
Local Papers are commonly biased in their reporting. Online papers are too. The advantage with online papers is that you can either find one that matches your bias or compare and contrast in an effort to find the truth. Papers from a foreign country are extremely important, as they'll allow you a perspective on your own country that is impossible to get from non-imported print media.
The process of printing means the news is old (by modern standards) by the time I read it. Why would I want to read old news? (Or as Wired put it a few years ago, "Wired is Tired.")
I live in Omaha. The paper used to be close to useless due to biased content, however they have adapted nicely. I can search and find news articles and, more importantly, search the classifieds. The last one makes my ad much more valuable and it makes looking for an item or a job much easier. If I want an exercise bike, I can search a few weeks of newspapers quickly and easily.
I'll read the newsmagazines (such as Time and Newsweek) when someone can convince me they've started to put out issues without faked photos and with accurate content. The last few times I looked at one they were covering Columbine and the Seattle W.T.O. events. The bias and partial coverage of the events in their reporting made the article worthless.
If print news wants to compete with online news they must base themselves off of the two advantages they have over the online community. Those advantages are portability and locality. This means that they need to quit paying for news feeds (a.p., etc.), improve local editorials and news articles, and decrease the size and cost of the paper. In addition, an online mirror (as described above) has its uses, especially for classifieds. Finally, there are services a paper can do well that the internet doesn't. Comics, crosswords, and Advice columns (bathroom reading) are still better in papers than online. Expand your comics/crossword section. Cover local sports and local politics heavily. Contain content aimed at your entire community. Contain editorials that are controversial.
Newspapers have long held an effective monopoly in many areas. They have grown weak and really are not good at dealing with competition. Some papers are wonderful, but many are utter drek.
Realize that many local news teams have used humor to stay sucessful. Consider it.
News is news. It is a list of the facts regarding a situation. They should not contain opinions. Editorials are editorials. They are opinions that contain news as a basis for the opinions. John Katz writes editorials that use news as support. (good). Taco writes news that contains editorials (bad). If newspapers could learn to remove bias and sensationalism from their reporting they would do a lot better. (And if they think we don't see it then their only blinding themselves.)
A friend of mine has gone out on a camera crew with the Daily Show. The method is simple. Interview someone for 2 to three hours and throw in a really oddball question after the first hour or so and every half hour after that. The person doesn't realize that the whole purpose of the interview is the few odd questions so they do their best to answer them and end up looking like an idiot. What's sad is that it seems that the real news does much the same thing. They blow rolls of film, including a number of staged shots for many articles. As a result, we've grown used to it and it has ceased to have an impact on us. Papers do it. We know they do it. We've seen them do it. Therefore we cease to trust them. Why would I pay to read news I don't trust?
-----
I do web page design, programming, and have a number of outdoor interests. Since I haven't replaced my last digital camera (stolen), I'm in the market for a new one.
With Kodak offering a VGA camera (a.k.a. the Palm Pix) I see an all in one solution.
With the two combined I can take photos of a disc golf course or event, label them, make notes about the photos and upload the page as soon as I get home. Using a portable keyboard makes the whole thing much easier and allows me to carry the whole production on the course.
One final comment: :)
"Remember, when color film came out, the quality of motion pictures went down." - Yeah, the Wizard of OZ sucked until Pink Floyd released a new sountrack...
-----
Oddly enough, despite the often held belief that computers and internet are for the young, it's the elderly who are really getting their money's worth. The internet allows those people unable to get around easily to meet and talk to people of similar ages and with similar experiences. When you reach an age where most of your friends have passed on it's nice to have a place where you can make new friends.
Yes. I no longer meet my neighbors. Thanks to the internet I am able to keep in touch with friends who actually know who Voltaire is. I can discuss my latest problems with my child with my friends two time zones away, who also have a child of the same age. I can communicate with people of a similar mind and IQ regardless of their age, race, religion, profession, or location. I can have my opinions challenged and even rated on Slashdot.
I met my wife on a WWIV BBS. If it hadn't been for the interaction we obviously didn't have over the modem lines I would have never married her...
I live in Nebraska. My son (age 7 months) has grandparents in Washington and Seattle. We have friends and family all over the U.S. (plus a few Aussies). I can put his latest photos on his web page and everyone can see him without me trying to send photos all over heck and creation.
I have come to a conclusion. The study at Standford was done by human beings, and published on the interent. As I have not had physical contact with these human beings, I cannot possibly be considered to have interacted with them. Therefore I cannot have been influenced by them. Therefore I cannot consider myself to have been informed by their research. Therefore their study is meaningless to me and to all others who have seen it.
-----
Why is it that some moderators are such asses (and please note, that "some" is perhaps just one a week) about having their opinions become part of unrelated articles on Slashdot? Last week Slashdot posted about 75 stories and two of them contained offtopic opinions in the article. So why is it that sometimes when someone gets the ability to write an article, they have to go attack Slashdot users? It becomes a conspiracy: favoritism, Rob not caring, Slashdot really sucking these days, the list goes on and on, but it never mentions the real reason.
The fact is that posters are allowed to post their opinions, just like the authors. The moderators can only moderate down a fraction of all submissions. But they can't moderate down any submission that comes from the Author of the article. Just because a user can't understand why Slashdot rejected a submission doesn't mean there was a reason, it just means that when it was submitted, no one felt like posting it. |Everyone want Slashdot to be a fun mix: stuff that matters. Legos? Linux? Black Holes? Nanotech? If Slashdot was all serious, many of us wouldn't enjoy reading it or posting to it.
But I see articles all over with these childish little notes on them: "Why is it that some people are such asses...)".
The personal attacks get old Taco; they hurt because we all work so hard making Slashdot happen each day... and attacking us because we didn't agree with your attitude doesn't make our visits filled with joy.
And that's why I like Jon Katz. If he wants to rant he does it in a separate article. He doesn't subvert a decent piece of news like a Grits poster.
-----
First we have this wonderful timeline of events and eToys' stock price. But perhaps that's all propaganda...
Who is eToys target customer?
That would be net-savvy or at least net-capable people. The kind of people that would be bound to come across the massive amount of unfavorable eToys press. The kind of people who would have to be blind to miss half the protest sites if they did a search on eToys.
Who is eToys target investor?
People who are subject to all of the above but also get to read all the bad investor news.
To top it all off, you have people who realize that if Etoys is looking at controlling the etoy.com content we should wonder what kind of content they have. Now the FCC does too. Hmmm, I wonder who sent the information on over 350 mismarketed products?
No. Toywar had nothing to do with the fall of eToys, and Slashdot is a powerless entity as well. The only people who want you to believe that is companies who don't want to face their own toywar.
-----
In return for this free service I hereby grant spam-free-email-for-life.com whatever legal thing they need in order to sue spammers in my name and they can keep the $10. In return they agree to keep all my spam to mynamespam@spam-free-email-for-life.com and the rest of my mail to myname@spam-free-email-for-life.com.
They can have the money. I don't get the spam. Good enough for me.
By the way, tracing SPAM is often easy. If they want your money then they have to give you a way to contact them, don't they?
-----