IMHO you need to simply realize that there is no such thing as a Capitalist. Capitalism is based on allowing greed as a personal motivator. It's closely tied to the Free Market, which says that informed consumers make informed choices and vote with their Capital.
You can always make more money, and therefore give better vent to your greed, at least in the short and medium terms, by destroying the Free Market. That's been What Business Is All About, especially (most recently, this is an age-old cycle) since the 80's and Microsoft. Attain a monopoly and you can print cash. I suspect most people believe in Capitalism as long as it offers them a chance to move up. Once they're there, thoughts of Capitalism as a principle wane, and they're ready to pull up the ladder.
Karl Marx criticized Capitalism, saying that it would end in a few mega-corporate monopolies controlling everything. He's right, unless external stabilizing forces are present. For instance, antitrust laws, accounting standards, SLAPP laws, and the like. He's also wrong, in that he effectively substituted one Government for several mega-corporations.
Say it again. Capitalism and the Free Market need external maintenance, or else their most successful participants will act to destroy them.
When "Big Brother" and "Pizza Delivery" come together, normally some sort of obligatory reference to Snow Crash is required.
But in this case, there's actually something interesting to be questioned. The subject article comes from the credit history angle, for purposes like trying to locate deadbeats. But take the more sinister view and add "financial profiling." How about checking takeout orders, but instead of looking for pizza look for Halaal food? Of course only sleeper-cells would order take-out Halaal. (for Halaal, think Kosher, only for Muslims)
Re:Americans who travel abroad
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 1
You made the point more eloquently than I did. Thanks.
It goes back to the turn of the last century (around the year 1900) when the Supreme Court granted corporations most of the legal status of individuals.
So now there's a pro and con to this.
First off, somehow corporations haven't managed to get the right to vote, yet. Could you imagine all the mess if fully-owned subsidaries got the vote, and how many of those Disney could spawn when it came time to elect another Bono or Hollings?
Second, what about the death penalty? Certainly if a person sold a product he *knew* caused cancer, kept doing so, and lied to everyone including Congress that it didn't, that person would get the Chair. I've heard that there is a "dissolution of charter" that is the equivalent of a death penalty for a corporation, but has it ever been ordered as a response to wrongdoing? On the side, even if Arthur Anderson goes under, it won't have been a death penalty, it'll have been the sharks circling what the government exposed as weakened prey. (agreed the government did some of the weakening, too)
> But sometimes there isn't a reason, as with random processes like evolution. You didn't say there was a reason for HIV, so I won't belabor the point.
I wasn't attempting to assign or invoke any sort of reason, only wondering about long-term effects. Even though I later mentioned Darwin's Radio I wasn't meaning to wander out on that branch.
> We discovered hand washing and rat control before it really reworked the genome. Condoms and medicine will do the same for HIV.
So maybe HIV will really alter our perception and application of religion and some political systems. Right now it appears that religious conservatism is the greatest obstacle proper education about sex and HIV risks, and promoting the use of condoms. South Africa has the highest proportion of AIDS, and at least part of the reason is/was political. The government set up a situation with residence in one area, and jobs in another. Workers were on a weekly/monthly commute, and AIDS spread like wildfire through the prostitutes.
So maybe religious and political opinions will need to be the biggest changes.
> We're not gonna wait that long for a solution...
I have an ugly feeling that at some point, social-unrest-driven solutions are going to be forced on us, and some of them will be decidedly sub-optimal. Unfortunately, we had time to develop better solutions, and squandered it because of religious/political reasons.
* In the Darwin's Radio sense, perhaps our genes have looked at our actions, and decided, "It's time for us to go."
* In a punctuated equillibrium sense, I've always heard that evolution through natural selection *really* kicks in when you have 90%-type mortalities. Do we know for sure that the death rate from AIDS is 100%? How about the "sufficient to procreate" rate? Left completely unchecked, would AIDS kill off the human race, or would a tiny fraction of us evolve past it, and their descendents inherit the Earth?
First off, FoTR is coming out in November, and I've suggested February.
Second, FoTR is a DVD. At the moment, DVDs appear to offer the kind of value we'd like to see CDs have. Isn't it just a little silly that you can buy the complete movie on DVD for about the same price as the soundtrack? I wouldn't see FoTR coming under my proposed boycott, anyway.
Let's pick a time, at the moment I think February would do the job, and take RIAA sales *and music downloads* as close to zero as we can. Let's get heard. But getting the music downloads to zero is as important as the purchases, if not moreso. We need this to be a political statement, not just an economic one, even though economics are an important part.
Personally, I've been on a low-level RIAA boycott for years. A bit too much like Frank Zappa's "half-hearted war against apathy." The other side is getting my family to buy-in to such a thing. For that reason, I don't believe a Christmas boycott could be made to stick in a broad population. But I believe the month of February could make a loud statement.
We have 5.5 months to get it organized.
Americans who travel abroad
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2
I'd assert that by the time an American goes abroad, there's already likely been quite a bit of "sorting" done. Those party-hearty young Americans are most likely out of the very wealthy, as are the old energetic. They're not average.
...and give these to the world.
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2
Your whole post is great, but these last few words really nail it. The fact is, common Americans have squat to do with "giving our culture to the world." First off, we don't export, big Katzian corporations do. Second off, we don't travel abroad, at least we can't afford to very often, and can't do much personal export.
So maybe I'd be willing to give some of my culture to the world, but there's not much way or opportunity. Instead we have Disney and AOL/Time Warner selling American "culture", as you say. The key distinction is between "give" and "sell".
Actually the new MS EULAs with Media Player, Win2k SP3, and WinXP SP1 do much more than "nothing to the end user"... they grant MS root on your machine.
The new UCITA appears to remove "help-yourself deactivation" for software providers, but how about the "We need root in order to warrant this software," argument?
I read "Ringworld" and "Ringworld Engineers" but wasn't aware that there was a third. So it's not worth the money, but if I see it in the library is it worth the life-span?
So how do I email TibbonZero? I tried clicking your "User571809" and it doesn't arrive at any sort of email address. Never tried this before, don't know how.
But it would be worthy to plan/instigate a 1Q03 boycott.
There seems to be a general gripe about tax support for Amtrak, but nobody complains about the amount of tax support going for roads and airport infrastructure. The playing field is nowhere near level.
For another one, in spite of the fact that many semi trucks say things like, "This truck pays $xxxx a year in taxes," they pay NOTHING compared to the amount of damage they do to the roads. Trucking is terribly subsidized by cars.
My dad was into conspiracy theory, but sometimes he was on the money with it.
Before WWII trolleys were more common in cities. After WWII with the surge in spending on cars, the auto industry came in and bought up all of the trolley infrastructure they could. Now we use cars and buses, and bigger cities have subways. I guess San Francisco still has trolleys, maybe a few others.
IMHO, it's just as valuable if he's found guilty. Remember, there are two ways to change a law. One is through getting it circumscribed or thrown out in court. The other is getting it repealed through public outrage.
I don't want to wish the guy into jail, but perhaps widespread public outrage would be better than mere circumscription of the DMCA. With an acquittal no doubt fair use would be improved a little, but only to the extent of defeating Macrovision for your own non-infringing purposes in your own home. Region coding and Track-0 on DVDs would remain untouched. Security disclosure would remain a crime.
Actually, I fear we have to face an unpleasant fact, here: There's no shortage of musical talent. In fact, there's probably a surplus. There's no shortage of good music, there's a surplus.
Perhaps the RIAA are the ones who are *really* clued in, because their whole business is focused on creating scarcity in music. First channel the airwaves, then channel the promotion. Now you wind up with the appearance of scarcity of musical Stars and their music. There's money in scarcity. They're acting as more than just gatekeepers, they're gatebuilders.
So if you want to guess what the RIAA is going to do, think "scarcity maintenance" and how to preserve it.
It might cut both ways. If there truly were a Free Market in music, I don't know how many musicians could make their living that way. But then again, if there were a Free Market in music, maybe supply and demand between musicians and listeners would balance out in a reasonable place.
I could see telling my family not to get me CDs or videos for Christmas, but I'm not sure I can see forcing my boycott on them, and not getting them any of those.
I can see pushing a post-Christmas boycott across to them, though.
Back on the CD topic, when my son was 4, he was getting into the stereo equipment too much, and I ended up pretty much dropping music. After that, I had neither time nor space to get back into it, and after that I started getting involved in the ??AA copyright issues. But recently I began looking into Indie music. My birthday list this year is going to include Indie CDs. I'm glad to see common usage of "Pink-Floyd-like" to describe music. (Atom Heart Mother rules!)
I've been following this in a mealy-mouthed kind of way, for years. It's closely aligned with my skinflint nature, but isn't that really part of the problem, here? Already CDs and tapes are pretty much gift-only items, and I postpone movies for either second run (cheap-seats theaters) or matinee.
The problem with a boycott is getting the rest of the family to go along with it. I don't quite see being able to say "no CD's, videos, or movies for Christmas," to the whole family.
OTOH, why don't we pick a period of time *after* Christmas and get a month or two boycott arranged. At the same time, we should try and get people to shut down their P2P sharing, as well. We need to make a political statement here, and it will take time to organize it and effectively communicate the vision. Getting the P2P boycott is an essential and difficult part, and buy-in is essential for this.
All DRM-enabled systems must be able to play non-DRM content. ee: The Public Domain must not be excluded!
One more thing, and I need to understand TCPA better to know if this is the case, or not. In content creation and modification tools, there must be general recognition that the tool producer is not the copyright owner. The copyright owner must always be able to: 1 - Remove the copyright/DRM from the data and place it in the Public Domain. 2 - Extract the content from the tool, in order to exercise the Free Market right to select a different tool.
Still one more thing that's missing from any DRM I've ever heard of - Copyright expiration. Even with the perversion of the Constitution known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, the copyright expires. A quick google of "trusted time service" shows that there is indeed a supply that could be used as a trustworthy means of copyright expiration. Lest we be tempted to say, "This media won't last long enough for the copyright to expire," remember the two-digit date fields that gave us Y2K.
Yet one more thing is posterity. We're taking an important slice of history and locking it away. IMHO every piece of DRM media should include a clear-text description of how it may be cracked in the future. Sounds silly, but I mean something like "brute-force factor these 2048-bit keys" that we can't do readily today, but future archaeologists who can read the CD/DVD should.
Does anyone know if Netscape 6+ has retained the popup suppression? Someone else mentioned that IE will never have it, basically because of the Good Old Boy system in business. That may well apply to the Netscape-branded Mozilla, as well. More likely they'll leave the feature in place, but remove the settings from the UI.
There's a very real chance that popup suppression could change Internet advertising methods, if it becomes widespread.
On a similar topic,/. warned about popup ads on TV coming, and I saw one the other night. Forget the channel, but it might have been on The Learning Channel. It was about the same height as the watermark, twice as wide, used the same space, and animated. A small dinosaur jumped on some prey and ate it, to advertise some dinosaur show. It's size similarity to the watermark meant that I wouldn't have thought twice about it, except for having read the/. story.
Aahhhh, but Microsoft didn't scrap a whole bunch of chips, nVidia did. Isn't that a slick way of sticking someone else with the cost of your mistakes? I'd be curious to know the volume procurement agreement between the two, and why the heck nVidia got stuck with excess inventory when the product was working correctly as designed. I would expect that when a customer error like the encryption/key issue forced a re-rev, the customer (in this case, Microsoft) would have been stuck with the inventory as well as the NRE (non-recurring engineering) fees for the rev, itself. This is tempered with the issue of whether nVidia had built to-order or built ahead. The latter nVidia would be stuck with.
I know you were trying to say something else, but take a look at this line and consider:
>2) The thing that scares me about the DMCA is that, in this narrow sense, it is ILLEGAL to bitch about faulty hardware. The problem is that under the >law, HP DOES have a case against SNOsoft. Just because they're not pressing it doesn't mean that the law is fundamentally broken. Note that the >UCITA's shrink-wrap enforcement codicils could be used similarly.
The "Free Market" that so many seem to worship is based on an informed consumer able to make choices, to vote with his/her money. We really stink in the tech sector. First we have Microsoft dedicated to becoming the only choice. Now we have the DMCA removing the "informed" from what choices we have left.
Perhaps it's time to bill the UCITA and portions of the DMCA as being anti-free-market.
Slashdot Mirror
only spoons.
IMHO you need to simply realize that there is no such thing as a Capitalist. Capitalism is based on allowing greed as a personal motivator. It's closely tied to the Free Market, which says that informed consumers make informed choices and vote with their Capital.
You can always make more money, and therefore give better vent to your greed, at least in the short and medium terms, by destroying the Free Market. That's been What Business Is All About, especially (most recently, this is an age-old cycle) since the 80's and Microsoft. Attain a monopoly and you can print cash. I suspect most people believe in Capitalism as long as it offers them a chance to move up. Once they're there, thoughts of Capitalism as a principle wane, and they're ready to pull up the ladder.
Karl Marx criticized Capitalism, saying that it would end in a few mega-corporate monopolies controlling everything. He's right, unless external stabilizing forces are present. For instance, antitrust laws, accounting standards, SLAPP laws, and the like. He's also wrong, in that he effectively substituted one Government for several mega-corporations.
Say it again. Capitalism and the Free Market need external maintenance, or else their most successful participants will act to destroy them.
When "Big Brother" and "Pizza Delivery" come together, normally some sort of obligatory reference to Snow Crash is required.
But in this case, there's actually something interesting to be questioned. The subject article comes from the credit history angle, for purposes like trying to locate deadbeats. But take the more sinister view and add "financial profiling." How about checking takeout orders, but instead of looking for pizza look for Halaal food? Of course only sleeper-cells would order take-out Halaal. (for Halaal, think Kosher, only for Muslims)
You made the point more eloquently than I did. Thanks.
It goes back to the turn of the last century (around the year 1900) when the Supreme Court granted corporations most of the legal status of individuals.
So now there's a pro and con to this.
First off, somehow corporations haven't managed to get the right to vote, yet. Could you imagine all the mess if fully-owned subsidaries got the vote, and how many of those Disney could spawn when it came time to elect another Bono or Hollings?
Second, what about the death penalty? Certainly if a person sold a product he *knew* caused cancer, kept doing so, and lied to everyone including Congress that it didn't, that person would get the Chair. I've heard that there is a "dissolution of charter" that is the equivalent of a death penalty for a corporation, but has it ever been ordered as a response to wrongdoing? On the side, even if Arthur Anderson goes under, it won't have been a death penalty, it'll have been the sharks circling what the government exposed as weakened prey. (agreed the government did some of the weakening, too)
> But sometimes there isn't a reason, as with random processes like evolution. You didn't say there was a reason for HIV, so I won't belabor the point.
I wasn't attempting to assign or invoke any sort of reason, only wondering about long-term effects. Even though I later mentioned Darwin's Radio I wasn't meaning to wander out on that branch.
> We discovered hand washing and rat control before it really reworked the genome. Condoms and medicine will do the same for HIV.
So maybe HIV will really alter our perception and application of religion and some political systems. Right now it appears that religious conservatism is the greatest obstacle proper education about sex and HIV risks, and promoting the use of condoms. South Africa has the highest proportion of AIDS, and at least part of the reason is/was political. The government set up a situation with residence in one area, and jobs in another. Workers were on a weekly/monthly commute, and AIDS spread like wildfire through the prostitutes.
So maybe religious and political opinions will need to be the biggest changes.
> We're not gonna wait that long for a solution...
I have an ugly feeling that at some point, social-unrest-driven solutions are going to be forced on us, and some of them will be decidedly sub-optimal. Unfortunately, we had time to develop better solutions, and squandered it because of religious/political reasons.
So what is HIV doing to human evolution?
* In the Darwin's Radio sense, perhaps our genes have looked at our actions, and decided, "It's time for us to go."
* In a punctuated equillibrium sense, I've always heard that evolution through natural selection *really* kicks in when you have 90%-type mortalities. Do we know for sure that the death rate from AIDS is 100%? How about the "sufficient to procreate" rate? Left completely unchecked, would AIDS kill off the human race, or would a tiny fraction of us evolve past it, and their descendents inherit the Earth?
First off, FoTR is coming out in November, and I've suggested February.
Second, FoTR is a DVD. At the moment, DVDs appear to offer the kind of value we'd like to see CDs have. Isn't it just a little silly that you can buy the complete movie on DVD for about the same price as the soundtrack? I wouldn't see FoTR coming under my proposed boycott, anyway.
Let's pick a time, at the moment I think February would do the job, and take RIAA sales *and music downloads* as close to zero as we can. Let's get heard. But getting the music downloads to zero is as important as the purchases, if not moreso. We need this to be a political statement, not just an economic one, even though economics are an important part.
Personally, I've been on a low-level RIAA boycott for years. A bit too much like Frank Zappa's "half-hearted war against apathy." The other side is getting my family to buy-in to such a thing. For that reason, I don't believe a Christmas boycott could be made to stick in a broad population. But I believe the month of February could make a loud statement.
We have 5.5 months to get it organized.
I'd assert that by the time an American goes abroad, there's already likely been quite a bit of "sorting" done. Those party-hearty young Americans are most likely out of the very wealthy, as are the old energetic. They're not average.
Your whole post is great, but these last few words really nail it. The fact is, common Americans have squat to do with "giving our culture to the world." First off, we don't export, big Katzian corporations do. Second off, we don't travel abroad, at least we can't afford to very often, and can't do much personal export.
So maybe I'd be willing to give some of my culture to the world, but there's not much way or opportunity. Instead we have Disney and AOL/Time Warner selling American "culture", as you say. The key distinction is between "give" and "sell".
Actually the new MS EULAs with Media Player, Win2k SP3, and WinXP SP1 do much more than "nothing to the end user"... they grant MS root on your machine.
The new UCITA appears to remove "help-yourself deactivation" for software providers, but how about the "We need root in order to warrant this software," argument?
Not to mention in Steely Dan's "Katy Lied", either. Of course there he goes by his more formal "Doctor" title.
I read "Ringworld" and "Ringworld Engineers" but wasn't aware that there was a third. So it's not worth the money, but if I see it in the library is it worth the life-span?
So how do I email TibbonZero? I tried clicking your "User571809" and it doesn't arrive at any sort of email address. Never tried this before, don't know how.
But it would be worthy to plan/instigate a 1Q03 boycott.
There seems to be a general gripe about tax support for Amtrak, but nobody complains about the amount of tax support going for roads and airport infrastructure. The playing field is nowhere near level.
For another one, in spite of the fact that many semi trucks say things like, "This truck pays $xxxx a year in taxes," they pay NOTHING compared to the amount of damage they do to the roads. Trucking is terribly subsidized by cars.
My dad was into conspiracy theory, but sometimes he was on the money with it.
Before WWII trolleys were more common in cities. After WWII with the surge in spending on cars, the auto industry came in and bought up all of the trolley infrastructure they could. Now we use cars and buses, and bigger cities have subways. I guess San Francisco still has trolleys, maybe a few others.
IMHO, it's just as valuable if he's found guilty. Remember, there are two ways to change a law. One is through getting it circumscribed or thrown out in court. The other is getting it repealed through public outrage.
I don't want to wish the guy into jail, but perhaps widespread public outrage would be better than mere circumscription of the DMCA. With an acquittal no doubt fair use would be improved a little, but only to the extent of defeating Macrovision for your own non-infringing purposes in your own home. Region coding and Track-0 on DVDs would remain untouched. Security disclosure would remain a crime.
Actually, I fear we have to face an unpleasant fact, here: There's no shortage of musical talent. In fact, there's probably a surplus. There's no shortage of good music, there's a surplus.
Perhaps the RIAA are the ones who are *really* clued in, because their whole business is focused on creating scarcity in music. First channel the airwaves, then channel the promotion. Now you wind up with the appearance of scarcity of musical Stars and their music. There's money in scarcity. They're acting as more than just gatekeepers, they're gatebuilders.
So if you want to guess what the RIAA is going to do, think "scarcity maintenance" and how to preserve it.
It might cut both ways. If there truly were a Free Market in music, I don't know how many musicians could make their living that way. But then again, if there were a Free Market in music, maybe supply and demand between musicians and listeners would balance out in a reasonable place.
I could see telling my family not to get me CDs or videos for Christmas, but I'm not sure I can see forcing my boycott on them, and not getting them any of those.
I can see pushing a post-Christmas boycott across to them, though.
Back on the CD topic, when my son was 4, he was getting into the stereo equipment too much, and I ended up pretty much dropping music. After that, I had neither time nor space to get back into it, and after that I started getting involved in the ??AA copyright issues. But recently I began looking into Indie music. My birthday list this year is going to include Indie CDs. I'm glad to see common usage of "Pink-Floyd-like" to describe music. (Atom Heart Mother rules!)
I've been following this in a mealy-mouthed kind of way, for years. It's closely aligned with my skinflint nature, but isn't that really part of the problem, here? Already CDs and tapes are pretty much gift-only items, and I postpone movies for either second run (cheap-seats theaters) or matinee.
The problem with a boycott is getting the rest of the family to go along with it. I don't quite see being able to say "no CD's, videos, or movies for Christmas," to the whole family.
OTOH, why don't we pick a period of time *after* Christmas and get a month or two boycott arranged. At the same time, we should try and get people to shut down their P2P sharing, as well. We need to make a political statement here, and it will take time to organize it and effectively communicate the vision. Getting the P2P boycott is an essential and difficult part, and buy-in is essential for this.
All DRM-enabled systems must be able to play non-DRM content. ee: The Public Domain must not be excluded!
One more thing, and I need to understand TCPA better to know if this is the case, or not. In content creation and modification tools, there must be general recognition that the tool producer is not the copyright owner. The copyright owner must always be able to:
1 - Remove the copyright/DRM from the data and place it in the Public Domain.
2 - Extract the content from the tool, in order to exercise the Free Market right to select a different tool.
Still one more thing that's missing from any DRM I've ever heard of - Copyright expiration. Even with the perversion of the Constitution known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, the copyright expires. A quick google of "trusted time service" shows that there is indeed a supply that could be used as a trustworthy means of copyright expiration. Lest we be tempted to say, "This media won't last long enough for the copyright to expire," remember the two-digit date fields that gave us Y2K.
Yet one more thing is posterity. We're taking an important slice of history and locking it away. IMHO every piece of DRM media should include a clear-text description of how it may be cracked in the future. Sounds silly, but I mean something like "brute-force factor these 2048-bit keys" that we can't do readily today, but future archaeologists who can read the CD/DVD should.
Does anyone know if Netscape 6+ has retained the popup suppression? Someone else mentioned that IE will never have it, basically because of the Good Old Boy system in business. That may well apply to the Netscape-branded Mozilla, as well. More likely they'll leave the feature in place, but remove the settings from the UI.
/. warned about popup ads on TV coming, and I saw one the other night. Forget the channel, but it might have been on The Learning Channel. It was about the same height as the watermark, twice as wide, used the same space, and animated. A small dinosaur jumped on some prey and ate it, to advertise some dinosaur show. It's size similarity to the watermark meant that I wouldn't have thought twice about it, except for having read the /. story.
There's a very real chance that popup suppression could change Internet advertising methods, if it becomes widespread.
On a similar topic,
Aahhhh, but Microsoft didn't scrap a whole bunch of chips, nVidia did. Isn't that a slick way of sticking someone else with the cost of your mistakes? I'd be curious to know the volume procurement agreement between the two, and why the heck nVidia got stuck with excess inventory when the product was working correctly as designed. I would expect that when a customer error like the encryption/key issue forced a re-rev, the customer (in this case, Microsoft) would have been stuck with the inventory as well as the NRE (non-recurring engineering) fees for the rev, itself. This is tempered with the issue of whether nVidia had built to-order or built ahead. The latter nVidia would be stuck with.
I know you were trying to say something else, but take a look at this line and consider:
>2) The thing that scares me about the DMCA is that, in this narrow sense, it is ILLEGAL to bitch about faulty hardware. The problem is that under the
>law, HP DOES have a case against SNOsoft. Just because they're not pressing it doesn't mean that the law is fundamentally broken. Note that the
>UCITA's shrink-wrap enforcement codicils could be used similarly.
The "Free Market" that so many seem to worship is based on an informed consumer able to make choices, to vote with his/her money. We really stink in the tech sector. First we have Microsoft dedicated to becoming the only choice. Now we have the DMCA removing the "informed" from what choices we have left.
Perhaps it's time to bill the UCITA and portions of the DMCA as being anti-free-market.