Ok, I even call myself a bleeding-heart liberal, but I try not to be a fool. Like this schmuck. From the story:
"DSL providers, the NorthPoints, the Covads, the Rhythms, they don't care about the customer. All they care about is the numbers on Wall Street," Nathans said.
Does the word "duh" mean anything to you? Welcome to capitalism, Mr. Nathans. Tomorrow, the shocking true story of corporate executives exploiting their workers to get filthy rich!
All sarcasm aside, there are some people laughing all the way to the bank here: the Baby Bells, the "last-mile" providers. In Portland it's QWest, and they don't exactly make it easy for little ISPs to sign up DSL customers. Especially since they have their own competing service, and a guaranteed revenue stream from existing customers to prop up any DSL losses.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
I was going to moderate, but we've had too damn much of that lately, and this is an interesting post.:)
I also am very leery of such surveillance, and I think that there is at least one fundamental difference between having (a) one or more sharp-eyed employees and (b) a video monitoring system: data collection and retrieval.
It's not like having one sharp-eyed employee at all, really. It's like having thousands of sharp-eyed employees, all over the world, all with instantaneous access to each other's memories and perceptions. E.g. a network of computers.
The U.S. is now Database Nation - thousands of personal details of each of us are stored in databases over which we have zero control. This is likely to continue unchecked for a very long time. The end result is that when face-recognition technology starts to work well you're trackable. Everywhere you go, every step, is stored in a database somewhere, and available to the highest bidder.
For anyone who just thought, "paranoid," riddle me this, Batman: what would someone 100 or even 50 years ago have thought about our current state of affairs, in which nearly every purchase we make is trackable, and such information is regularly bought and sold? A paranoid fantasy?
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
...but when you are suing because you spilled coffee on yourself...
I know this is peripheral to your main point, but it's worth addressing. You are, of course, referring to Stella Liebeck, who was awarded $2.9 million by a jury in 1994. Let me say first that I agree with your basic premise people should take more responsibility for their actions, rather than resorting to a frivolous lawsuit.
Having said that, the case you to which you refer does not illustrate this in the way you believe. The popular meme for this case is as follows: Ditzy woman orders coffee, drives away and spills it on herself and is scalded. She sues and is an instant millionaire. This is completely false. Here are the facts:
Ms. Liebeck was not driving the car, neither was the car moving at the time of the incident.
Ms. Liebeck was 79 at the time of the incident, and subsequently spent 8 days in the hospital undergoing surgery.
Ms. Liebeck had 3rd-degree burns over 6% of her body. Her vagina was completely destroyed and had to be reconstructed by a plastic surgeon. She has permanent scarring over 16% of her body.
Ms. Liebeck attempted to settle the case out of court for $20,000, but McDonald's refused. McDonald's offered her $800, refusing even to pay her medical expenses.
McDonald's gave the court internal documents showing that in the previous 10 years, on average 70 people per year claimed to have been burned by McDonald's coffee.
The court found McDonald's conduct "reckless, callous and willful."
Finally, Ms. Liebeck never collected anything near $2.9 million (an amount, BTW, equal to 2 days worth of coffee sales at McDonald's worldwide). The amount was reduced to $480,000 by another court, and the parties later settled an undisclosed amount.
In short, I think the court system worked remarkably well. It's unconscionable that a company can serve food products which are capable of severe and immediate damage to human tissue if used as intended. McDonald's had know for more than a decade that their coffee was burning people, but they did nothing about it. They served their coffee at 185 degrees. Their warning labels were useless: "Caution: hot." They should have said, "Caution: contents are hot enough to liquify human skin in less than 3 seconds."
Many posters are confusing this issue of personal information with email. This is not just about email. It's about your credit rating and history, your medical records, tax records, police records. The DMA wants legal access to every single digital bit of information ever created for, by or about you. Their "opt-out" strategy means, in essence, "You tacitly give us permission to use these thousands of bits of information unless you tell us, one at a time, that we can't." The ideal world for them is one in which it takes so much effort for you to "opt-out" that you don't even bother.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Opt-in is a security risk. For those who haven't read the article, here's a beautiful quote:
Since an "opt-in" approach reduces the amount of information available to sellers regarding the consumer's preferences, spending habits and typical behavior patterns, it hampers sellers' efforts to detect "unusual" purchases and alert the consumer to possible fraud.
Ironically, this is only a problem because we have such weak privacy laws and infrastructure. It's still pathetically easy to steal someone's identity: a SS#, an addressed envelope and a little social engineering. Of course it's illegal, but since when has that stopped anyone? It needs to be difficult as well. And the less information about me floating around the public datastream, the more difficult it is.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
And contrary to what Guido says, I don't think they're longwinded or hairsplitting. Excerpts from the referenced email:
Conclusion: in order to be "compatible" in the strict sense, we need paragraph 7 to remove the choice of law clause. We would also recommend that paragraph 8 be changed to say that copying, modification or distribution constitutes acceptance of the license, but we don't have to have that change to agree that the license is fully "GPL compatible."
They've given him one requirement to make the license fully GPL-compatible, and IMHO it's very reasonable. Virginia, folks, is a very scary place to license software. If you haven't read up on UCITA, do so.
So we have never allowed a license with a choice-of-law clause to be treated as fully compatible with GPL. Virginia is the worst of all choices, because that state has passed the UCITA law, which adds a whole new range of risks and burdens in the distribution of free software.
Now, CNRI's lawyers might not like that, but their job is to do one thing: cover CNRI's ass. That's well and good, but the GPL has loftier goals: guaranteeing our freedoms.
The bottom line is that the GPL is the most powerful defense that Free software has. Yes, the FSF is inflexible, but they're preparing for the worst-case scenario. We'll thank them later, when the GPL stands up in court.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
The problem with Kozmo's email was not the opt-in beg, it was the following new service announcement. In your case I believe you'd be protected, since your email was 100% administrative. Kozmo took an administrative email and then tacked on some advertising.
From the article, it looks like the Kozmo rep used the same argument you did, but the judge didn't buy it. For good reason, IMHO. Got a problem with my account? Sure - email me. But this was one very questionable "problem" ("Egads! You didn't opt-in! We can't have that, you know.") and one very over-the-line advertisment.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Submitter of the April 2 story: devinsky@eng.buffalo.edu
Submitter of this April 16 story: devinsky@eng.buffalo.edu
He didn't like the answer he got the first time, so he tried again. Jesus, Slashdot, this is pretty bad - posting the same homework assignment from the same kid TWICE?
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Ok, thanks for replying again. I think I see the core of our disagreement. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be saying that humans are a natural part of the ecosystem and literally nothing that we do can be "unnatural" or "against the natural order."
I agree with this, albiet narrowly. In a strict sense, if we saturation-nuked the planet into a ball of smooth glass then yes, it would still be natural. But we'd be fucked. I'm not concerned about the health of Earth, or nature, or the ecosystem. I'm concerned about the health of us, and IMHO we're making some really stupid decisions, and not planning well for the future.
I've also seen that some populations are levelling, but the most recent figure I saw (no link - sorry) was 15 billion. Do we have the technology to keep 15 billion people alive on this planet? No one's even askign that question - we're just mindlessly expanding.
Thanks for the argument, anyway.:)
legs
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
First, I'll admit that this is pretty OT. And I don't watch TV, so I can't tell you about PBS.;)
Second, I agree that some species are doomed and should not be saved, and that some individuals within species should not be saved. The world is a brutal place, and many swans die of various causes. This is well and good, and your point about "retarding evolution" is well-taken.
Third, though, it's kind of sad that you apparently missed the point of my post. Since you took the trouble to reply, I'll assume you're at least a little interested and try again.
The point is that human beings have used our gigantic brains to create near-incredible technology to enable us to (a) breed and expand with few limits, and (b) kill off every species that gets in our way rather easily. In a very small span of time, geologically and evolutionarily speaking, we've made unprecedented changes in the ecosystem and environment of our planet (e.g. paving thousands of square miles with concrete or killing 99.x% of buffalo just for the hell of it).
No other species has ever had such power over its environment, and we're using that power blindly, without thought for the future. We're killing other organisms and species at a stunning rate because we can't see their immediate value to us. All I'm saying is that it's in our own best interests to keep the ecosystem of planet Earth as diverse as possible. As a species we have that power, and I think we should use it responsibly.
I'm not saying that we should save the California Condor because it's cute or some Earth-Firster loves the way its feathers shine in the sun. I'm saying we should save it to save ourselves. Simple ecosystems do not survive, and we're simplifying Earth's ecosystem very fast. Perhaps faster than our technology can keep up with the changes.
"Nature is exitncting some swan" you say. Unless you literally mean that "Nature" is a discreet entity like the Jolly Green Giant, this is a category mistake. "Nature" is a word we use to describe the natural processes at work in the world. It has no volition of its own; no goals, plans, will, or acts. Nature really is the sum of its parts, and right now human beings are the most powerful "part." It's not anyone's fault if a single swan dies. But if every species of frog dies because we pollute the environment, then yes, it is our fault.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Here's a fact for you (free of liberal bias, I think): "Simple ecosystems do not survive without external intervention."
Easily demonstrated by putting a fish in a tank. In most cases, the fish will die unless you intervene by feeding it. Or it will suffocate unless you oxygenate the water. Once you feed the fish, it starts to excrete, and pretty soon the tank's full of muck and algae. So you get an algae eater, and it swims around cleaning the tank. And using more oxygen, so you put in a plant or two, but they too need nutrients in the water to survive. The only way for that mini-ecosystem to survive without your intervention is to make it sufficiently complex.
But what happens to your fish tank if one species of fish suddenly develops a forebrain (far-fetched, I know, but bear with me) and wipes out all of its competition for food and oxygen? Pretty soon it's fucked: it can't clean up the tank fast enough to survive, and it's breeding rate is out of control and unbalanced with the resources at hand. If you're lucky, the fish just dies back and the ecosystem is balanced again. But if you're unlucky, the fish has poisoned the ecosystem so that nothing else can survive in it either. Then you've got a smelly empty fish tank, and you have to start over.
Right now humans are like that slightly smarter fish in the tank. We're hell-bent on eliminating all ecological competition so that we can expand more, but in doing so we've put ourselves in a dangerous position. We truly have the tiger by the tail - if our technology (our grip on the tail) fails us we're toast, and billions of people will die.
This might sound alarmist, but it's just biology: simple ecosystems do not survive without external intervention. Right now we're counting on our technology to be that external intervention, but it's not infallible. It's worked for a few thousand years, but that's barely blink of the eye.
Maybe one day technology will be infallible, and humans will be able to synthesize food from silicone and dirty water. Then we won't need any plants or animals; it'll just be us. All 50 billion of us, living in one large metal city under the gray sky, eating synthetic food, watching videos of the species we wiped out so we could expand. That will prove once and for all that those liberal swan-feeders were wrong: we don't need other species to survive. It will be beautiful.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
The most frightening aspect of this is what's going to happen in 10 years when game developers are dependent upon corporate advertising. What happens now when a major sponsor pulls ads from a TV show? The show dies (c.f. Dr. Laura's show, recently cancelled). It's often happened that a network has pulled or altered a show to suit major sponsors.
Could this happen to a game? hard to say. TV is very advertising-dependent, and game development seems more like movie-making. But check this out (from the story):
"Our expectation is, we'll cover the cost of the games where we do the in-game advertising, partly because of the large audience we're able to realize."
(John Riccitiello, EA president)
Here's EA straight-up planning to use advertising as a prime source of game funding. Will this be reflected in better contracts with content producers? Yeah... hold your breath.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Perhaps my point wasn't entirely clear; I left out the implicit "human" in front of "labor." Let's try it again:
Machines don't save you from doing more labor, but they save your company from paying for more
human labor.
Machines are almost always much cheaper to operate than people, so you're absolutely correct in saying that "the machines take over and save you, the employee, from the doing more labor." They also save you, the ex-employee, from collecting a paycheck for your ex-labor. This is what happened to those 2,000 employees who got axed - economies of scale and machine efficiency.
This is the point of my previous post: the more things are automated (and at a national ISP, as much as possible is automated), the fewer people are needed to produce the same service. Also, the remaining people need more and deeper skills to manage the more complicated machines that replaced their ex-co-workers.
The future belongs to those who can tell machines how to manipulate data, or other machines, or people. Pretty soon everyone else will be flipping burgers.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
My post below seems to echo your experience; I'm also in Portland, and used Teleport (*sob*) until recently. Who's your ISP now? Why do you like them? I've signed up with Hevanet, who are still small enough for real people to make customer-satisfaction decisions. They seem good in other respects too, but time will tell...
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
"What has happened in the Internet industry to cause such a decline in not only sales, but in jobs as well?" Consolidation has happened, and it's going to keep happening. DSL and cable are putting mom-and-pop ISPs out of business left and right. For every cable sign-up, one person leave LocalISP Inc. forever. Each DSL signup makes it harder to run a cheap 56k modem-based operation. "...where is this going to end?" When there are a handful of huge national ISPs and a bunch of local, hacker-friendly "boutique" ISPs.
It's ironic that, as promised 50 years and more ago, machines and computers really are labor-saving devices, just not in the way we hoped. Machines don't save you from doing more labor, but they save your company from paying for more labor. As more dataflow gets automated, and as hardware and software get easier to use, less human intervention and ingenuity is required to keep things running (less in aggregate, I mean, not in depth).
The ISP apocolypse is similar to what has happened in nearly every other industry: start off with thousands of little operations which compete fiercly for customers and market share. Eventually only a few will be left. After a while the service stops being differentiated from company to company and they compete on price. Once that happens, the company with the best economics - the most efficient - wins.
Look at Earthlink; their slogan is, "We're 10% better than AOL." For most people that's enough. Sure, people reading this comment probably want shell access on a *nix box for their $20/month, but Joe Sixpack just wants something that's easy to use (i.e. limited in options and functionality so it doesn't confuse him).
Yes, it's very sad that so many good ISPs are going away. My personal favorite, Teleport, was based in Portland, Oregon for years. They were reliable, responsive, and hacker-friendly. The got bigger, got inhaled by OneMain which was promptly inhaled by Earthlink. My service went from "shell access to pine" to "pray that 50% of my mail makes it through" in less than a month. And now I'm stuck with Earthlink's port 25 blocking.
I just signed up with another local ISP. Hopefully they won't be bought too soon.:)
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
2001-03-30 22:34:02 Microsoft Passport: we 0wn j00 (yro,microsoft) (rejected)
Second, following is an email a friend and I both got after we complained:
Thank you for your message to Passport Privacy.
We appreciate your concerns related to the Microsoft Passport Terms of Use. This issue has recently come under review, and will be addressed soon with an updated Microsoft Passport Terms of Use. You will be able to view the updated Microsoft Passport Terms of Use at http://www.passport.com/Consumer/TermsOfUse.asp as soon as it is posted.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused you.
Sincerely,
Passport Privacy
Christ, I've gotten used to M$ software being beta - but even their TOS are beta?? Bastards.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
"Fact: Women love long hair! It's an instant chick magnet. It's better than walking puppies in the park! Wash it and wear it down. Toss it around on your shoulders a lot. When my guy does this, women will just walk up and start touching his hair! Wouldn't you like this to happen to you?"
Guess that means John Romero gets more ass than a toilet seat, eh? And I'm going bald... sigh. John's gonna steal my wife, I just know it.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Only Libertarians understand where the line should be drawn.
You're missing the point: Libertarians don't have any moral high ground here. What all sides are arguing about is simply that: where to draw the line. Examples:
Dick the Republican wants to place censorware in all public libraries. Of course he'd say he's doing this to protect children: that's his "clear link to real damage."
Jane the Democrat wants laws restricting publications that advocate crime, or are perceived to advocate crime. Her "clear link to real damage" is protecting a women's right to choose and doctor's a right to live.
A freedom of speech argument won't work against these people because you don't have the same definitions of "legal speech." Each one will say "We want to protect free speech" but none will mean the same thing.
To say that Liberatarians are superior just because you happen to agree with them is as naive and false as any other bigotry. To put it another way, you can't argue from your own definitions when your conclusion is based on those definitions. First you must agree about your terms.
Look, if you lived in a society where "abortion" was legal up until 12 years of age (permise of a brilliant Philip K. Dick story), or were suddenly transplanted there, would you feel morally justified in killing the doctors who killed 11-year-olds for a living? Sure you would. It's disgusting - no free society should have people legally employed in killing other human beings (leaving the death penalty out of this - that's another argument entirely). That's how anti-abortionists feel.
If you want to have a credible argument on any issue you must understand your own position, then you must understand your opponent's position.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
The Bible doesn't say that Pi = 3. What the Bible says, in 1 Kings, is that Solomon created a bath measuring 10 cubits in diameter and 30 in circumference.
So of course 30 divided by 10 doesn't equal Pi, but then I bet it wasn't exactly 10 x 30 cubits, either. It's a story, dammit, and the point of the story is not to derive mathematical constants from incidental details. You're making the same mistake that some Christians do - taking the Bible literally - and you're wrong for the same reasons.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Nice list - looks much like mine. You should check out WinKey - it lets you assign any shortcut (including some window controls) to a keyboard combo with the Win95 key. They haven't updated it for years, but it works perfectly on Win2k. It's literally the first thing I install on a new box - I can't live without it. It takes ~2.5MB RAM and, in over 3 years and a few dozen machines, I've not seen it crash once.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
I'm thankful that the NCCUSL folks (who wrote UCITA) are really pretty fucking stupid. The "remote self-help" clause is attracting negative attention like dead meat attracts flies. If they'd had any brains, they would have left it out. That wouldn't have made the law much better, but it would have made opposition more difficult.
Really, it's a prefect issue for the opposition. "Do you want Microsoft to remotely disable Windows?" is a much easier question for Joe TechoPhobe [R-TX] to answer than some convoluted thing about enforcing shrink-wrap licenses.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
The codes, and your use of them, are all stored at MondoUncrackableDatabase.microsoft.com. And sure, you could set your clock back every day, but writing software to detect this would really be pretty trivial - have Windows record how many hours you've been using it. It could encrypt this info and save it to \system32\gondonlyknows.dll.
So after your computer's been up for about 300 hours, but the date never changes, it'll start to get suspicious, and politely shut down.
I don't think they'll be this draconian, but it's certainly technically feasible.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
He said "in balance," not "stays the same all the time." There's a huge difference between the balancing of nature (birth, death and extinction in all its rich variety) and human equilibrium (everything the same all the time - preferably paved with concrete).
C'mon - think about it (no, really - try). You're talking about year-to-year changes which are completely unimportant for the overall ecosystem. Exceptions to this are quick, catastrophic events like huge volcanos. Get a sense of scale, damnit: looking at Earth's ecosystems from a long-term perspective, the rise of homo sapiens is exactly that: a quick, catastrophic event. We're a blip in the history of this planet, but we've made more changes in less time than any other force, with the exception of a couple huge meteors.
This is a cognitive problem common to both "sides" of the environmtal vs. corporate movements: what's at stake. The health and future of Earth's ecosystem is not the issue here. Barring a complete saturation-bombing of the planet with nukes, we're not going to make significant long-term changes to the planet. We are, however, perfectly capable of FUBARing the system so badly that we can't survive.
Humans are pretty fragile, really. All we have going for us is our technology - tool-making. And that's dependent upon natural resources, which are dependent upon environment and climate. How long could we as a species live without sunlight - I mean none at all. A few years, tops? But 1,000 years with no light would be a brief catnap to the planet.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
As other posters have said, doing meatspace retail for such a small market is difficult. Sure, sell old carts, but also old arcade consoles. There are a couple retro arcades here in Portland, OR, and kids love them - they're always packed. I like a good game of Tron every now and then:)
Have the consoles setup to play for a quarter, but have a sale price on them. You'd get some revenue from plays, but there's no shortage of dot-com yuppies with 80's nostalgia, and more money than sense. Hell, start building them yourself.
Get really nutty: sell espresso; have coin-op laundry; free 'net access. Above all, make your place attractive as a hang-out - regulars will do your marketing for you.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Slashdot Mirror
All sarcasm aside, there are some people laughing all the way to the bank here: the Baby Bells, the "last-mile" providers. In Portland it's QWest, and they don't exactly make it easy for little ISPs to sign up DSL customers. Especially since they have their own competing service, and a guaranteed revenue stream from existing customers to prop up any DSL losses.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
I was going to moderate, but we've had too damn much of that lately, and this is an interesting post. :)
I also am very leery of such surveillance, and I think that there is at least one fundamental difference between having (a) one or more sharp-eyed employees and (b) a video monitoring system: data collection and retrieval.
It's not like having one sharp-eyed employee at all, really. It's like having thousands of sharp-eyed employees, all over the world, all with instantaneous access to each other's memories and perceptions. E.g. a network of computers.
The U.S. is now Database Nation - thousands of personal details of each of us are stored in databases over which we have zero control. This is likely to continue unchecked for a very long time. The end result is that when face-recognition technology starts to work well you're trackable. Everywhere you go, every step, is stored in a database somewhere, and available to the highest bidder.
For anyone who just thought, "paranoid," riddle me this, Batman: what would someone 100 or even 50 years ago have thought about our current state of affairs, in which nearly every purchase we make is trackable, and such information is regularly bought and sold? A paranoid fantasy?
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
... that damn green lizard looks more sinister all the time.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Having said that, the case you to which you refer does not illustrate this in the way you believe. The popular meme for this case is as follows: Ditzy woman orders coffee, drives away and spills it on herself and is scalded. She sues and is an instant millionaire. This is completely false. Here are the facts:
- Ms. Liebeck was not driving the car, neither was the car moving at the time of the incident.
- Ms. Liebeck was 79 at the time of the incident, and subsequently spent 8 days in the hospital undergoing surgery.
- Ms. Liebeck had 3rd-degree burns over 6% of her body. Her vagina was completely destroyed and had to be reconstructed by a plastic surgeon. She has permanent scarring over 16% of her body.
- Ms. Liebeck attempted to settle the case out of court for $20,000, but McDonald's refused. McDonald's offered her $800, refusing even to pay her medical expenses.
- McDonald's gave the court internal documents showing that in the previous 10 years, on average 70 people per year claimed to have been burned by McDonald's coffee.
- The court found McDonald's conduct "reckless, callous and willful."
- Finally, Ms. Liebeck never collected anything near $2.9 million (an amount, BTW, equal to 2 days worth of coffee sales at McDonald's worldwide). The amount was reduced to $480,000 by another court, and the parties later settled an undisclosed amount.
In short, I think the court system worked remarkably well. It's unconscionable that a company can serve food products which are capable of severe and immediate damage to human tissue if used as intended. McDonald's had know for more than a decade that their coffee was burning people, but they did nothing about it. They served their coffee at 185 degrees. Their warning labels were useless: "Caution: hot." They should have said, "Caution: contents are hot enough to liquify human skin in less than 3 seconds."Here's a handy Google search on the subject.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Opt-in is a security risk. For those who haven't read the article, here's a beautiful quote: Ironically, this is only a problem because we have such weak privacy laws and infrastructure. It's still pathetically easy to steal someone's identity: a SS#, an addressed envelope and a little social engineering. Of course it's illegal, but since when has that stopped anyone? It needs to be difficult as well. And the less information about me floating around the public datastream, the more difficult it is.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
They've given him one requirement to make the license fully GPL-compatible, and IMHO it's very reasonable. Virginia, folks, is a very scary place to license software. If you haven't read up on UCITA, do so.
Now, CNRI's lawyers might not like that, but their job is to do one thing: cover CNRI's ass. That's well and good, but the GPL has loftier goals: guaranteeing our freedoms.
The bottom line is that the GPL is the most powerful defense that Free software has. Yes, the FSF is inflexible, but they're preparing for the worst-case scenario. We'll thank them later, when the GPL stands up in court.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
The problem with Kozmo's email was not the opt-in beg, it was the following new service announcement. In your case I believe you'd be protected, since your email was 100% administrative. Kozmo took an administrative email and then tacked on some advertising.
From the article, it looks like the Kozmo rep used the same argument you did, but the judge didn't buy it. For good reason, IMHO. Got a problem with my account? Sure - email me. But this was one very questionable "problem" ("Egads! You didn't opt-in! We can't have that, you know.") and one very over-the-line advertisment.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Submitter of the April 2 story: devinsky@eng.buffalo.edu
Submitter of this April 16 story: devinsky@eng.buffalo.edu
He didn't like the answer he got the first time, so he tried again. Jesus, Slashdot, this is pretty bad - posting the same homework assignment from the same kid TWICE?
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Ok, thanks for replying again. I think I see the core of our disagreement. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be saying that humans are a natural part of the ecosystem and literally nothing that we do can be "unnatural" or "against the natural order."
:)
I agree with this, albiet narrowly. In a strict sense, if we saturation-nuked the planet into a ball of smooth glass then yes, it would still be natural. But we'd be fucked. I'm not concerned about the health of Earth, or nature, or the ecosystem. I'm concerned about the health of us, and IMHO we're making some really stupid decisions, and not planning well for the future.
I've also seen that some populations are levelling, but the most recent figure I saw (no link - sorry) was 15 billion. Do we have the technology to keep 15 billion people alive on this planet? No one's even askign that question - we're just mindlessly expanding.
Thanks for the argument, anyway.
legs
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
First, I'll admit that this is pretty OT. And I don't watch TV, so I can't tell you about PBS. ;)
Second, I agree that some species are doomed and should not be saved, and that some individuals within species should not be saved. The world is a brutal place, and many swans die of various causes. This is well and good, and your point about "retarding evolution" is well-taken.
Third, though, it's kind of sad that you apparently missed the point of my post. Since you took the trouble to reply, I'll assume you're at least a little interested and try again.
The point is that human beings have used our gigantic brains to create near-incredible technology to enable us to (a) breed and expand with few limits, and (b) kill off every species that gets in our way rather easily. In a very small span of time, geologically and evolutionarily speaking, we've made unprecedented changes in the ecosystem and environment of our planet (e.g. paving thousands of square miles with concrete or killing 99.x% of buffalo just for the hell of it).
No other species has ever had such power over its environment, and we're using that power blindly, without thought for the future. We're killing other organisms and species at a stunning rate because we can't see their immediate value to us. All I'm saying is that it's in our own best interests to keep the ecosystem of planet Earth as diverse as possible. As a species we have that power, and I think we should use it responsibly.
I'm not saying that we should save the California Condor because it's cute or some Earth-Firster loves the way its feathers shine in the sun. I'm saying we should save it to save ourselves. Simple ecosystems do not survive, and we're simplifying Earth's ecosystem very fast. Perhaps faster than our technology can keep up with the changes.
"Nature is exitncting some swan" you say. Unless you literally mean that "Nature" is a discreet entity like the Jolly Green Giant, this is a category mistake. "Nature" is a word we use to describe the natural processes at work in the world. It has no volition of its own; no goals, plans, will, or acts. Nature really is the sum of its parts, and right now human beings are the most powerful "part." It's not anyone's fault if a single swan dies. But if every species of frog dies because we pollute the environment, then yes, it is our fault.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Here's a fact for you (free of liberal bias, I think): "Simple ecosystems do not survive without external intervention."
Easily demonstrated by putting a fish in a tank. In most cases, the fish will die unless you intervene by feeding it. Or it will suffocate unless you oxygenate the water. Once you feed the fish, it starts to excrete, and pretty soon the tank's full of muck and algae. So you get an algae eater, and it swims around cleaning the tank. And using more oxygen, so you put in a plant or two, but they too need nutrients in the water to survive. The only way for that mini-ecosystem to survive without your intervention is to make it sufficiently complex.
But what happens to your fish tank if one species of fish suddenly develops a forebrain (far-fetched, I know, but bear with me) and wipes out all of its competition for food and oxygen? Pretty soon it's fucked: it can't clean up the tank fast enough to survive, and it's breeding rate is out of control and unbalanced with the resources at hand. If you're lucky, the fish just dies back and the ecosystem is balanced again. But if you're unlucky, the fish has poisoned the ecosystem so that nothing else can survive in it either. Then you've got a smelly empty fish tank, and you have to start over.
Right now humans are like that slightly smarter fish in the tank. We're hell-bent on eliminating all ecological competition so that we can expand more, but in doing so we've put ourselves in a dangerous position. We truly have the tiger by the tail - if our technology (our grip on the tail) fails us we're toast, and billions of people will die.
This might sound alarmist, but it's just biology: simple ecosystems do not survive without external intervention. Right now we're counting on our technology to be that external intervention, but it's not infallible. It's worked for a few thousand years, but that's barely blink of the eye.
Maybe one day technology will be infallible, and humans will be able to synthesize food from silicone and dirty water. Then we won't need any plants or animals; it'll just be us. All 50 billion of us, living in one large metal city under the gray sky, eating synthetic food, watching videos of the species we wiped out so we could expand. That will prove once and for all that those liberal swan-feeders were wrong: we don't need other species to survive. It will be beautiful.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Could this happen to a game? hard to say. TV is very advertising-dependent, and game development seems more like movie-making. But check this out (from the story): Here's EA straight-up planning to use advertising as a prime source of game funding. Will this be reflected in better contracts with content producers? Yeah
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This is the point of my previous post: the more things are automated (and at a national ISP, as much as possible is automated), the fewer people are needed to produce the same service. Also, the remaining people need more and deeper skills to manage the more complicated machines that replaced their ex-co-workers.
The future belongs to those who can tell machines how to manipulate data, or other machines, or people. Pretty soon everyone else will be flipping burgers.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
My post below seems to echo your experience; I'm also in Portland, and used Teleport (*sob*) until recently. Who's your ISP now? Why do you like them? I've signed up with Hevanet, who are still small enough for real people to make customer-satisfaction decisions. They seem good in other respects too, but time will tell...
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
"What has happened in the Internet industry to cause such a decline in not only sales, but in jobs as well?" Consolidation has happened, and it's going to keep happening. DSL and cable are putting mom-and-pop ISPs out of business left and right. For every cable sign-up, one person leave LocalISP Inc. forever. Each DSL signup makes it harder to run a cheap 56k modem-based operation. "...where is this going to end?" When there are a handful of huge national ISPs and a bunch of local, hacker-friendly "boutique" ISPs.
:)
It's ironic that, as promised 50 years and more ago, machines and computers really are labor-saving devices, just not in the way we hoped. Machines don't save you from doing more labor, but they save your company from paying for more labor. As more dataflow gets automated, and as hardware and software get easier to use, less human intervention and ingenuity is required to keep things running (less in aggregate, I mean, not in depth).
The ISP apocolypse is similar to what has happened in nearly every other industry: start off with thousands of little operations which compete fiercly for customers and market share. Eventually only a few will be left. After a while the service stops being differentiated from company to company and they compete on price. Once that happens, the company with the best economics - the most efficient - wins.
Look at Earthlink; their slogan is, "We're 10% better than AOL." For most people that's enough. Sure, people reading this comment probably want shell access on a *nix box for their $20/month, but Joe Sixpack just wants something that's easy to use (i.e. limited in options and functionality so it doesn't confuse him).
Yes, it's very sad that so many good ISPs are going away. My personal favorite, Teleport, was based in Portland, Oregon for years. They were reliable, responsive, and hacker-friendly. The got bigger, got inhaled by OneMain which was promptly inhaled by Earthlink. My service went from "shell access to pine" to "pray that 50% of my mail makes it through" in less than a month. And now I'm stuck with Earthlink's port 25 blocking.
I just signed up with another local ISP. Hopefully they won't be bought too soon.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
- Dick the Republican wants to place censorware in all public libraries. Of course he'd say he's doing this to protect children: that's his "clear link to real damage."
- Jane the Democrat wants laws restricting publications that advocate crime, or are perceived to advocate crime. Her "clear link to real damage" is protecting a women's right to choose and doctor's a right to live.
A freedom of speech argument won't work against these people because you don't have the same definitions of "legal speech." Each one will say "We want to protect free speech" but none will mean the same thing.To say that Liberatarians are superior just because you happen to agree with them is as naive and false as any other bigotry. To put it another way, you can't argue from your own definitions when your conclusion is based on those definitions. First you must agree about your terms.
Look, if you lived in a society where "abortion" was legal up until 12 years of age (permise of a brilliant Philip K. Dick story), or were suddenly transplanted there, would you feel morally justified in killing the doctors who killed 11-year-olds for a living? Sure you would. It's disgusting - no free society should have people legally employed in killing other human beings (leaving the death penalty out of this - that's another argument entirely). That's how anti-abortionists feel.
If you want to have a credible argument on any issue you must understand your own position, then you must understand your opponent's position.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
The Bible doesn't say that Pi = 3. What the Bible says, in 1 Kings, is that Solomon created a bath measuring 10 cubits in diameter and 30 in circumference.
So of course 30 divided by 10 doesn't equal Pi, but then I bet it wasn't exactly 10 x 30 cubits, either. It's a story, dammit, and the point of the story is not to derive mathematical constants from incidental details. You're making the same mistake that some Christians do - taking the Bible literally - and you're wrong for the same reasons.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Nice list - looks much like mine. You should check out WinKey - it lets you assign any shortcut (including some window controls) to a keyboard combo with the Win95 key. They haven't updated it for years, but it works perfectly on Win2k. It's literally the first thing I install on a new box - I can't live without it. It takes ~2.5MB RAM and, in over 3 years and a few dozen machines, I've not seen it crash once.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
I'm thankful that the NCCUSL folks (who wrote UCITA) are really pretty fucking stupid. The "remote self-help" clause is attracting negative attention like dead meat attracts flies. If they'd had any brains, they would have left it out. That wouldn't have made the law much better, but it would have made opposition more difficult.
Really, it's a prefect issue for the opposition. "Do you want Microsoft to remotely disable Windows?" is a much easier question for Joe TechoPhobe [R-TX] to answer than some convoluted thing about enforcing shrink-wrap licenses.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
The codes, and your use of them, are all stored at MondoUncrackableDatabase.microsoft.com. And sure, you could set your clock back every day, but writing software to detect this would really be pretty trivial - have Windows record how many hours you've been using it. It could encrypt this info and save it to \system32\gondonlyknows.dll.
So after your computer's been up for about 300 hours, but the date never changes, it'll start to get suspicious, and politely shut down.
I don't think they'll be this draconian, but it's certainly technically feasible.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Remember: if you're the only person who can maintain your code, it not only means you can't be replaced, it means you can't be promoted.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
He said "in balance," not "stays the same all the time." There's a huge difference between the balancing of nature (birth, death and extinction in all its rich variety) and human equilibrium (everything the same all the time - preferably paved with concrete).
C'mon - think about it (no, really - try). You're talking about year-to-year changes which are completely unimportant for the overall ecosystem. Exceptions to this are quick, catastrophic events like huge volcanos. Get a sense of scale, damnit: looking at Earth's ecosystems from a long-term perspective, the rise of homo sapiens is exactly that: a quick, catastrophic event. We're a blip in the history of this planet, but we've made more changes in less time than any other force, with the exception of a couple huge meteors.
This is a cognitive problem common to both "sides" of the environmtal vs. corporate movements: what's at stake. The health and future of Earth's ecosystem is not the issue here. Barring a complete saturation-bombing of the planet with nukes, we're not going to make significant long-term changes to the planet. We are, however, perfectly capable of FUBARing the system so badly that we can't survive.
Humans are pretty fragile, really. All we have going for us is our technology - tool-making. And that's dependent upon natural resources, which are dependent upon environment and climate. How long could we as a species live without sunlight - I mean none at all. A few years, tops? But 1,000 years with no light would be a brief catnap to the planet.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
As other posters have said, doing meatspace retail for such a small market is difficult. Sure, sell old carts, but also old arcade consoles. There are a couple retro arcades here in Portland, OR, and kids love them - they're always packed. I like a good game of Tron every now and then :)
Have the consoles setup to play for a quarter, but have a sale price on them. You'd get some revenue from plays, but there's no shortage of dot-com yuppies with 80's nostalgia, and more money than sense. Hell, start building them yourself.
Get really nutty: sell espresso; have coin-op laundry; free 'net access. Above all, make your place attractive as a hang-out - regulars will do your marketing for you.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes