4. What happens when someone cracks the "copy protection" in the WMA format? Is MS gonna change it without regard to compatibility?
All digital audio security right now is inherantly broken - you can break any of them by writing a mock sound card driver that dumps to disk, then play to that sound card.
The hardware restrictions. Watch out for the hardware restrictions...
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
From the constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It's clear that the document you are using for your argument is the Declaration of Independence, because it refers to Creator-granted inalienable rights. It doesn't, however, found anything. It breaks away from the British Empire.
The preamble from the constution uses very different language. God doesn't even get a mention. It's stated pretty clearly that the document is created for the benefit of the People of the United States, which even at the time included a healthy amount of Non-Christians. Considering that God doesn't seem to have a SSN, a mailing address, a residence, or any paid tax returns, we can conclude that God is not a US Citizen. Thus, the constitution is not written for him. I'm sure that they'd be willing to throw in an "equal rights for deities" clause, but since we can't even figure out where God lives, we have no idea which Senator represents him, and thus no place to start.
As for patriotism: here's a clue. You're not one. Your blind attack on the larger half of US Citizens (liberals and/or non-cristians) indicates that your actions have a lot more to do with the destruction rather than the preservation of the US. Jesus Christ was a nice guy. You are a dick. Thank you for playing.
I thought you might have, but of course we have a world of readers following our conversation.
I'll throw in at this point something that you might already know - Mozilla is built around XPCOM, which aims to bring most of the benefits of MSCOM to the open source world. I don't know how much they get into inter-machine communication, though.
I know little about the serverserver communications for NNTP. I know enough, though, to know that reasonably successful group mirroring across the world is quite an accomplishment. I think you miss my point - the "distributed, replicated, client-server collaberation system" part should - and is now becoming - seperate from the "news".
All of these systems are quite admirable, because they do everything themselves. They had to - nobody else did it then. You wouldn't design it that way now, though.
1.2 million dollars will be pumped into the development of Linux.
That's 1.2 million dollars of government effort. It gets you one project manager who doesn't understand the project, three programmers who are there because they can do no work and not get fired, two programmers who are there bankrolling thier education to the government, one programmer who died at his desk in '79 and nobody's noticed yet, 20 dot matrix printers someone in procurement bought because they're an idiot, five toilet seats, and a ball-peen hammer.
While that might be the microsoft sales plot, on the technological level there's a lot more to it than that. MSNet (.net is the stupidest name in ages) is an extension of the principles of COM, which is a reasonably powerful extensible architecture. The ability to access objects anywhere is a very revolutionary (and not microsoft exclusive) concept.
Look at a newsbrowser, for instance. It contacts the server. The server gets the article out of memory, and translates it from however it's stored to a transmittable form. From there it's sent along the wire and converted into a different form, and from there it pops up on your screen. Tin, and most other newsreaders, are reasonably huge. The servers are pretty massive, too. They're both a tangle of code around something, that from a modern perspective, smells a lot like a hack. Often you have to process a huge stack of data before you even see an article. "Loading Headers..."
Were you designing usenet today, using distriubted object technology, the news indexes, lists, and articles, would all be objects on the server that you call. NNTP would be unnecessary - the communication is taken care of by whatever they're calling RPC today - so the communication stuff gets trimmed out of each end. The client becomes thin, so you don't have to worry about state on the client end. It goes from technology that people have spent years trying to get right (because they have to solve a half a dozen big problesm other than news storage and indexing), to something a couple guys can hack up in a month in thier free time because they only have to worry about the news. Not protocols, timeouts, latency, client state, etc... but news. COM/CORBA/MSNet handles all of the communication.
Am I looking forward to a lease, no-configuration-control, subscriber based software model? Not on your life. Does that mean that MSNet and the technology therin is a smelly pile of elephant dung? No. COM, CORBA, JavaBeans, MSNet, whatever - pick the product brand of your choice - is some incredible stuff. It forfills the promise that RPC introduced.
Why do we all seem to have a soft spot in our hearts for hacking? Was it because of that thrill we got when we guessed mr. hibbard the science teacher's password so we could up our print-out quotas and print a bunch of ascii porn? Maybe so. I reckon most everyone out there has at least something like that in their background. Is this what makes hacking so fastenating to us all? It's really glorified in our community.
It's glorified because of it's majesty. One does true hacking when someone sees a problem and a solution at the same time, and the solution is so beautiful that you have to apply it. The solution is alive in your head and you have to bring it to the real world.
Several times he dismisses Linux as not being particularly revolutionary. But it is revolutionary in several ways. It runs on damn near every hardware platform ever. There's no other OS that does that. I can take a program on my IA32 archetecture, move it right on up to an S390 (or down to IBM's Linux watch) and be pretty sure that compiling it there will work pretty much the same way. I reiterate, no other OS does that.
Linux doesn't do that either. Linux is a kernel, a kernel that a great many people have made to work on a great many machines. Linux uses a lot of things that were around a long time before Linux was.
If you have Linux running on your machine, then you can download and compile things. So? You can do that with most any kernel that you've gotten GCC to run on top of. The fact that it's the *same* kernel deserves a round of applause. But where's the revolution? You promised a revolution, dammit.
The cooperation Linux encourages in developers is truly revolutionary. While BSD was the first "free" OS, for some reason it didn't seem to encourage the level of cooperation that Linux does. I don't know why. Maybe it's the GPL, maybe it's the timing, maybe it's the marketing but the Linux community has managed to grow while BSD has remained out on the fringe. The fact that all these developers are coming together from all over the world is pretty revolutionary.
Once upon a time, if you ran Unix home, you probably ran BSD. They had pretty much all of the home Unix marketplace. Now Linux has almost all of the home marketplace for Unix. The home marketplace for Unix is larger now (because more people need router boxes, etcetera), but this is a massive victory for Linux only if you see the world through penguin-tinted glasses. You haven't supplaned anybody but BSD, and BSD is far from gone. It moves from the home market to the buisness market because people know how to use it. Interesting, noteworthy, predictable. Still no revolution. Same thing happened with BSD.
The GPL in and of itself is pretty revolutionary too. Some people don't like it, but I do. If you want to profit off my work, I want you to give something back to the community. I tend to be more inclined to muck about with the lgpl which strikes me as being more evenly balanced. At a time when Corporate America wants to tie your computer up in proprietary standards that keep you from using your computer in any way without their express permission, the GPL will become more and more important in encouraging hobbiests to tinker with hardware and code.
Pyramid marketing in code form. No wonder it's taking the net by storm.
I'm pretty sure the "Revoltionary" vision Microsoft is trying to force down our throats is one where your only choice is that you lease a propetary machine, run Microsoft's proprietary OS and pay for each application by the minute. I really don't want to live in that world.
Nice persecution complex. "They" wanted to crush tapes, and failed. VCRs, and failed. Ectetera. Do you see the US government collapsing into feudalism any time soon, as well?
This gets a five. *This* gets a five. They're giving moderation points to anybody who stumbles off the street with a forty these days, I see.
Hey, nice twist at the end there. You had me going.
Seriously. It's pretty well established, by now, that news media has to have something to draw the audience in. News shows these days pick violence, charming newscasters, violence, often watched time slots, violence, crushing the competitors, violence, and violence.
The stories, themselves, have to have draw. Violence, human interest, drugs, relevancy (well, no, this isn't enough alone, really), violence, crime, violence, violence, or violence.
Or you could throw all of that away and use humor as a draw. Think about that. Anything can be turned into humor by a skilled enough writer. You can cover any issue, if you can make it funny, anything. You can report on anything. You're not restricted to the flash-in-the-pan "I-shot-my-whole-family" kind of trash that is the only thing that gets ratings these days. People don't change the channel while they are laughing, so if you're clever, you might actually slip something informative and educational in there.
You've got to get the attention of the viewer, in these days where the average american has access to 52.3 channels. Humor just may be the most flexible way to do it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's cool.:)
Damn. I thought you were trying to say it was useless. As cool as it might be, if it's completely disconnected from the outside world then it's useless to anyone who isn't willing to use it only for the sake of itself.
Do they even have a million hits for a million nodes? You'd think that if they had a million neat, interesting, informative, readworthy articles then they'd be be getting hundreds of millions, no, billions, of hits. What? They don't? Draw your own conclusion from that.
Someone needs to launch Everything3, where you get one article. Maybe people would make it a good article worth reading, then, instead of trying to homestead like mad.
The philosophical debate about moral responsibility regarding coherced actions is a reasonably long one.
My view on the matter:
If I'm in an evil army, and I have a gun, and my superior says, while pointing a gun at me, "Kill those villagers", then, while I am not the primary motive force behind the death of the villagers, I still hold some responsibility.
Not too much - my "commander" could just as easily killed them himself. He wants me to, probably so I'll crack and follow all of his orders in the future. I'd like to think that in this situation I'd die trying to kill the commander, but of course that's just a fantasy, an ideal, a hope. I might kill the villagers, or myself, or lock up completely and not do anything.
The important thing is, where did this evil army come from? Such a thing can not be built without many, many people knuckling in and obeying a malign collective. When the army exists, and I am conscriped into it, I have no choice except to obey or die. When the army is just beginning, when things are at thier beginning, the choice is to obey, or not to obey. The primary moral failings here happened long before I was placed in this situation, when people said things like, "Yes, Hitler's a bastard, but he's doing great things for the economy, so I'll back him.", and set the stage for me being in front of a bunch of villagers with a gun much later.
To prevent such things from happening, the "He told me to" defense must not be considered morally valid.
I wonder if you could make a specialized machine, with a bunch of FPGAs, solely for the purpose of AI for massive scale online games. Most MMORPGs have famously stupid AI because making smart creature AI takes both lots of cycles and very good code. Could a specialized box designed for these computations be a salable device?
Lionhead has a shockwave/flash/whatever page that is reasonably astounding. I knew you could do all the stuff that they do, but I never considered putting it together like that. The scrolling landscape is particularly neat.
If the defendant can reasonably claim that the film he watched incited him to commit the act, and that hence he is not responsible, then he can reasonably claim to be innocent.
Argh, the crap we put up with in our society.
People should be held responsible for the things that they do. Nobody should be able to claim "but they said to do it!" You did it - noone else, and you didn't even stop to think why other people wern't doing it. Maybe people would be a little more eager to unhook themselves from thier propaganda nipple if they could be made to realize that they can never disavow responsibility for thier own actions. They may do it legally, they may lie, they may hide, but they will have to live with what they did for the rest of thier lives.
Nobody considers giving the Nazis any slack, despite the fact that most of them "just followed orders". They don't deserve any. The fool who follows is just as guilty as the fool who leads. You'd think that this and other authoritiarian cults throughout history would teach us that the "he dared me to" legal/social defense simply cannot be tolerated.
Tocqueville warned us a hundred and fifty years ago that individualism was the only virtue that could save democracy. We must rebut the idea that membership in a hivemind somehow clears your sins away, before it goes too far.
Why would bringing in new streaming listeners increase the broadcast station listeners? Most of them probably arn't within the broadcast range. Even if it did, is the increase in advertising revenue going to justify the bandwidth expense?
Streaming is only cheap to offer for free while streaming is a fringe market. If the whole of the baseball fanbase was to switch over to streaming they'd bankrupt the radio stations with bandwidth bills. Bringing in new fans is great and all but it doesn't pay the bills.
Don't like it, don't buy it. That simple. Or are you implying that this service is evil and we should crush it under a torrent of flamebait posts, which won't weigh on real networks any heavier than a slightly uncomfortable hat?
If something's broadcasted over the net, someone has to pay for it, and it's surely not going to be them. They are trying to make money offering streaming, a unpopular thing at slashdot but a necessary thing none the less.
All internet buisnesses that arn't B2B fail. ISPs steadily lose memberships because of the lack of new content for customers. People with short attention spans depart the net to watch Friends reruns.
Flash-in-the-pan products die. Quick buck makers stop trying to conjure customer bases for stupid products and go back to making infomercials. Commercial releases decline. Software gets written because people ask for and use it.
Wait.
This is the *worst* thing? This sounds like a return to the uberelite early days of the net, before usenet was invaded by AOL, before spam, before the browser wars, before the invasion of incompatible protocols. Is there a lever that I can pull to cause this to happen? Sure, I'd be out of a job, but Camelot would be reborn. Small tradeoff, perhaps.
Interesting point. I don't know. Then again, there were probably locally elected officials even while a part of the British empire. Someone's got to lie to the public, and why sail across the ocean when you can hire a local?
Slashdot Mirror
4. What happens when someone cracks the "copy protection" in the WMA format? Is MS gonna change it without regard to compatibility?
All digital audio security right now is inherantly broken - you can break any of them by writing a mock sound card driver that dumps to disk, then play to that sound card.
The hardware restrictions. Watch out for the hardware restrictions...
From the Declaration of Independance:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
From the constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It's clear that the document you are using for your argument is the Declaration of Independence, because it refers to Creator-granted inalienable rights. It doesn't, however, found anything. It breaks away from the British Empire.
The preamble from the constution uses very different language. God doesn't even get a mention. It's stated pretty clearly that the document is created for the benefit of the People of the United States, which even at the time included a healthy amount of Non-Christians. Considering that God doesn't seem to have a SSN, a mailing address, a residence, or any paid tax returns, we can conclude that God is not a US Citizen. Thus, the constitution is not written for him. I'm sure that they'd be willing to throw in an "equal rights for deities" clause, but since we can't even figure out where God lives, we have no idea which Senator represents him, and thus no place to start.
As for patriotism: here's a clue. You're not one. Your blind attack on the larger half of US Citizens (liberals and/or non-cristians) indicates that your actions have a lot more to do with the destruction rather than the preservation of the US. Jesus Christ was a nice guy. You are a dick. Thank you for playing.
I feel for the troll. Someone smack my hand.
I thought you might have, but of course we have a world of readers following our conversation.
I'll throw in at this point something that you might already know - Mozilla is built around XPCOM, which aims to bring most of the benefits of MSCOM to the open source world. I don't know how much they get into inter-machine communication, though.
I know little about the serverserver communications for NNTP. I know enough, though, to know that reasonably successful group mirroring across the world is quite an accomplishment. I think you miss my point - the "distributed, replicated, client-server collaberation system" part should - and is now becoming - seperate from the "news".
All of these systems are quite admirable, because they do everything themselves. They had to - nobody else did it then. You wouldn't design it that way now, though.
1.2 million dollars will be pumped into the development of Linux.
That's 1.2 million dollars of government effort. It gets you one project manager who doesn't understand the project, three programmers who are there because they can do no work and not get fired, two programmers who are there bankrolling thier education to the government, one programmer who died at his desk in '79 and nobody's noticed yet, 20 dot matrix printers someone in procurement bought because they're an idiot, five toilet seats, and a ball-peen hammer.
While that might be the microsoft sales plot, on the technological level there's a lot more to it than that. MSNet (.net is the stupidest name in ages) is an extension of the principles of COM, which is a reasonably powerful extensible architecture. The ability to access objects anywhere is a very revolutionary (and not microsoft exclusive) concept.
Look at a newsbrowser, for instance. It contacts the server. The server gets the article out of memory, and translates it from however it's stored to a transmittable form. From there it's sent along the wire and converted into a different form, and from there it pops up on your screen. Tin, and most other newsreaders, are reasonably huge. The servers are pretty massive, too. They're both a tangle of code around something, that from a modern perspective, smells a lot like a hack. Often you have to process a huge stack of data before you even see an article. "Loading Headers..."
Were you designing usenet today, using distriubted object technology, the news indexes, lists, and articles, would all be objects on the server that you call. NNTP would be unnecessary - the communication is taken care of by whatever they're calling RPC today - so the communication stuff gets trimmed out of each end. The client becomes thin, so you don't have to worry about state on the client end. It goes from technology that people have spent years trying to get right (because they have to solve a half a dozen big problesm other than news storage and indexing), to something a couple guys can hack up in a month in thier free time because they only have to worry about the news. Not protocols, timeouts, latency, client state, etc... but news. COM/CORBA/MSNet handles all of the communication.
Am I looking forward to a lease, no-configuration-control, subscriber based software model? Not on your life. Does that mean that MSNet and the technology therin is a smelly pile of elephant dung? No. COM, CORBA, JavaBeans, MSNet, whatever - pick the product brand of your choice - is some incredible stuff. It forfills the promise that RPC introduced.
Why do we all seem to have a soft spot in our hearts for hacking? Was it because of that thrill we got when we guessed mr. hibbard the science teacher's password so we could up our print-out quotas and print a bunch of ascii porn? Maybe so. I reckon most everyone out there has at least something like that in their background. Is this what makes hacking so fastenating to us all? It's really glorified in our community.
It's glorified because of it's majesty. One does true hacking when someone sees a problem and a solution at the same time, and the solution is so beautiful that you have to apply it. The solution is alive in your head and you have to bring it to the real world.
Maybe the negative energy that forces space apart is a mechanism that makes room for big bangs.
Hey, propaganda, modded up. Whee. Refutations:
Several times he dismisses Linux as not being particularly revolutionary. But it is revolutionary in several ways. It runs on damn near every hardware platform ever. There's no other OS that does that. I can take a program on my IA32 archetecture, move it right on up to an S390 (or down to IBM's Linux watch) and be pretty sure that compiling it there will work pretty much the same way. I reiterate, no other OS does that.
Linux doesn't do that either. Linux is a kernel, a kernel that a great many people have made to work on a great many machines. Linux uses a lot of things that were around a long time before Linux was.
If you have Linux running on your machine, then you can download and compile things. So? You can do that with most any kernel that you've gotten GCC to run on top of. The fact that it's the *same* kernel deserves a round of applause. But where's the revolution? You promised a revolution, dammit.
The cooperation Linux encourages in developers is truly revolutionary. While BSD was the first "free" OS, for some reason it didn't seem to encourage the level of cooperation that Linux does. I don't know why. Maybe it's the GPL, maybe it's the timing, maybe it's the marketing but the Linux community has managed to grow while BSD has remained out on the fringe. The fact that all these developers are coming together from all over the world is pretty revolutionary.
Once upon a time, if you ran Unix home, you probably ran BSD. They had pretty much all of the home Unix marketplace. Now Linux has almost all of the home marketplace for Unix. The home marketplace for Unix is larger now (because more people need router boxes, etcetera), but this is a massive victory for Linux only if you see the world through penguin-tinted glasses. You haven't supplaned anybody but BSD, and BSD is far from gone. It moves from the home market to the buisness market because people know how to use it. Interesting, noteworthy, predictable. Still no revolution. Same thing happened with BSD.
The GPL in and of itself is pretty revolutionary too. Some people don't like it, but I do. If you want to profit off my work, I want you to give something back to the community. I tend to be more inclined to muck about with the lgpl which strikes me as being more evenly balanced. At a time when Corporate America wants to tie your computer up in proprietary standards that keep you from using your computer in any way without their express permission, the GPL will become more and more important in encouraging hobbiests to tinker with hardware and code.
Pyramid marketing in code form. No wonder it's taking the net by storm.
I'm pretty sure the "Revoltionary" vision Microsoft is trying to force down our throats is one where your only choice is that you lease a propetary machine, run Microsoft's proprietary OS and pay for each application by the minute. I really don't want to live in that world.
Nice persecution complex. "They" wanted to crush tapes, and failed. VCRs, and failed. Ectetera. Do you see the US government collapsing into feudalism any time soon, as well?
This gets a five. *This* gets a five. They're giving moderation points to anybody who stumbles off the street with a forty these days, I see.
Ok, if anyone still reads back threads: tell me why an outsider should visit Everything2.
Hey, nice twist at the end there. You had me going.
Seriously. It's pretty well established, by now, that news media has to have something to draw the audience in. News shows these days pick violence, charming newscasters, violence, often watched time slots, violence, crushing the competitors, violence, and violence.
The stories, themselves, have to have draw. Violence, human interest, drugs, relevancy (well, no, this isn't enough alone, really), violence, crime, violence, violence, or violence.
Or you could throw all of that away and use humor as a draw. Think about that. Anything can be turned into humor by a skilled enough writer. You can cover any issue, if you can make it funny, anything. You can report on anything. You're not restricted to the flash-in-the-pan "I-shot-my-whole-family" kind of trash that is the only thing that gets ratings these days. People don't change the channel while they are laughing, so if you're clever, you might actually slip something informative and educational in there. You've got to get the attention of the viewer, in these days where the average american has access to 52.3 channels. Humor just may be the most flexible way to do it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's cool. :)
Damn. I thought you were trying to say it was useless. As cool as it might be, if it's completely disconnected from the outside world then it's useless to anyone who isn't willing to use it only for the sake of itself.
Do they even have a million hits for a million nodes? You'd think that if they had a million neat, interesting, informative, readworthy articles then they'd be be getting hundreds of millions, no, billions, of hits. What? They don't? Draw your own conclusion from that.
Someone needs to launch Everything3, where you get one article. Maybe people would make it a good article worth reading, then, instead of trying to homestead like mad.
It's a pretty box, too, simple asthetics. Black and white, opens front and back. I have it in my hands, my hot little hands.
Watch out, btw. If you buy it, open it and check the cd before you leave the store. Some of them shipped with no CD key.
The philosophical debate about moral responsibility regarding coherced actions is a reasonably long one.
My view on the matter:
If I'm in an evil army, and I have a gun, and my superior says, while pointing a gun at me, "Kill those villagers", then, while I am not the primary motive force behind the death of the villagers, I still hold some responsibility.
Not too much - my "commander" could just as easily killed them himself. He wants me to, probably so I'll crack and follow all of his orders in the future. I'd like to think that in this situation I'd die trying to kill the commander, but of course that's just a fantasy, an ideal, a hope. I might kill the villagers, or myself, or lock up completely and not do anything.
The important thing is, where did this evil army come from? Such a thing can not be built without many, many people knuckling in and obeying a malign collective. When the army exists, and I am conscriped into it, I have no choice except to obey or die. When the army is just beginning, when things are at thier beginning, the choice is to obey, or not to obey. The primary moral failings here happened long before I was placed in this situation, when people said things like, "Yes, Hitler's a bastard, but he's doing great things for the economy, so I'll back him.", and set the stage for me being in front of a bunch of villagers with a gun much later.
To prevent such things from happening, the "He told me to" defense must not be considered morally valid.
I wonder if you could make a specialized machine, with a bunch of FPGAs, solely for the purpose of AI for massive scale online games. Most MMORPGs have famously stupid AI because making smart creature AI takes both lots of cycles and very good code. Could a specialized box designed for these computations be a salable device?
"Make me a cup of coffee."
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."
Lionhead has a shockwave/flash/whatever page that is reasonably astounding. I knew you could do all the stuff that they do, but I never considered putting it together like that. The scrolling landscape is particularly neat.
The link:
www.lionhead.com
Go to the shocked version, of course.
If the defendant can reasonably claim that the film he watched incited him to commit the act, and that hence he is not responsible, then he can reasonably claim to be innocent.
Argh, the crap we put up with in our society.
People should be held responsible for the things that they do. Nobody should be able to claim "but they said to do it!" You did it - noone else, and you didn't even stop to think why other people wern't doing it. Maybe people would be a little more eager to unhook themselves from thier propaganda nipple if they could be made to realize that they can never disavow responsibility for thier own actions. They may do it legally, they may lie, they may hide, but they will have to live with what they did for the rest of thier lives.
Nobody considers giving the Nazis any slack, despite the fact that most of them "just followed orders". They don't deserve any. The fool who follows is just as guilty as the fool who leads. You'd think that this and other authoritiarian cults throughout history would teach us that the "he dared me to" legal/social defense simply cannot be tolerated.
Tocqueville warned us a hundred and fifty years ago that individualism was the only virtue that could save democracy. We must rebut the idea that membership in a hivemind somehow clears your sins away, before it goes too far.
Why would bringing in new streaming listeners increase the broadcast station listeners? Most of them probably arn't within the broadcast range. Even if it did, is the increase in advertising revenue going to justify the bandwidth expense?
Streaming is only cheap to offer for free while streaming is a fringe market. If the whole of the baseball fanbase was to switch over to streaming they'd bankrupt the radio stations with bandwidth bills. Bringing in new fans is great and all but it doesn't pay the bills.
They hid it in "Program Files"? Bastards.
Don't like it, don't buy it. That simple. Or are you implying that this service is evil and we should crush it under a torrent of flamebait posts, which won't weigh on real networks any heavier than a slightly uncomfortable hat?
If something's broadcasted over the net, someone has to pay for it, and it's surely not going to be them. They are trying to make money offering streaming, a unpopular thing at slashdot but a necessary thing none the less.
now software designers can release even sloppier, slower, uglier code and still have it work fast enough!
All internet buisnesses that arn't B2B fail. ISPs steadily lose memberships because of the lack of new content for customers. People with short attention spans depart the net to watch Friends reruns.
Flash-in-the-pan products die. Quick buck makers stop trying to conjure customer bases for stupid products and go back to making infomercials. Commercial releases decline. Software gets written because people ask for and use it.
Wait.
This is the *worst* thing? This sounds like a return to the uberelite early days of the net, before usenet was invaded by AOL, before spam, before the browser wars, before the invasion of incompatible protocols. Is there a lever that I can pull to cause this to happen? Sure, I'd be out of a job, but Camelot would be reborn. Small tradeoff, perhaps.
Interesting point. I don't know. Then again, there were probably locally elected officials even while a part of the British empire. Someone's got to lie to the public, and why sail across the ocean when you can hire a local?