This whole discussion is an illustration of an ancient Sufi teaching problem:
Make a hole in your backyard fence that is just large enough for your chickens to get through and eat in your neighbors garden -- and just small enough that your neighbors chickens cannot get through to eat in your garden.
Nothing wrong with the spirit of the posting but if this is going to be rated as insightful, someone should get the facts right.
Take note of the fact that UUNet and Sprint are both owned by MCI. MCI is still negotiating with the government antitrusters as to whether they get to keep sprint plus some of their other aquistions. Many tears in the corporate boardroom.
So where is your competition when they all get bought out by Time-AOL-MCI-ATT-TweetyBird-... ?
A Unix System Administrator was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week." The Unix System Administrator took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to the pocket.
The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do anything you want." Again, the Unix System Administrator took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket.
Finally, the frog asked, "What's the matter? I've told you that I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll stay with you for a week, and that I'll do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The Unix System Administrator said, "Look, I'm an Unix System Administrator. I don't have time for a girlfriend; but a talking frog, now that's cool!"
If the combined inquiries of slashdot readers can overwhelm a server, we ought to be able to handle a few lawyers with ease.
If everone who actually gives a damn sent in one dollar, we ought to be able to hire someone to inform corporate attorneys that 1) Their case is groundless, and 2) If they don't give it up and go away it's going become expensive and embarassing.
If every issue had to be handled at trial, it could be very expensive. In the real world, a large number of these corporate bozos would disappear in a puff of smoke - once they realized that the intimidation trick was not going to work.
Total cost per bozo should be a few hundred bucks, but a larger fund is probably necessary - to make the counter-threat believable.
Besides the satisfaction of a job well done, we could have hours of amusement debating which causes deserve support. If nothing else, we could make a great improvement in the quality of trolling and flamebait on slashdot.
Go back to the link and read the referenced OJR article.
The real info is in a second link to a fairly long boring article in Brill's content describing the multi-corporation hype used to push the Austin Powers movie.
I rented the original movie due the the first round of hype, and personally found it to be one of the least funny movies ever made.
It was interesting that when the second movie came out, every publication in America jumped on the bandwagon. Salon among others had five articles in one day and they weren't even owned by the same conglomerate.
At the time I was curious how they could afford to bribe every publication in America. Apparently if you own half of them, the rest will get in line thru some mutual back-scratching process.
It seems a lot of people actually liked the movie, but it intrigued me that I never found a negative review.
That was a different time. The media would jump over anything remotely close to the government's actions during the Prohibition. There will be isolated insidents but as the press converges on them they will subside.
Your response proves a point - one that I don't much like.
For about fifteen years now we have had an unrelenting "war on drugs". Only in the last year or so have I seen anything in the media that indicates that the war is lost and that the overall effect on our society has been incredibly bad - and that maybe we should try something else.
The list of horror stories, ranging from government confiscation of innocent peoples' money to no-knock raids that kill the occupants of the wrong house could fill this entire thread.
I don't really want to debate drugs themselves, merely to point out that the media will protect our rights mostly when it is safe and convenient.
But all of this has been going on right in front of your face, so is there some kind of selective attention going on here?
Like:
'what happened then can't happen now and if it does I won't acknowlege it until it is over and done.' ?
Stripping out all the BS, it appears that they want to turn your computer into a cable TV with built in decoder box.
Does anyone else see a connection between this and the P3 serial number ?
If this works, they can charge you for decryption of the 'content' and immediately add a record of what you watched to their database.
A few years back there was a really gritty novel called "The Tomorrow File". That was where 'they' put all the ideas that were just a little too ripe to implement immediately. I think I need to track it down and read it again.
If I believe most of the pop-psych theories about how how men and women operate, women are more oriented toward communication and cooperation.
How about the theory that people tend to go with those skills that give them the most personal payoff?
The original geeks were those of us who lacked the smooth social graces that led to stellar careers in finance and insurance sales. The ability to think in binary wasn't highly prized.
At the same time, the ability to communicate and motivate isn't a lot of help in technical fields (leaving out 'managment') - unless you become an expert in getting grants.
Possibly all that's needed is a little pre-orientation for potential CS students, explaining that the computer doesn't care if you have a pleasant manner and a winning smile.
You can't negotiate with a computer. You can't motivate it. You can't get it to join your team. All you can do is write code the way the system wants it - and that's the only way it will work.
Oh well, I wasn't using those karma points anyway.
The content of this article is relatively interesting, but mixing meme's and censorship doesn't work.
The original idea of a meme was an idea that propagates itself in the manner of a gene or a virus.
It was a pretty fuzzy concept when it was originated but it was a way of describing some things that happen in the real world - i.e.
Stories like alligators in the sewers seem to go on forever, passed from person to person.
Some complex 'memes' such as the Mormon religion have a belief that the members should work to gain converts. A lot of people laugh at the ernestness of some young Mormon missionaries, but the growth of the church seems to prove that this is a 'meme' with high survival and growth characteristics.
The only intellectual benefit in calling something a 'meme' is that you can study how the idea survives and propagates without having to pay attention to the actual content of the idea.
The fact that people tend to spread lies that they want to believe is not very surprising, but in the context of the article mixing lies, memes and censorship is simply confusing.
If you give a man a hammer, pretty soon every problem starts looking like a nail.
There are no guarantees, but this could be one of the most brilliant strategic moves in a lot of years.
Borland has been light years ahead of Microsoft for over five years -- but they have never been able to sell their own product. There are a lot of reasons why this has been so.
Part of it is history. The Lotus "look and feel" lawsuit crippled the company at a critical time and eventually allowed the bean-counters to take over.
Part of it is the use of Pascal as a primary language. C++ programmers prefer C++ even if it takes five times as long to get anything done.
For a long time I preferred C++ and fought against Pascal as a really dumb language. Eventually cost-effectiveness convinced me that faster is better. The client is paying for results. (Borland does have a version of Delphi in C++ called C++ builder.)
Borland has an "open source" community that in many ways is a lot more effective than the linux community. No licenses, no copyleft, just good code that does realworld useful things. Some of it is sold and a very large amount is given away for free. Source code is always available.
Currently, there are three competing groups developing freeware Internet tool kits -- and distributing not only the tools but functional freeware applications built with them.
Whether it will work depends on whether Corel makes the investment to make a real linux port.
It they do, it gives developers the ability to write applications that run on linux, Windows and even AS400 of all god-awful platforms.
The catch here is that Delphi is highly dependent on the Windows API. It is going to be very interesting to see what Corel does in order to make the port. They may have to invent their own desktop.
Old Chinese Curse: "May you live in interesting times"
I'm not sure this clarifies anything, but there is one thing about contract law that has to be taken into account.
Most of the time, what a contract says has nothing to do with how the courts interpret it.
That is why a large number of shrink-wrap agreements are so one-sided.
If you make any representation such as "If it's broke, I'll fix it", when the case actually gets to court, you will find that it is judged according to an entire body of law related to warantees and product liabilities - and you are now liable for a lot of things that you never intended.
To be safe, you can't even say that the CD will make a good coaster. Someone will sue you because his coffee leaked thru the hole in the center.
"Corporate responsibility". Seems like a bit of an oxymoron. Sorry, but "MicroSoft Works" is still in the lead.
You have identified the problem but not in terms that make any real difference (imho).
The financial system is just that -- a system. It operates on a defined set of rules. The guys who understand the rules get the goodies.
Unfortunately, there is no operating system manual that explains how it works. And when enough people do begin to figure it out, they change the rules.
Talking to your pension fund manager is all well and good, but perhaps you should be talking to the guys who made the rules that insure that your money is in a fund that is not under your personal control.
If you want to understand how it really works, you have to have both knowlege, intuition and a small dash of poetry. A reasonably good example is "The Milagro Beanfield War".
The section I have in mind describes the events that occur when the partly subsidised telephone company comes to a small rural peasant community.
I'm paraphrasing from memory so this is not a real quote from the book. It does get the flavor.
"The minute that phone became available, Juan was doomed. Maria was going to have a phone so she could talk to her cousins and aunts and nieces. There wasn't going to be any argument -- Maria was going to have that phone."
Even with the subsidy, the cost of that phone is going to be more than Juan's annual income. At some point, he is going to have to borrow the money to pay the bill. And the only asset he has is his small plot of land. He can't pay off the loan and in the long run, he will lose the land and have to work at the local gas station.
Is Juan's life better? Is it worse? The only thing we know is that it is very different. And Juan never quite knew what was happening.
In any case, If you want to change the system, you need to know how it works. It's a combination of people, rules and knowing which rules can be bent or broken at what time.
For the minority who actually have to install or upgrade MS software, you might be surprised to find that the mere presence of AOL can keep you from installing Win98 over Win95. Before Windows 98 setup will work, you have to delete aolndi.dll. otherwise setup gives you the informative message "Call to Undefined Dynalink"
It's was bad enough dealing with Microsoft's screwups -- now we have a new set of clowns joining the act.
There is one case that was decided a few years back where a medical institution took a blood sample from a patient, found a useful medical application for either his DNA (or some blood component) and filed for a patent.
(It's been a while so I can't recall the exact details.) In any case, the courts found in favor of the medical institution.
Be careful. If you decide to clone yourself you may have to pay someone royalties.
Your comment is well expressed, but it only covers part of the issue. In theory the company applying for the patent is providing all of us with valuable information in exchange for a temporary, exclusive right to profit from that information.
Many of the BS patents currently being issued provide no useful information in exchange for the rights they are seeking.
Patenting "a process for converting H2O into a crystaline form through endothermic control devices" doesn't add to the sum of human knowlege, it simply threatens to charge a royalty for every refrigerator used to make ice cubes.
In most cases this is harmless. The guys who make rerigerators have enough money to ignore or fight this kind of nonsense. Of course they also have the money to ignore patents that cover valid new discoveries.
As an alternative to patents, there is a large body of law that deals with trade secrets. If you have a really new discovery and you do not have the money to defend your patent, you may be much better off keeping the technique to yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Make a hole in your backyard fence that is just large enough for your chickens to get through and eat in your neighbors garden -- and just small enough that your neighbors chickens cannot get through to eat in your garden.
Once you have solved this, the Internet is easy.
Nothing wrong with the spirit of the posting but if this is going to be rated as insightful, someone should get the facts right.
Take note of the fact that UUNet and Sprint are both owned by MCI. MCI is still negotiating with the government antitrusters as to whether they get to keep sprint plus some of their other aquistions. Many tears in the corporate boardroom.
So where is your competition when they all get bought out by Time-AOL-MCI-ATT-TweetyBird-... ?
The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week." The Unix System Administrator took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to the pocket.
The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do anything you want." Again, the Unix System Administrator took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket.
Finally, the frog asked, "What's the matter? I've told you that I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll stay with you for a week, and that I'll do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The Unix System Administrator said, "Look, I'm an Unix System Administrator. I don't have time for a girlfriend; but a talking frog, now that's cool!"
The agreement that you accepted when you opened the box precludes any criticism of the product.
If everone who actually gives a damn sent in one dollar, we ought to be able to hire someone to inform corporate attorneys that 1) Their case is groundless, and 2) If they don't give it up and go away it's going become expensive and embarassing.
If every issue had to be handled at trial, it could be very expensive. In the real world, a large number of these corporate bozos would disappear in a puff of smoke - once they realized that the intimidation trick was not going to work.
Total cost per bozo should be a few hundred bucks, but a larger fund is probably necessary - to make the counter-threat believable.
Besides the satisfaction of a job well done, we could have hours of amusement debating which causes deserve support. If nothing else, we could make a great improvement in the quality of trolling and flamebait on slashdot.
The real info is in a second link to a fairly long boring article in Brill's content describing the multi-corporation hype used to push the Austin Powers movie.
I rented the original movie due the the first round of hype, and personally found it to be one of the least funny movies ever made.
It was interesting that when the second movie came out, every publication in America jumped on the bandwagon. Salon among others had five articles in one day and they weren't even owned by the same conglomerate.
At the time I was curious how they could afford to bribe every publication in America. Apparently if you own half of them, the rest will get in line thru some mutual back-scratching process.
It seems a lot of people actually liked the movie, but it intrigued me that I never found a negative review.
I was crushed when I found out that they had been aquired by someone else.
By the way, the preferred pronunciation is: 'The skiffy channel' per Harlon Elison who should know.
That was a different time. The media would jump over anything remotely close to the government's actions during the Prohibition. There will be isolated insidents but as the press converges on them they will subside.
Your response proves a point - one that I don't much like.
For about fifteen years now we have had an unrelenting "war on drugs". Only in the last year or so have I seen anything in the media that indicates that the war is lost and that the overall effect on our society has been incredibly bad - and that maybe we should try something else.
The list of horror stories, ranging from government confiscation of innocent peoples' money to no-knock raids that kill the occupants of the wrong house could fill this entire thread.
I don't really want to debate drugs themselves, merely to point out that the media will protect our rights mostly when it is safe and convenient.
But all of this has been going on right in front of your face, so is there some kind of selective attention going on here?
Like:
All you need is one extra chip to hold the banner ads.
Does anyone else see a connection between this and the P3 serial number ?
If this works, they can charge you for decryption of the 'content' and immediately add a record of what you watched to their database.
A few years back there was a really gritty novel called "The Tomorrow File". That was where 'they' put all the ideas that were just a little too ripe to implement immediately. I think I need to track it down and read it again.
How about the theory that people tend to go with those skills that give them the most personal payoff?
The original geeks were those of us who lacked the smooth social graces that led to stellar careers in finance and insurance sales. The ability to think in binary wasn't highly prized.
At the same time, the ability to communicate and motivate isn't a lot of help in technical fields (leaving out 'managment') - unless you become an expert in getting grants.
Possibly all that's needed is a little pre-orientation for potential CS students, explaining that the computer doesn't care if you have a pleasant manner and a winning smile.
You can't negotiate with a computer. You can't motivate it. You can't get it to join your team. All you can do is write code the way the system wants it - and that's the only way it will work.
Oh well, I wasn't using those karma points anyway.
If you have the bandwith or the patience, you can pick up either MP3 or Quicktime MOV files from SouthPark RangerStation
It's almost like seeing the movie again.
The original idea of a meme was an idea that propagates itself in the manner of a gene or a virus.
It was a pretty fuzzy concept when it was originated but it was a way of describing some things that happen in the real world - i.e.
Stories like alligators in the sewers seem to go on forever, passed from person to person.
Some complex 'memes' such as the Mormon religion have a belief that the members should work to gain converts. A lot of people laugh at the ernestness of some young Mormon missionaries, but the growth of the church seems to prove that this is a 'meme' with high survival and growth characteristics.
The only intellectual benefit in calling something a 'meme' is that you can study how the idea survives and propagates without having to pay attention to the actual content of the idea.
The fact that people tend to spread lies that they want to believe is not very surprising, but in the context of the article mixing lies, memes and censorship is simply confusing.
If you give a man a hammer, pretty soon every problem starts looking like a nail.
Borland has been light years ahead of Microsoft for over five years -- but they have never been able to sell their own product. There are a lot of reasons why this has been so.
Part of it is history. The Lotus "look and feel" lawsuit crippled the company at a critical time and eventually allowed the bean-counters to take over.
Part of it is the use of Pascal as a primary language. C++ programmers prefer C++ even if it takes five times as long to get anything done.
For a long time I preferred C++ and fought against Pascal as a really dumb language. Eventually cost-effectiveness convinced me that faster is better. The client is paying for results. (Borland does have a version of Delphi in C++ called C++ builder.)
Borland has an "open source" community that in many ways is a lot more effective than the linux community. No licenses, no copyleft, just good code that does realworld useful things. Some of it is sold and a very large amount is given away for free. Source code is always available.
Currently, there are three competing groups developing freeware Internet tool kits -- and distributing not only the tools but functional freeware applications built with them.
Whether it will work depends on whether Corel makes the investment to make a real linux port.
It they do, it gives developers the ability to write applications that run on linux, Windows and even AS400 of all god-awful platforms.
The catch here is that Delphi is highly dependent on the Windows API. It is going to be very interesting to see what Corel does in order to make the port. They may have to invent their own desktop.
Old Chinese Curse: "May you live in interesting times"
Most of the time, what a contract says has nothing to do with how the courts interpret it.
That is why a large number of shrink-wrap agreements are so one-sided.
If you make any representation such as "If it's broke, I'll fix it", when the case actually gets to court, you will find that it is judged according to an entire body of law related to warantees and product liabilities - and you are now liable for a lot of things that you never intended.
To be safe, you can't even say that the CD will make a good coaster. Someone will sue you because his coffee leaked thru the hole in the center.
You have identified the problem but not in terms that make any real difference (imho).
The financial system is just that -- a system. It operates on a defined set of rules. The guys who understand the rules get the goodies.
Unfortunately, there is no operating system manual that explains how it works. And when enough people do begin to figure it out, they change the rules.
Talking to your pension fund manager is all well and good, but perhaps you should be talking to the guys who made the rules that insure that your money is in a fund that is not under your personal control.
If you want to understand how it really works, you have to have both knowlege, intuition and a small dash of poetry. A reasonably good example is "The Milagro Beanfield War".
The section I have in mind describes the events that occur when the partly subsidised telephone company comes to a small rural peasant community.
I'm paraphrasing from memory so this is not a real quote from the book. It does get the flavor.
"The minute that phone became available, Juan was doomed. Maria was going to have a phone so she could talk to her cousins and aunts and nieces. There wasn't going to be any argument -- Maria was going to have that phone."
Even with the subsidy, the cost of that phone is going to be more than Juan's annual income. At some point, he is going to have to borrow the money to pay the bill. And the only asset he has is his small plot of land. He can't pay off the loan and in the long run, he will lose the land and have to work at the local gas station.
Is Juan's life better? Is it worse? The only thing we know is that it is very different. And Juan never quite knew what was happening.
In any case, If you want to change the system, you need to know how it works. It's a combination of people, rules and knowing which rules can be bent or broken at what time.
It's was bad enough dealing with Microsoft's screwups -- now we have a new set of clowns joining the act.
There is one case that was decided a few years back where a medical institution took a blood sample from a patient, found a useful medical application for either his DNA (or some blood component) and filed for a patent.
(It's been a while so I can't recall the exact details.) In any case, the courts found in favor of the medical institution.
Be careful. If you decide to clone yourself you may have to pay someone royalties.
Many of the BS patents currently being issued provide no useful information in exchange for the rights they are seeking.
Patenting "a process for converting H2O into a crystaline form through endothermic control devices" doesn't add to the sum of human knowlege, it simply threatens to charge a royalty for every refrigerator used to make ice cubes.
In most cases this is harmless. The guys who make rerigerators have enough money to ignore or fight this kind of nonsense. Of course they also have the money to ignore patents that cover valid new discoveries.
As an alternative to patents, there is a large body of law that deals with trade secrets. If you have a really new discovery and you do not have the money to defend your patent, you may be much better off keeping the technique to yourself.