"What exactly is a congressman going to bring to the table at such a discussion?"
First, and most important, they represent you and me at the table.
Why is that important?
Well, if a nuclear lab is having a lot of accidents, congress (representing the people) have a right to know what's going on to provide oversight to the people directly running the program.
In other words, if the people directly responsible won't fix the problem, congress can at least insist on better oversight.
It's in everyone's interest to know these accidents are occurring.
The question is, how much liquidity does Google have, and how does it help their bottom line.
All by itself, I don't see how it helps Google, but it would be nice to have that spectrum opened up to all devices so that we can finally have decent coverage without draconian device restrictions. Just a complete guess is that Google wants to "sublet" the space to smaller device makers.
The original can't be a full-sized replica of Harrison Ford; it's probably like an 80% model so it wouldn't be so big in the shots. But he cast his head at 100%. Then he made it worse by positioning the head too high.
It looks awful. I would try to put the original back together and never admit I did that if it came out that poorly.
"Probably they meant $800 billion to $1 trillion?"
So you're saying if we had just invested in Geothermal power instead of the war in Iraq (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/0 8/01/analysis_says_war_could_cost_1_trillion/) then not only would we not be in a quagmire in Iraq, but we would no longer have to be so involved in the political process in the middle east? Imagine if the amount of money going to that region was halved. The political power of people who are not at all friendly to the West would be cut substantially.
If this is true, then it seems the only thing standing between the United States and energy independence is a will to do something about it. Maybe we need leadership (and I'm referring to much more than Bush & Co) willing to do something that will do a little bit more than just try to ensure a steady stream of oil from a politically unstable region.
"Will Joe Cityadmin give a rat's butt if I call to complain about an outage? "
Well, good luck if you have an outage with Comcast. My internet line was down for two months. They kept closing the ticket claiming it was fixed. One tech came out and tried to tell me I needed lighting arrestors that he personally would install for only $300. Then they finally fixed it just as I switched to Verizon FIOS. Then they called me back and asked what it would take to switch back... I told them "A promise that it won't take 2 months to fix a problem". They said they couldn't do that and hung up.
Or better still... if you have a physical problem with a buried line from Verizon. Two weeks minimum for them to come out and look at it. I was without phone service for 2 1/2 weeks a few years back because workmen on my neighbor's property cut the phone lines accidentally.
So as much as I agree with you, it's hard to argue government could do any worse than the fiasco that is the communications infrastructure in the U.S. It's pitiful.
"Thus the money doesn't have to change hands before the contract goes into effect."
This is probably a mistake in the long run, because now we'll start fiddling around with when a contract is in effect. For example, if an auction can only be paid for via PayPal, and the person bids, wins, and then doesn't pay for a few days, is there a sale or not?
If you leave it at "once money changes hands, it's a contract", then it's simple to remember and enforce. It's better for everyone, because it encourages the buyer to get the money to the seller as quickly as possible. And the buyer knows as soon as he pays for it, it's his, even if not in his possession.
That's why they have to ban individual musical notes. You record 1 note here, and 1 note there, you can string them together to form *any song ever written or recorded*. Just owning a piano might be proof that you intend to illegally reproduce copyrighted music.
Re:Locks are for Honest People
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"They give people who know what is right permission to do the right thing."
George Orwell just called and said he owns the IP to "newspeak", and he's giving you permission to do the right thing and stop stealing it.
Re:The BBC and Licensing?
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"The BBC's iPlayer has recently come under fire for being Windows only and DRM-riddled, but what can they do?"
Send everybody who pays for a TV license a card with an ID and password.
Person must first log into the web site with their ID and password, and then they can stream the programs using some sort of open CODEC or even Flash.
The solves 98% of the problem. And it's one of those good enough solutions that lawyers and bureaucrats will turn down because they're not thinking rationally. They're looking for a 100% protection solution that can never exist. They're only making it harder for their customers, and it makes no difference to "protecting" the content.
At some level he does understand this. But as I said in an earlier post, the point of these new security measures is to make people feel secure, not actually increase security to a significant degree.
AC is suggesting the procedures make him/her feel more secure. By your bringing up the point that it isn't really doing anything, you are antagonizing them because it would force them to admit to themselves that they really are not safer today than on 9/10/2001. And that makes them feel anxious and less secure. So they become angry at you.
"The idea is to make the shee--I mean, taxpayers--feel like they're getting something for their dollars."
The purpose of security after 9/11 isn't to actually make airplanes more secure. That can be done simply and almost without cost or complication (i.e. secure cockpit door, instructions to pilot never open). The purpose of this new security is to (as you suggest), give the appearance of that the government is "doing something". But more importantly, after 9/11 people didn't want to travel. An important reason for the window-dressing security provided by the TSA is to make passengers feel as if the airplanes are safe once again, even though the only thing that is different these days is that your shampoo is thrown out, and you have to take your shoes off. That's it. That's the security.
oh, and certain people can't fly, but no one can tell you who or why. You just have to kinda... find out.
"like most musicians you will have to work the first dozen or so years of your life for virtually nothing, with no guarantee whatsoever of ever making a penny from any of it."
Anybody who goes to a University for 4 years and spends $80K in education bills will tell you musicians are not really unique in that regard. And no, there is no guarantee that you will do any better financially because of your degree.
I do remember that era very well, but the desktop PC was the harbinger of things to come. I remember well the VAX, the PDP series, they were the reference through the late 70's and early 80's. But the PC was a signal that pure processing power was not going to be enough to distinguish yourself from the pack. The PC epitomized the idea that a single hardware standard could be a powerful driver for software innovation. Companies like Sun, Apple, and IBM "got it" and they prospered. But DEC saw the idea, and it scared Ken so much that he campaigned against small PC's. His vision was a mini computer and you would "share time". He didn't "get it".
DEC had a lot of great ideas and great technology, but I always felt that at a certain point they forgot what made their hardware and software a standard, and they ignored the reality that the landscape changed around them. Despite overwhelming evidence all around them.
That's why I said DEC went out of their way to fail.
Remember the launch date? 9/9/99. There was a huge amount of hype around that date, and it was one of the first times I recall people waiting in line to buy a console. I still have the launch T-Shirt for the console, black with red letters.
I think what happened is that after launch when you have that inevitable lull (like has happened with 360, Wii, PS3), they simply ran out of money to hype the thing. I don't think they were stupid, as a previous poster mentioned, they were already in financial trouble.
And make no mistake, the Dreamcast had the most innovative games. Sega was good at that. But admittedly, the graphics on the PS2 were better (by a little), but clearly it had more CPU power. The Sega in mind was a 3/4 of a generation ahead when it was launched, and 1/4 of a generation behind when the PS2 came out.
I still have mine, although we hardly play it anymore.
PC Tools was a superior product to the Norton Utilities, Symantec bought PC Tools, and then shut it down. At the time, it seemed illegal or something. But there you have it.
Symantec did that with a bunch of products. Most of them are gone. And now Symantec has the dubious distinction of being a company that makes an anti-virus tool that is eerily like spyware.... just try to get rid of it from your computer.
"And much as it pains some, IE4 was a far superior browser to NS4. "
NS4 *eventually* was fine, but it took a long time to get there.
But really, the height of the browser wars was the 3 version of both, and in that regard, Netscape blew away IE3. And in terms of long-term survival, Netscape had the right idea (groupware), they just took long to get there. Note that Google is trying a similar path; they're just being careful how they engage MS, always doing it on their terms, not MS. For this reason alone, it's clear Google is run by brighter management than Netscape.
Don't forget, IE4 was combined in a way to put a lot of "push" access (that was big at the time) so that the active desktop would simply team with advertisements for Disney and a few other companies. It slowed the PC down so as to be useless so people turned it off. The concept was correct; it just came out about 8 years too early and was proprietary (RSS anyone?). If you fire up Windows 98 (the original) in VMWare, unfortunately the effect is gone because the companies who provided the push content no longer do it.
When Ken Olsen made his famous comment in 1977, it set the tone for DEC to ensure it quickly lost relevance in the computer world. And when DEC did finally come out with PC's, they were proprietary at a time when the proprietary designs were slowly losing out to the IBM PC.
By the time the Alpha chip was released, the company was already doing very poorly. By the time Robert Palmer took over, it was not clear to anyone at the time that DEC would ever again be relevant. I don't know if he was the right man for the job or not, but he basically started parceling out bits of DEC to whoever would buy it. My experience is you can't cut your way to profitability, and when Compaq bought DEC, it was never clear to anyone why they would be interested. I believe DEC took out Compaq on it's way to the bottom.
I find it amusing now that Ken Olsen tries to claim that he was not anti-PC. My personal opinion was the Ken Olsen was anti-PC because it was pretty clear that cheap boxes would soon be as powerful as the "minis" that DEC had for sale. He knew he'd eventually be squeezed from the bottom end by PC's and there was no place to grow on the top end.
My only reminder of DEC is a copy of Digital Unix with all the manuals in the original box that I keep on a top shelf to remind me of what DEC used to be. Personally, I'm not surprised that DEC failed, I'm more surprised how little time it took they basically went from being the #2 computer maker to irrelevance in 5 years and then they were gone 5 years later.
The issue in a nutshell is the cable providers would prefer you to use their box, because Cablecard didn't support 2-way connectivity (not yet). And since the cablecards aren't that common, hardly any TV's (even high-end) have a cablecard slot.
Virtually all the new services require the cable/phone company's box to get the full range of channels because everyone is using encrypted QAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAM_tuner) so a standard QAM or ATSC tuner is useless for hi-def.
For example, the Verizon FIOS service has only the local channels unencrypted, so without the box, you can only receive a handful of channels.
It's my understanding the original spec cable card doesn't address the scrambled QAM channels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_card#Physical_ CableCARDs), and the new MCard spec is only due this month. But they simply aren't available, and who knows if they'll actually work when released?
So that fancy new 100" Plasma that supports every standard possible? You still need the box.
"But one political party is comprised of members today who support torture and voted to gut habeus corpus--which party was it?"
Both parties supported and support it all of these policies. They were and are widely known.
It's like certain political candidates decrying the war and the abuses during their campaign, but they knew about it the entire time it was going on. In a way, they're worse, because they'll do anything that is politically expedient. They have no guiding principles of their own.
So to me, both parties are equally guilty. You might single this administration out as particularly inept and anti civil rights, but I think party affiliation has less to do with it than the individuals involved.
"mposing import tariffs in order to penalize countries that oppress their laborers, that deny them basic human rights, that deny them democratic participation and representation in their government, in my opinion are exactly the sort of cases when countries should impose tariffs."
The sounds pretty noble, and maybe an interesting way to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The trouble is, they aren't doing this on general principles, they're doing it to promote and protect specific local industries, otherwise, they would raise the tariffs on all Chinese goods. Instead, they're just raising the tariffs on cameras with very specific capabilities. In the end, I don't see how this really helps anyone, save a handful of wealthy shareholders that this tax protects against Asian competition.
Slashdot Mirror
"What exactly is a congressman going to bring to the table at such a discussion?"
First, and most important, they represent you and me at the table.
Why is that important?
Well, if a nuclear lab is having a lot of accidents, congress (representing the people) have a right to know what's going on to provide oversight to the people directly running the program.
In other words, if the people directly responsible won't fix the problem, congress can at least insist on better oversight.
It's in everyone's interest to know these accidents are occurring.
"How much cash does Google have?"
The question is, how much liquidity does Google have, and how does it help their bottom line.
All by itself, I don't see how it helps Google, but it would be nice to have that spectrum opened up to all devices so that we can finally have decent coverage without draconian device restrictions. Just a complete guess is that Google wants to "sublet" the space to smaller device makers.
The original can't be a full-sized replica of Harrison Ford; it's probably like an 80% model so it wouldn't be so big in the shots. But he cast his head at 100%. Then he made it worse by positioning the head too high.
It looks awful. I would try to put the original back together and never admit I did that if it came out that poorly.
If you want a good networking stack, you simply grab the BSD source and you're done.
Even Apple understands that.
I've seen a huge spike in SPAM on my hotmail accounts.
Also, the PDF's emails are simply a way to get past spam filters; they're all viagra/meds style ads. These started appearing about a month ago.
"So the question is, who is controlling these botnets and why?"
I can't answer who, but why is almost certainly:
1) Someone going into the extortion business. They have machines all over the world to command against blackmail targets.
2) Someone who will sell control of portions of these bots to 3rd parties for profit. Either spam, DOS, or whatever.
"Probably they meant $800 billion to $1 trillion?"
0 8/01/analysis_says_war_could_cost_1_trillion/) then not only would we not be in a quagmire in Iraq, but we would no longer have to be so involved in the political process in the middle east? Imagine if the amount of money going to that region was halved. The political power of people who are not at all friendly to the West would be cut substantially.
So you're saying if we had just invested in Geothermal power instead of the war in Iraq (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/
If this is true, then it seems the only thing standing between the United States and energy independence is a will to do something about it. Maybe we need leadership (and I'm referring to much more than Bush & Co) willing to do something that will do a little bit more than just try to ensure a steady stream of oil from a politically unstable region.
"Will Joe Cityadmin give a rat's butt if I call to complain about an outage? "
Well, good luck if you have an outage with Comcast. My internet line was down for two months. They kept closing the ticket claiming it was fixed. One tech came out and tried to tell me I needed lighting arrestors that he personally would install for only $300. Then they finally fixed it just as I switched to Verizon FIOS. Then they called me back and asked what it would take to switch back... I told them "A promise that it won't take 2 months to fix a problem". They said they couldn't do that and hung up.
Or better still... if you have a physical problem with a buried line from Verizon. Two weeks minimum for them to come out and look at it. I was without phone service for 2 1/2 weeks a few years back because workmen on my neighbor's property cut the phone lines accidentally.
So as much as I agree with you, it's hard to argue government could do any worse than the fiasco that is the communications infrastructure in the U.S. It's pitiful.
"For some young newlyweds, this means a debate over whether to combine their blogs."
The fun never ends when you hang around with some people.
"Thus the money doesn't have to change hands before the contract goes into effect."
This is probably a mistake in the long run, because now we'll start fiddling around with when a contract is in effect. For example, if an auction can only be paid for via PayPal, and the person bids, wins, and then doesn't pay for a few days, is there a sale or not?
If you leave it at "once money changes hands, it's a contract", then it's simple to remember and enforce. It's better for everyone, because it encourages the buyer to get the money to the seller as quickly as possible. And the buyer knows as soon as he pays for it, it's his, even if not in his possession.
"...and soon enough, you have the whole movie. "
That's why they have to ban individual musical notes. You record 1 note here, and 1 note there, you can string them together to form *any song ever written or recorded*. Just owning a piano might be proof that you intend to illegally reproduce copyrighted music.
"They give people who know what is right permission to do the right thing."
George Orwell just called and said he owns the IP to "newspeak", and he's giving you permission to do the right thing and stop stealing it.
"The BBC's iPlayer has recently come under fire for being Windows only and DRM-riddled, but what can they do?"
Send everybody who pays for a TV license a card with an ID and password.
Person must first log into the web site with their ID and password, and then they can stream the programs using some sort of open CODEC or even Flash.
The solves 98% of the problem. And it's one of those good enough solutions that lawyers and bureaucrats will turn down because they're not thinking rationally. They're looking for a 100% protection solution that can never exist. They're only making it harder for their customers, and it makes no difference to "protecting" the content.
"How do you fail to understand this?"
At some level he does understand this. But as I said in an earlier post, the point of these new security measures is to make people feel secure, not actually increase security to a significant degree.
AC is suggesting the procedures make him/her feel more secure. By your bringing up the point that it isn't really doing anything, you are antagonizing them because it would force them to admit to themselves that they really are not safer today than on 9/10/2001. And that makes them feel anxious and less secure. So they become angry at you.
"The idea is to make the shee--I mean, taxpayers--feel like they're getting something for their dollars."
The purpose of security after 9/11 isn't to actually make airplanes more secure. That can be done simply and almost without cost or complication (i.e. secure cockpit door, instructions to pilot never open). The purpose of this new security is to (as you suggest), give the appearance of that the government is "doing something". But more importantly, after 9/11 people didn't want to travel. An important reason for the window-dressing security provided by the TSA is to make passengers feel as if the airplanes are safe once again, even though the only thing that is different these days is that your shampoo is thrown out, and you have to take your shoes off. That's it. That's the security.
oh, and certain people can't fly, but no one can tell you who or why. You just have to kinda... find out.
"like most musicians you will have to work the first dozen or so years of your life for virtually nothing, with no guarantee whatsoever of ever making a penny from any of it."
Anybody who goes to a University for 4 years and spends $80K in education bills will tell you musicians are not really unique in that regard. And no, there is no guarantee that you will do any better financially because of your degree.
I do remember that era very well, but the desktop PC was the harbinger of things to come. I remember well the VAX, the PDP series, they were the reference through the late 70's and early 80's. But the PC was a signal that pure processing power was not going to be enough to distinguish yourself from the pack. The PC epitomized the idea that a single hardware standard could be a powerful driver for software innovation. Companies like Sun, Apple, and IBM "got it" and they prospered. But DEC saw the idea, and it scared Ken so much that he campaigned against small PC's. His vision was a mini computer and you would "share time". He didn't "get it".
DEC had a lot of great ideas and great technology, but I always felt that at a certain point they forgot what made their hardware and software a standard, and they ignored the reality that the landscape changed around them. Despite overwhelming evidence all around them.
That's why I said DEC went out of their way to fail.
I'm not sure I quite agree.
Remember the launch date? 9/9/99. There was a huge amount of hype around that date, and it was one of the first times I recall people waiting in line to buy a console. I still have the launch T-Shirt for the console, black with red letters.
I think what happened is that after launch when you have that inevitable lull (like has happened with 360, Wii, PS3), they simply ran out of money to hype the thing. I don't think they were stupid, as a previous poster mentioned, they were already in financial trouble.
And make no mistake, the Dreamcast had the most innovative games. Sega was good at that. But admittedly, the graphics on the PS2 were better (by a little), but clearly it had more CPU power. The Sega in mind was a 3/4 of a generation ahead when it was launched, and 1/4 of a generation behind when the PS2 came out.
I still have mine, although we hardly play it anymore.
PC Tools was a superior product to the Norton Utilities, Symantec bought PC Tools, and then shut it down. At the time, it seemed illegal or something. But there you have it.
Symantec did that with a bunch of products. Most of them are gone. And now Symantec has the dubious distinction of being a company that makes an anti-virus tool that is eerily like spyware.... just try to get rid of it from your computer.
"And much as it pains some, IE4 was a far superior browser to NS4. "
NS4 *eventually* was fine, but it took a long time to get there.
But really, the height of the browser wars was the 3 version of both, and in that regard, Netscape blew away IE3. And in terms of long-term survival, Netscape had the right idea (groupware), they just took long to get there. Note that Google is trying a similar path; they're just being careful how they engage MS, always doing it on their terms, not MS. For this reason alone, it's clear Google is run by brighter management than Netscape.
Don't forget, IE4 was combined in a way to put a lot of "push" access (that was big at the time) so that the active desktop would simply team with advertisements for Disney and a few other companies. It slowed the PC down so as to be useless so people turned it off. The concept was correct; it just came out about 8 years too early and was proprietary (RSS anyone?). If you fire up Windows 98 (the original) in VMWare, unfortunately the effect is gone because the companies who provided the push content no longer do it.
When Ken Olsen made his famous comment in 1977, it set the tone for DEC to ensure it quickly lost relevance in the computer world. And when DEC did finally come out with PC's, they were proprietary at a time when the proprietary designs were slowly losing out to the IBM PC.
By the time the Alpha chip was released, the company was already doing very poorly. By the time Robert Palmer took over, it was not clear to anyone at the time that DEC would ever again be relevant. I don't know if he was the right man for the job or not, but he basically started parceling out bits of DEC to whoever would buy it. My experience is you can't cut your way to profitability, and when Compaq bought DEC, it was never clear to anyone why they would be interested. I believe DEC took out Compaq on it's way to the bottom.
I find it amusing now that Ken Olsen tries to claim that he was not anti-PC. My personal opinion was the Ken Olsen was anti-PC because it was pretty clear that cheap boxes would soon be as powerful as the "minis" that DEC had for sale. He knew he'd eventually be squeezed from the bottom end by PC's and there was no place to grow on the top end.
My only reminder of DEC is a copy of Digital Unix with all the manuals in the original box that I keep on a top shelf to remind me of what DEC used to be. Personally, I'm not surprised that DEC failed, I'm more surprised how little time it took they basically went from being the #2 computer maker to irrelevance in 5 years and then they were gone 5 years later.
In theory, you are correct. However:l
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-8900_7-5581176-1.htm
The issue in a nutshell is the cable providers would prefer you to use their box, because Cablecard didn't support 2-way connectivity (not yet). And since the cablecards aren't that common, hardly any TV's (even high-end) have a cablecard slot.
It would have been simpler to go with DVB.
Virtually all the new services require the cable/phone company's box to get the full range of channels because everyone is using encrypted QAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAM_tuner) so a standard QAM or ATSC tuner is useless for hi-def.
_ CableCARDs), and the new MCard spec is only due this month. But they simply aren't available, and who knows if they'll actually work when released?
For example, the Verizon FIOS service has only the local channels unencrypted, so without the box, you can only receive a handful of channels.
It's my understanding the original spec cable card doesn't address the scrambled QAM channels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_card#Physical
So that fancy new 100" Plasma that supports every standard possible? You still need the box.
"But one political party is comprised of members today who support torture and voted to gut habeus corpus--which party was it?"
Both parties supported and support it all of these policies. They were and are widely known.
It's like certain political candidates decrying the war and the abuses during their campaign, but they knew about it the entire time it was going on. In a way, they're worse, because they'll do anything that is politically expedient. They have no guiding principles of their own.
So to me, both parties are equally guilty. You might single this administration out as particularly inept and anti civil rights, but I think party affiliation has less to do with it than the individuals involved.
"mposing import tariffs in order to penalize countries that oppress their laborers, that deny them basic human rights, that deny them democratic participation and representation in their government, in my opinion are exactly the sort of cases when countries should impose tariffs."
The sounds pretty noble, and maybe an interesting way to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The trouble is, they aren't doing this on general principles, they're doing it to promote and protect specific local industries, otherwise, they would raise the tariffs on all Chinese goods. Instead, they're just raising the tariffs on cameras with very specific capabilities. In the end, I don't see how this really helps anyone, save a handful of wealthy shareholders that this tax protects against Asian competition.