Oh, I agree with you that this isn't a big deal from a privacy perspective. But you asked if a dynamic IP could mask your personal identity, and the short answer is, it can't. So someone who really wanted to know, and had the (legal, technological?) means to find out, could find out who you are.
But you give out your IP every time you surf to any webpage anywhere, so this Word document *feature* is no worse a privacy concern than Apache weblogs, in my opinion. In fact, I would argue that this is a very useful feature. Most of the complaints seem to be knee-jerk anti-M$ sound and fury.
But the ISP does have logs of what IP address you were using at what time and date. With a subpoena (or maybe Carnivore?) that info could be extracted... I got spammed once by a real amateur who didn't fake his IP through Flash.net. I called up Flash.net's tech support and told them the IP, they gave me his username on the spot! I then wrote to the abuse email address and got his account revoked. It's that easy - and that's how powerful IP addresses are, even if you are at an ISP, for identification.
What's the big deal? How many Word documents does anyone write that they distribute? How many Word documents written by someone else do you read? Who cares if the original author knows you are reading the document? Why would you be reading a Word document from an untrusted source anyway?
what we should really be worried about is this part:
This issue is potentially critical for music file formats such as MP3 files where piracy concerns are high. For example, it is easy to imagine an extended MP3 file format that supports embedded HTML for showing song credits, cover artwork, lyrics, and so on. The embedded HTML with embedded Web bugs could also be used to track how many times a song is played and by which computer, identified by its IP address.
so there could eventually be Trojaned mp3 floating on Napster someday. Only way to avoid this would be to never upgrade Sonique, Winamp, or Media Player again...
actually, it's " !Link Club ", as our aim is Subversive Civil Obedience. While linking would be civil disobedience, !linking is Obedience to the letter, but not the spirit...
There are two ways to stop this. One is for everyone to comply. The other is for DeCSS to show up EVERYWHERE - on a much more massive scale than ever before. The MPAA would be spending so much in the way of time and resources that they might even have to stop judging movies.
Actually, we can do BOTH. The solution is to distribute deCSS widely, but not link to it - but make it understood how to acquire it easily.
Everyone with a domain should put deCSS in webroot. Don't link to it, but make it standard - you should be able to go to any website you want and type in http://www.domainname.com/deCSS.zip and bingo! you download the file. But nary an <a href=""> anywhere!
Every webmaster on every site, commercial, private, personal, educational - should put deCSS in webroot. Imagine:
webmasters, unite! Civil Obedience on a grand scale! !Link !
let's show the MPAA it isn't linking per se they should fear, but the power of people to resist in an organized way when their rights are taken away for corporate gain. or, more colloquially...
The First Rule of Link Club is: you don't talk about !Link Club
The Second Rule of !Link Club is: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT !LINK CLUB.
The Third Rule of !Link Club is: if this is your first night, you WILL put deCSS in webroot!
There are two ways to stop this. One is for everyone to comply. The other is for DeCSS to show up EVERYWHERE - on a much more massive scale than ever before. The MPAA would be spending so much in the way of time and resources that they might even have to stop judging movies.
Actually, we can do BOTH of these solutions at once. The solution is to distribute deCSS widely, but not link to it - but make it understood how to acquire it easily.
Everyone with a domain should put deCSS in webroot. Don't link to it, but make it standard - you should be able to go to any website you want and type in http://www.domainname.com/deCSS.zip and bingo! you download the file. But nary an <a href=""> anywhere!
Every webmaster on every site, commercial, private, personal, educational - should put deCSS in webroot. I dream of the day when we can get:
http://www.mit.edu/deCSS.zip
http://www.nytimes.com/deCSS.zip
http://www.loc.gov/deCSS.zip
webmasters, unite! rise up! insidiously spread the Code! Civil Disobedience on a grand scale!
let's show the MPAA it isn't linking per se they should fear, but the power of people to resist in an organized way when their rights are taken away for corporate gain. or, more colloquially...
The First Rule of Link Club is: you don't talk about Link Club
The Second Rule of Link Club is: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT LINK CLUB.
The Third Rule of Link Club is: if this is your first night, you WILL put deCSS in webroot!
content of any sort (audio, video, text, sculpture, etc.) has always existed for the sole purpose of being consumed. It's not a surprise that digital content is being slurped at a rate far exceeding its creation - the digital medium is what facilitates that content being distributed more effeciently than ever before possible.
The analogy to a "commons" is a false analogy. A commons is a resource that is shared by a community. For example, a grassy area where you graze your cattle, or the air we breathe, or Social Security. If a system is not used to regulate how users donate and withdraw from the commons, the commons WILL collapse because short term private advantage (eat all the grass) is always more attractive than long-term common gain (ensure grass is there for your cattle for the next hundred years, for the whole village).
Napster, Gnutella, etc are NOT a commons at all. They are a content distribution system, where a elite set of users (Britney Spears, people with large hard drives or great bandwidth, etc) provide content to a system of users. A better analogy is a museum - the public comes in to access the content (in this case, sculpture, archaeological ruins, etc.) which was provided by a elite (the original cultures who built the structures, Indiana Jones who saved it from Belloch, the city of New York and the MoMA...)
given that content is very difficult to produce, and then also difficult to distribute (and don't forget that the sole reason content exists is for distribution. NBC doesn't seal filmed episodes of Survivor in a cave, it broadcasts them, for example).
its important not to gloss over what a "commons" really is because there really are a LOT of commons' out there which we desperately need to regulate better. Lumping in Napster and Gnutella is a mistake because it dilutes the idea of a commons, and also sets unreasonable metrics of success for these new systems to be measured against. The exaggerated upload/download ratio is not a sign of failure but rather one of triumph.
Welcome to ADVENTURE!! Would you like instructions?
>y
Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in
treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never
seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave. I will be your eyes
and hands. Direct me with natural English commands. I should warn
you that I look at only the first six letters of each word. Also you
should enter "Northeast" as "NE" to distinguish it from "North".
(Should you get stuck, type "HELP" or "?" for some general hints.)
Good Luck!
- - - -
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully.
look, this isn't about MS Office, this is just about Internet Explorer (which already has been ported to Solaris and HP-UX IIRC). M$'s main purpose is not to let people use Linux, but draw people away from it. Paradoxically, that does mean porting IE to Linux because that becomes the bridge.
Unless M$ does indeed get split into two compainies, M$ will always push people towards Windows rather than empower them to use Linux. This is because "Linux desktop monopoly" is a complete oxymoron. So there is no reason to start airing absurd fears about M$ dominating the Linux application market. As another poster pointed out, the current news is not that much different from WINe. Hardly a threat.
If M$ did get split into two companies, then the applications group (who would inherit Office) would indeed be free to port to Linux because that would be a new source of revenue - suddenly it becomes a win-win situation instead of a lose-lose. But that would actually *increase* the Linux desktop market share and so that would be a good thing.
The title, "Rise of the Empire" has been around for over a year, according to TheForce.Net. They point out two older articles discussing it: [1] , [2] JOIN !LINK CLUB!
the link in the article wasn't very descriptive, neither was the FAQ. It is instructive to compare the MPL with the GPL directly.
A very useful link is the Annotated MPL which explains some of the jargon in IANAL terms, though Mozilla says that this document is "now somewhat dated, but are still here for historical purposes".
An important thing to keep in mind is that the MPL is explicitly NOT the same thing as truly open-source. As Mozilla explains in detail :
In drafting this license, we attempted to balance the needs of several different constituencies: the free software development community, commercial programmers, and Netscape itself. Our intent with this license is to promote a Communicator development community on the Net and to release the source code under a license that supports this community, yet still allows Netscape to meet its business goals going forward. We believe this license satisfies the
Debian Free Software Guidelines, which provide a commonly accepted definition of ''free software,'' much like other free software licenses such as GPL or BSD. We felt that none of the existing licenses balanced the needs of the various developers in a way that is most appropriate for this source code. It is our intention that the Netscape Public License balances these three constituencies in such a way that will maximize development on this code base.
(emphasis added)
since IANAL and very few of us are, maybe an actual lawyer here can comment on these documents more thoroughly? Especially the parts about intellectual property in the MPL.
it sounds like AT&T will do some kind of vetting on materials submitted to the system - and the concept of "interesting" content itself emphasises that there will indeed be censorship at the front-end of the system, even if it is immune to censorship at the receiving end.
What happens when someone tries to submit deCSS code to the system? Will AT&T allow that as "interesting" ? or not allow it for fear of legal reprisal? if the former, everyone should submit all the open source code you can find as separate packages! keep code free as in speech! if the latter case, then Publius is a joke. --
______________________________________________
As I recall from several interviews of his, he never really liked having been part of the Star Wars mythos. He rightfully felt that his film legacy was overshadowed by what he considered a non-important film.
Ironically, his most symbolic line as Obi-Wan, "If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine" (para) now rings truer. Sir Alec will never be mentioned in the media again without reference to the character he hated - Obi-Wan has indeed grown more powerful.
How can companies like Sega be convinced that products that don't make them money anymore should be made GPL?"
Did Jon Katz write that? Why should Sega be convinced of anything of the sort? This assertion implies a banket statement that GPL is automatically relevant the moment profit is no longer an issue.
Other posters have mentioned the great point that copyright on Sega games extends to the characters - also if you read the article carefully, you'll notice this passage:
...unlike the Napster music-sharing service, there is no equivalent of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which permits the copying of music a person already owns. "The video game market doesn't have such an act that allows a consumer to do that,"...
It is because of this that Sega MUST take action. As the rep explains in the article:
Sega has no choice but to shut down all unauthorized file-sharing sites.... We need to protect the community of talented artists and developers we have at Sega and the content they're developing
Without the existence of an AHRA for video game content (which is blurring the lines with movie and cinema content- think Final Fantasy), Sega and other game companies HAVE to protect their content aggressively or risk losing their rights.
Just because a given video game doesn't earn them money at present doesn't mean they can't leverage it later. Blindly spouting off about the GPL is a bad habit and the GPL has no relevance to this matter.
Most of the arguments against convergence are driven by desktop analogies - which are clearly innapplicable.
Most of the arguments for convergence are driven by Bluetooth-type fantasies - but this doesn't deal with the reality of the immediate market.
The fact is, the ultimate convergence device could be built today. In this market, even a few months coudl spell the difference between total domination and second-rate status, so let's design a machine that could be manufactured next month and be on sale by X-Mas. Here are the specs (modify/iterate freely in replies):
Palm form factor . The form factor could be thickened a bit or ergonomically designed for either one-handed use (like the Sony Palm) or beltclip access.
Palm OS . The large base of third-party apps make this the best choice. WinCE has too much emotional baggage and it would take about a year for full-fledged Linux equivalents to get coded on the same scale. PalmOS is a mature apps platform.
Encrypted Wallet Application . Critical app! This device should lessen the wallet load and allow you to store all personal data digitally instead of on pieces of paper.
WAP browser . (duh)
Wireless antenna ..
built-in cell phone . Regarding form factor, if the ergonomic design is done well, the reverse side of the device could have the voice speaker and earpiece and still be a comfortable grip. The entire device should still weigh less than a land-line cordless phone.
audio jack . essential for plugging in standard headphones. Audio DSP chip would be ideal and well-worth a $25 dollar increase in price, so digital audio and cell phone audio could be integrated.
dedicated storage expansion slot . The only thing people really need is more storage in terms of peripherals. Something along the lines of Memory Stick is needed - VERY small form factor and essentially negligible weight.
IR port . for local data sharing and interactivity with other users.
Standard integrated pager . The pager should operate using the same antenna as the cell phone, but be configurable to operate with any paging service. Any PCS user can tell you that the integrated pager sucks when indoors.
The reason for this feature set is simple. The intersection of cell-phone users and PDA users is a SIGNIFICANT fraction of PDA users. While true that not all cell phone users need a PDA, almost all PDA users need a cell phone, and therefore have two devices hanging off their belt. The Palm Wireless showed us that you can add wireless capability to the Palm form factor without significantly adding size/weight, and proper ergonomic design would allow the cell phone aspect of this PDA-phone to be minimized.
hey Sony! paying attention?:) --
______________________________________________
If someone would just put up a site where you can buy MP3s (no SDMI crap) at $.20 - $1.00 each, with half of that going to the artist, this whole thing would cease to be an issue.
Even if such a scheme were started by the artists themselves, it would still be illegal under current law (far more illegal than using Napster, in fact!) because teh artists don't have distribution rights to the music. The label does. Artists surrender LOTS of control just in order to get signed.
You can do things like super-distribution, for example, where you can e-mail the song and say, "If you get 10 of your best friends to buy it, I'll give you free tickets to the Britney Spears concert next month." So you get on AOL and you e-mail the thing to 50 of your best friends and so on. And with InterTrust you can go down as many levels as you want, so they can e-mail it to 50 of their best friends, turning the consumer into a distributor of sorts. We think offers like that are going to be very compelling.
hello? isn't that a pyramid scheme?
It isn't enough that the RIAA wants to deny you the right to OWN what you BUY. Now they want to become pyramid-schemers.
They are lying when they say they want CD's to die. That's just condescension and red herring. Actually, they don't want us to pay $1 a song instead of $16 a CD because that means they will lose $15 bucks every time (how many CD's have more than one good song on them?). So to build up alternate revenus to offset that loss, they are willing to turn us into spammers, to build a pyramid of distribution using incentives, and basically suck us dry from every angle.
Just think about Their Vision of the Future: Consumer hears song on radio (free to consumer, but radio paid $ to Them for the broadcast rights). Consumer buys SDMI-compliant CD or individual files from the NapsterCorp (90% of sale goes to Them, maybe 10% goes to the artist). By buying the music the consumer has to surrender their privacy (or is tricked into losing it) and that demographic info is sold to marketing lists. The consumers are spammed, and further encouraged to spam their friends in a pyramid scheme using incentives. At *every* stage, They make $$ and We surrender our income, our privacy, and our rights. The poor artists will be brainwashed into thinking this is good and will beg for crumbs from their masters.
this guy is just a corporate egghead who is shilling for the Paycheck Masters. Zero credibility.
Apple made a great mouse for Apple users. But if they think a mouse will help them gain desktop market share, they're nuts. They've deliberately ceated an Apple-only mouse that cant be used on linux or windows systems:
-> no second button -> no scroll wheel
Seems like apple would rather preach to their choir than bother to try and make money. Hardware sold by Micro$oft ends up on Apple systems, and on boxes running *nix. If Apple adopted the same approach, they'd actually be more relevant.
-- ______________________________________________
review of Katz's review (summary: katz != siskel)
on
Slashdot Meets X-Men
·
· Score: 5
a trivial writer seeks to trivialize a movie which he isn't capable of comprehending. end result - he trivializes himself further.
Katz(x) = 1/x as x->infinity
His biggest problem was that Stewart and McKellen's acting almost totally overwhelm the movie.
sorry Katz. Stewart and McKellen were magnificent, but if you didn't catch the nuances of the "supporting" cast then you weren't paying attention. Each actor did a terrific job and were equal to the Big Two which you've pedestalized. If you were so easily captivated by the Big Two then its no wonder you missed the rest of the movie.
It's easy to see why some geeks and many outcasts have always loved the X-Men a sentiment very much reflected in the movie.
wrong again, idiot. X-Men is not merely about Geeks and Outcasts. The intolerance theme is far deeper. Did you miss the reason why we saw Poland 1944 in the beginning of the film? Did you fail to notice the allusions to homosexual persecution ("they could be among us - do you want them leading boy scouts?" etc.) ?
The very same thing, of course, is happening to "geeks, Goths and freaks" all over the United States today, post-Columbine.
gee a reference to Columbine. how chic. this has nothing to do with Columbine. Geeks and Outcasts always suffer unfair persecution by peers, but the Intolerance that X-Men is about is far deeper and more fundamental. You're just trivializing what you don't understand.
With the possible exception of Wolverine and Rogue, we never really get to know any of the X-types well enough to care a lot about what happens to them, or to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
consider that this film was barely an hour and a half. consider that sequels are planned. Consider that Singer's budget was slashed. Consider that this is a summer movie that needs a balance between character development and heavy action to compete (and action is what X-Men is about just as much as Intolerance). Consider that the X_Men universe is a rich one that needs more than one film to tell its story. This movie set the stage.
of course if you had your way and the entire film was nothing but exhaustive character development and no action, you'd complain that it lacked "energy" wouldn't you, Katz?
Until the very end of the movie, which is a somewhat hokey confrontation at the Statue of Liberty, they never really seem to jell as a team.
this is precisely the point. and you thought it was hokey? care to explain that opinion? why was it hokey? what was hokey about it?
Despite the sensibilities and complaints of X-Men fans -- it's obvious why the comic series meant so much to hunted brainaics everywhere -- Singer is under no obligation to be completely faithful to the strip.
wrong! Singer is a fan, by the way. And if X-Men was as blatantly non-canon as the Superman or Batman movies were, it would suffer the same fate. Die a slow death. By remaining true to it, he is building on and inherits the rich legacy of material that the X-Men comics have already charted. There are GOOD and SOLID stories there. Abandoning the canonical treatment and going off in a differrent direction would take away from the X-Men and rob future films from using that rich world.
filtered through that Hollywood prism, there's no way he could keep the brooding, sometimes haunting edge of the comic.
have you ever read the comic? at times it is brooding, yes. But the X-Men comic is about hope, and about relationships between people. It is not dark or brooding overall. Were you expecting another Batman Movie clone? hoping for a re-derivation of the X-Men into some formula film so you wouldn't need to think?
We're supposed to hate Magento, but there isn't anything particularly hateful about him.
you idiot, we AREN'T supposed to hate Magneto. Even Senator Kelly's initial position is a REASONABLE one. This is why X-Men is so powerful as a story. The issues and moral stands are ambiguous. The reason for showing us Poland 1944 was supposed to give you the context if you had been paying attention. This was not a movie about black and white good vs. evil. Perhaps you're just incapable of seeing that however. A simple flick with neatly structured plot of Good Guys vs Bad Guys is what you'd prefer?
Even Wolverine, our hero, had to ask - "you sure you're on the right side?"
Magento's Holocaust connection was written into the series 20 years after its creation
shrug. if true, so? what's your point, that the X-Men therefore has no tolerance issues anymore? judge the movie on its merits. Even a non-fanboy can derive the basic points that this is not a simple matter of Goos and Bad. Its a more complex issue of Us Vs Them which isn't the same thing at all.
what really terrifies the renegade wing of the mutants and motivates them to wipe out the human race as it's constituted isn't some powerful enemy, but pending legislation in Congress,
another brilliantly idiotic statement. yes you are correct that the mutants collectively could band together and take over the world. And Prof X hints that any attempt at taking his students by force would not be met with *passive* resistance. But the essential point is that MUTANTS ARE PEOPLE. They want to live their lives. As a citizen the idea that you must be registered in a govt database because of your genetics, doesn't scare you? Are you honestly unable to understand what effect such legislation would have? Did you pay attention to Jean Grey's Senate speech?
This leaves the movie without a villain to really hate or a cause we can particularly identify with.
wrong. The villain is FEAR. the hero is HOPE.
the bottom line on you Katz is that you barely paid attention to this movie and have pretensions that you think you *know* something about the X-Men. You'd prefer a nice simple flick that had a nice bad guy and a good guy, and the issues that it discusses are too deep for you so you just relegate it to simplistic "hey this movie is anti-geek!" to try and curry favor with the/. readers who smell your BS at twenty clicks of the mouse away.
The FBI has their own blurb on Carnivore. It's worth reading - it exlains the checks and balances on the FBI's ability to use Carnivore (heavily restricted by the legal system). Also another note is that the FBI does use advanced algorithms, sort of like the ones the credit card companies use for fraud or that the IRS does for tax evasion, to actually catch "suspicious" activity. They probably don't want that info leaking out otherwise people could workaround their algorithms. That justifies a co-hosted box as opposed to letting an Open Source zealot do it for them:) -- ______________________________________________
While I have been taunted by M$ blue screens as much as anyone, and beat my head to pulp against their labyrithine support in vain search for solutions to annoyances that interfere with my work, I have to admit concern - the Gov't is going too far.
Before I am accused of being a Redmond Parrot let me just get to my point. The reason M$ is being broken up is because of a perceived monopoly on OS. If Business A wants to use M$ Office (very reasonable and wise decision! Office is the standard - and we should be very supportive of standards. saying Office is a monopoly is like complaining TCP/IP is a monopoly) then Business A should use Office and that's their right.
The monopoly aspect comes into play because Office only exists on Windows. WINDOWS is the monopoly, right? but what does that really mean?
It means that Windows, in the business world, is nothing more than a $200 extension to Office that just lets you RUN Office. No Windows, no Office. Why arent there any Office apps on Linux? Cause then people could get Linux, not Win32, and then Office would only generate $400 instead of $600 for M$. Why does M$ make Office for Mac? Because M$ owns a stake in Apple and they get their pound of flesh thusly.
But the M$ company as a whole and the dominance of Windows has been a boon in the sense that hardware standards, drivers, etc all have become so prevalent under the unifying platform. And whether we like it or not, M$ is a force for innovation akin to Bell Labs or IBM - the R&D has billions of dollars of investment and is a driving resource for the entire industry.
My proposed solution is an alternative to breakup. Office should be mandated to run on all OS's - Linux, BSD, even BeOS. Microsoft should be able to achieve this fairly easily - after all they have Mac versions and even *nix versions of IE (which is an "integral part" of the OS, right? *ahem*)
Opening up Office allows Linux and other alternative OS'es to enter the business MONOPOLY. But it preserves M$ identity and right to it's OS, which according to *their* logic will win in the marketplace on its merits against Linux et. al (*ahem*). Let's see!
Forcing M$ to "open" its source or APIs is dangerous precedent. While advocates of Open Source seem to believe that its the only model worth doing business under, the reality is Open Source is not and should not be universally mandated. In a free business environment you should have choice as to whether you CHOOSE Open Source or the proprietary route. Breaking up M$ might sound great to those of us breaking our eggs on the pointy end, but to the fox, it doesnt matter which end you break the egg and we all round-end folks look alike.
abde
P.S. let's suggest that they rename the company MordorSoft. I like that analogy better than the Borg:P
When President Clinton signed it into law, he made a point of noting that "certain provisions of H.R. 2281 and the accompanying Conference Report regarding the Register of Copyrights raise serious constitutional concerns" (see more below, from here) Can someone with more constitutional understanding and legalese-proficency help analyse this? Does this raise the possibility of a challenge to DCMA? is this even relevant?
I am advised by the Department of Justice that certain provisions of H.R. 2281 and the accompanying Conference Report regarding the Register of Copyrights raise serious constitutional concerns. Contrary to assertions in the Conference Report, the Copyright Office is, for constitutional purposes, an executive branch entity. Accordingly, the Congress may exercise its constitutionally legitimate oversight powers to require the Copyright Office to provide information relevant to the legislative process. However, to direct that Office's operations, the Congress must act in accord with the requirements of bicameralism and presentment prescribed in Article I of the Constitution. Further, the Congress may not require the Register to act in a manner that would impinge upon or undermine the President's discretion under Article II, section 3 of the Constitution to determine which, if any, executive branch recommendations to the Congress would be "necessary and expedient." Accordingly, I will construe sections 103(a), 104(b), 401(b), and 403(a) of H.R. 2281 to require the Register to perform duties only insofar as such requirements are consistent with these constitutional principles.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I agree with you that this isn't a big deal from a privacy perspective. But you asked if a dynamic IP could mask your personal identity, and the short answer is, it can't. So someone who really wanted to know, and had the (legal, technological?) means to find out, could find out who you are.
But you give out your IP every time you surf to any webpage anywhere, so this Word document *feature* is no worse a privacy concern than Apache weblogs, in my opinion. In fact, I would argue that this is a very useful feature. Most of the complaints seem to be knee-jerk anti-M$ sound and fury.
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
But the ISP does have logs of what IP address you were using at what time and date. With a subpoena (or maybe Carnivore?) that info could be extracted... I got spammed once by a real amateur who didn't fake his IP through Flash.net. I called up Flash.net's tech support and told them the IP, they gave me his username on the spot! I then wrote to the abuse email address and got his account revoked. It's that easy - and that's how powerful IP addresses are, even if you are at an ISP, for identification.
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
What's the big deal? How many Word documents does anyone write that they distribute? How many Word documents written by someone else do you read? Who cares if the original author knows you are reading the document? Why would you be reading a Word document from an untrusted source anyway?
what we should really be worried about is this part:
so there could eventually be Trojaned mp3 floating on Napster someday. Only way to avoid this would be to never upgrade Sonique, Winamp, or Media Player again...
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
actually, it's " !Link Club ", as our aim is Subversive Civil Obedience. While linking would be civil disobedience, !linking is Obedience to the letter, but not the spirit...
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
nah - the simpler, the better
JOIN !LINK CLUB!JOIN !LINK CLUB!
Actually, we can do BOTH. The solution is to distribute deCSS widely, but not link to it - but make it understood how to acquire it easily.
Everyone with a domain should put deCSS in webroot. Don't link to it, but make it standard - you should be able to go to any website you want and type in http://www.domainname.com/deCSS.zip and bingo! you download the file. But nary an <a href=""> anywhere!
Every webmaster on every site, commercial, private, personal, educational - should put deCSS in webroot. Imagine:
webmasters, unite! Civil Obedience on a grand scale! !Link !
let's show the MPAA it isn't linking per se they should fear, but the power of people to resist in an organized way when their rights are taken away for corporate gain. or, more colloquially...
The First Rule of Link Club is: you don't talk about !Link Club
The Second Rule of !Link Club is: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT !LINK CLUB.
The Third Rule of !Link Club is: if this is your first night, you WILL put deCSS in webroot!
JOIN !LINK CLUB! spread the word...
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
the article states:
Actually, we can do BOTH of these solutions at once. The solution is to distribute deCSS widely, but not link to it - but make it understood how to acquire it easily.
Everyone with a domain should put deCSS in webroot. Don't link to it, but make it standard - you should be able to go to any website you want and type in http://www.domainname.com/deCSS.zip and bingo! you download the file. But nary an <a href=""> anywhere!
Every webmaster on every site, commercial, private, personal, educational - should put deCSS in webroot. I dream of the day when we can get:
webmasters, unite! rise up! insidiously spread the Code! Civil Disobedience on a grand scale!
let's show the MPAA it isn't linking per se they should fear, but the power of people to resist in an organized way when their rights are taken away for corporate gain. or, more colloquially...
The First Rule of Link Club is: you don't talk about Link Club
The Second Rule of Link Club is: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT LINK CLUB.
The Third Rule of Link Club is: if this is your first night, you WILL put deCSS in webroot!
JOIN LINK CLUB! spread the word...
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
content of any sort (audio, video, text, sculpture, etc.) has always existed for the sole purpose of being consumed. It's not a surprise that digital content is being slurped at a rate far exceeding its creation - the digital medium is what facilitates that content being distributed more effeciently than ever before possible.
The analogy to a "commons" is a false analogy. A commons is a resource that is shared by a community. For example, a grassy area where you graze your cattle, or the air we breathe, or Social Security. If a system is not used to regulate how users donate and withdraw from the commons, the commons WILL collapse because short term private advantage (eat all the grass) is always more attractive than long-term common gain (ensure grass is there for your cattle for the next hundred years, for the whole village).
Napster, Gnutella, etc are NOT a commons at all. They are a content distribution system, where a elite set of users (Britney Spears, people with large hard drives or great bandwidth, etc) provide content to a system of users. A better analogy is a museum - the public comes in to access the content (in this case, sculpture, archaeological ruins, etc.) which was provided by a elite (the original cultures who built the structures, Indiana Jones who saved it from Belloch, the city of New York and the MoMA...)
given that content is very difficult to produce, and then also difficult to distribute (and don't forget that the sole reason content exists is for distribution. NBC doesn't seal filmed episodes of Survivor in a cave, it broadcasts them, for example).
its important not to gloss over what a "commons" really is because there really are a LOT of commons' out there which we desperately need to regulate better. Lumping in Napster and Gnutella is a mistake because it dilutes the idea of a commons, and also sets unreasonable metrics of success for these new systems to be measured against. The exaggerated upload/download ratio is not a sign of failure but rather one of triumph.
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anyone want to play a game of Colossal Cave Adventure? we have a game running on the Ultimate Bulletin Board at Floor42 (reg. required)
Or download your own copy from here and play it yourself
perhaps gaming needs to take a step back - and then fork?
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Welcome to ADVENTURE!! Would you like instructions?
>y
Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in
treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never
seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave. I will be your eyes
and hands. Direct me with natural English commands. I should warn
you that I look at only the first six letters of each word. Also you
should enter "Northeast" as "NE" to distinguish it from "North".
(Should you get stuck, type "HELP" or "?" for some general hints.)
Good Luck!
- - - -
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully.
>_
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look, this isn't about MS Office, this is just about Internet Explorer (which already has been ported to Solaris and HP-UX IIRC). M$'s main purpose is not to let people use Linux, but draw people away from it. Paradoxically, that does mean porting IE to Linux because that becomes the bridge.
Unless M$ does indeed get split into two compainies, M$ will always push people towards Windows rather than empower them to use Linux. This is because "Linux desktop monopoly" is a complete oxymoron. So there is no reason to start airing absurd fears about M$ dominating the Linux application market. As another poster pointed out, the current news is not that much different from WINe. Hardly a threat.
If M$ did get split into two companies, then the applications group (who would inherit Office) would indeed be free to port to Linux because that would be a new source of revenue - suddenly it becomes a win-win situation instead of a lose-lose. But that would actually *increase* the Linux desktop market share and so that would be a good thing.
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The title, "Rise of the Empire" has been around for over a year, according to TheForce.Net. They point out two older articles discussing it: [1] , [2]
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the link in the article wasn't very descriptive, neither was the FAQ. It is instructive to compare the MPL with the GPL directly.
A very useful link is the Annotated MPL which explains some of the jargon in IANAL terms, though Mozilla says that this document is "now somewhat dated, but are still here for historical purposes".
An important thing to keep in mind is that the MPL is explicitly NOT the same thing as truly open-source. As Mozilla explains in detail :(emphasis added)
since IANAL and very few of us are, maybe an actual lawyer here can comment on these documents more thoroughly? Especially the parts about intellectual property in the MPL.
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it sounds like AT&T will do some kind of vetting on materials submitted to the system - and the concept of "interesting" content itself emphasises that there will indeed be censorship at the front-end of the system, even if it is immune to censorship at the receiving end.
What happens when someone tries to submit deCSS code to the system? Will AT&T allow that as "interesting" ? or not allow it for fear of legal reprisal? if the former, everyone should submit all the open source code you can find as separate packages! keep code free as in speech! if the latter case, then Publius is a joke.
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As I recall from several interviews of his, he never really liked having been part of the Star Wars mythos. He rightfully felt that his film legacy was overshadowed by what he considered a non-important film.
Ironically, his most symbolic line as Obi-Wan, "If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine" (para) now rings truer. Sir Alec will never be mentioned in the media again without reference to the character he hated - Obi-Wan has indeed grown more powerful.
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Did Jon Katz write that? Why should Sega be convinced of anything of the sort? This assertion implies a banket statement that GPL is automatically relevant the moment profit is no longer an issue.
Other posters have mentioned the great point that copyright on Sega games extends to the characters - also if you read the article carefully, you'll notice this passage:
It is because of this that Sega MUST take action. As the rep explains in the article:
Without the existence of an AHRA for video game content (which is blurring the lines with movie and cinema content- think Final Fantasy), Sega and other game companies HAVE to protect their content aggressively or risk losing their rights.
Just because a given video game doesn't earn them money at present doesn't mean they can't leverage it later. Blindly spouting off about the GPL is a bad habit and the GPL has no relevance to this matter.
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Most of the arguments against convergence are driven by desktop analogies - which are clearly innapplicable.
Most of the arguments for convergence are driven by Bluetooth-type fantasies - but this doesn't deal with the reality of the immediate market.
The fact is, the ultimate convergence device could be built today. In this market, even a few months coudl spell the difference between total domination and second-rate status, so let's design a machine that could be manufactured next month and be on sale by X-Mas. Here are the specs (modify/iterate freely in replies):
- Palm form factor
- Palm OS
- Encrypted Wallet Application
- WAP browser
- Wireless antenna
.
- built-in cell phone
- audio jack
- dedicated storage expansion slot
- IR port
- Standard integrated pager
The reason for this feature set is simple. The intersection of cell-phone users and PDA users is a SIGNIFICANT fraction of PDA users. While true that not all cell phone users need a PDA, almost all PDA users need a cell phone, and therefore have two devices hanging off their belt. The Palm Wireless showed us that you can add wireless capability to the Palm form factor without significantly adding size/weight, and proper ergonomic design would allow the cell phone aspect of this PDA-phone to be minimized. hey Sony! paying attention?. The form factor could be thickened a bit or ergonomically designed for either one-handed use (like the Sony Palm) or beltclip access.
. The large base of third-party apps make this the best choice. WinCE has too much emotional baggage and it would take about a year for full-fledged Linux equivalents to get coded on the same scale. PalmOS is a mature apps platform.
. Critical app! This device should lessen the wallet load and allow you to store all personal data digitally instead of on pieces of paper.
. (duh)
.
. Regarding form factor, if the ergonomic design is done well, the reverse side of the device could have the voice speaker and earpiece and still be a comfortable grip. The entire device should still weigh less than a land-line cordless phone.
. essential for plugging in standard headphones. Audio DSP chip would be ideal and well-worth a $25 dollar increase in price, so digital audio and cell phone audio could be integrated.
. The only thing people really need is more storage in terms of peripherals. Something along the lines of Memory Stick is needed - VERY small form factor and essentially negligible weight.
. for local data sharing and interactivity with other users.
. The pager should operate using the same antenna as the cell phone, but be configurable to operate with any paging service. Any PCS user can tell you that the integrated pager sucks when indoors.
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Even if such a scheme were started by the artists themselves, it would still be illegal under current law (far more illegal than using Napster, in fact!) because teh artists don't have distribution rights to the music. The label does. Artists surrender LOTS of control just in order to get signed.
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hello? isn't that a pyramid scheme?
It isn't enough that the RIAA wants to deny you the right to OWN what you BUY. Now they want to become pyramid-schemers.
They are lying when they say they want CD's to die. That's just condescension and red herring. Actually, they don't want us to pay $1 a song instead of $16 a CD because that means they will lose $15 bucks every time (how many CD's have more than one good song on them?). So to build up alternate revenus to offset that loss, they are willing to turn us into spammers, to build a pyramid of distribution using incentives, and basically suck us dry from every angle.
Just think about Their Vision of the Future: Consumer hears song on radio (free to consumer, but radio paid $ to Them for the broadcast rights). Consumer buys SDMI-compliant CD or individual files from the NapsterCorp (90% of sale goes to Them, maybe 10% goes to the artist). By buying the music the consumer has to surrender their privacy (or is tricked into losing it) and that demographic info is sold to marketing lists. The consumers are spammed, and further encouraged to spam their friends in a pyramid scheme using incentives. At *every* stage, They make $$ and We surrender our income, our privacy, and our rights. The poor artists will be brainwashed into thinking this is good and will beg for crumbs from their masters.
this guy is just a corporate egghead who is shilling for the Paycheck Masters. Zero credibility.
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Apple made a great mouse for Apple users. But if they think a mouse will help them gain desktop market share, they're nuts. They've deliberately ceated an Apple-only mouse that cant be used on linux or windows systems:
-> no second button
-> no scroll wheel
Seems like apple would rather preach to their choir than bother to try and make money. Hardware sold by Micro$oft ends up on Apple systems, and on boxes running *nix. If Apple adopted the same approach, they'd actually be more relevant.
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a trivial writer seeks to trivialize a movie which he isn't capable of comprehending. end result - he trivializes himself further.
Katz(x) = 1/x as x->infinity
His biggest problem was that Stewart and McKellen's acting almost totally overwhelm the movie.
sorry Katz. Stewart and McKellen were magnificent, but if you didn't catch the nuances of the "supporting" cast then you weren't paying attention. Each actor did a terrific job and were equal to the Big Two which you've pedestalized. If you were so easily captivated by the Big Two then its no wonder you missed the rest of the movie.
It's easy to see why some geeks and many outcasts have always loved the X-Men a sentiment very much reflected in the movie.
wrong again, idiot. X-Men is not merely about Geeks and Outcasts. The intolerance theme is far deeper. Did you miss the reason why we saw Poland 1944 in the beginning of the film? Did you fail to notice the allusions to homosexual persecution ("they could be among us - do you want them leading boy scouts?" etc.) ?
The very same thing, of course, is happening to "geeks, Goths and freaks" all over the United States today, post-Columbine.
gee a reference to Columbine. how chic. this has nothing to do with Columbine. Geeks and Outcasts always suffer unfair persecution by peers, but the Intolerance that X-Men is about is far deeper and more fundamental. You're just trivializing what you don't understand.
With the possible exception of Wolverine and Rogue, we never really get to know any of the X-types well enough to care a lot about what happens to them, or to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
consider that this film was barely an hour and a half. consider that sequels are planned. Consider that Singer's budget was slashed. Consider that this is a summer movie that needs a balance between character development and heavy action to compete (and action is what X-Men is about just as much as Intolerance). Consider that the X_Men universe is a rich one that needs more than one film to tell its story. This movie set the stage.
of course if you had your way and the entire film was nothing but exhaustive character development and no action, you'd complain that it lacked "energy" wouldn't you, Katz?
Until the very end of the movie, which is a somewhat hokey confrontation at the Statue of Liberty, they never really seem to jell as a team.
this is precisely the point. and you thought it was hokey? care to explain that opinion? why was it hokey? what was hokey about it?
Despite the sensibilities and complaints of X-Men fans -- it's obvious why the comic series meant so much to hunted brainaics everywhere -- Singer is under no obligation to be completely faithful to the strip.
wrong! Singer is a fan, by the way. And if X-Men was as blatantly non-canon as the Superman or Batman movies were, it would suffer the same fate. Die a slow death. By remaining true to it, he is building on and inherits the rich legacy of material that the X-Men comics have already charted. There are GOOD and SOLID stories there. Abandoning the canonical treatment and going off in a differrent direction would take away from the X-Men and rob future films from using that rich world.
filtered through that Hollywood prism, there's no way he could keep the brooding, sometimes haunting edge of the comic.
have you ever read the comic? at times it is brooding, yes. But the X-Men comic is about hope, and about relationships between people. It is not dark or brooding overall. Were you expecting another Batman Movie clone? hoping for a re-derivation of the X-Men into some formula film so you wouldn't need to think?
We're supposed to hate Magento, but there isn't anything particularly hateful about him.
you idiot, we AREN'T supposed to hate Magneto. Even Senator Kelly's initial position is a REASONABLE one. This is why X-Men is so powerful as a story. The issues and moral stands are ambiguous. The reason for showing us Poland 1944 was supposed to give you the context if you had been paying attention. This was not a movie about black and white good vs. evil. Perhaps you're just incapable of seeing that however. A simple flick with neatly structured plot of Good Guys vs Bad Guys is what you'd prefer?
Even Wolverine, our hero, had to ask - "you sure you're on the right side?"
Magento's Holocaust connection was written into the series 20 years after its creation
shrug. if true, so? what's your point, that the X-Men therefore has no tolerance issues anymore? judge the movie on its merits. Even a non-fanboy can derive the basic points that this is not a simple matter of Goos and Bad. Its a more complex issue of Us Vs Them which isn't the same thing at all.
what really terrifies the renegade wing of the mutants and motivates them to wipe out the human race as it's constituted isn't some powerful enemy, but pending legislation in Congress,
another brilliantly idiotic statement. yes you are correct that the mutants collectively could band together and take over the world. And Prof X hints that any attempt at taking his students by force would not be met with *passive* resistance. But the essential point is that MUTANTS ARE PEOPLE. They want to live their lives. As a citizen the idea that you must be registered in a govt database because of your genetics, doesn't scare you? Are you honestly unable to understand what effect such legislation would have? Did you pay attention to Jean Grey's Senate speech?
This leaves the movie without a villain to really hate or a cause we can particularly identify with.
wrong. The villain is FEAR. the hero is HOPE.
the bottom line on you Katz is that you barely paid attention to this movie and have pretensions that you think you *know* something about the X-Men. You'd prefer a nice simple flick that had a nice bad guy and a good guy, and the issues that it discusses are too deep for you so you just relegate it to simplistic "hey this movie is anti-geek!" to try and curry favor with the /. readers who smell your BS at twenty clicks of the mouse away.
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The FBI has their own blurb on Carnivore. It's worth reading - it exlains the checks and balances on the FBI's ability to use Carnivore (heavily restricted by the legal system). Also another note is that the FBI does use advanced algorithms, sort of like the ones the credit card companies use for fraud or that the IRS does for tax evasion, to actually catch "suspicious" activity. They probably don't want that info leaking out otherwise people could workaround their algorithms. That justifies a co-hosted box as opposed to letting an Open Source zealot do it for them :)
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Greets to /.
While I have been taunted by M$ blue screens as much as anyone, and beat my head to pulp against their labyrithine support in vain search for solutions to annoyances that interfere with my work, I have to admit concern - the Gov't is going too far.
Before I am accused of being a Redmond Parrot let me just get to my point. The reason M$ is being broken up is because of a perceived monopoly on OS. If Business A wants to use M$ Office (very reasonable and wise decision! Office is the standard - and we should be very supportive of standards. saying Office is a monopoly is like complaining TCP/IP is a monopoly) then Business A should use Office and that's their right.
The monopoly aspect comes into play because Office only exists on Windows. WINDOWS is the monopoly, right? but what does that really mean?
It means that Windows, in the business world, is nothing more than a $200 extension to Office that just lets you RUN Office. No Windows, no Office. Why arent there any Office apps on Linux? Cause then people could get Linux, not Win32, and then Office would only generate $400 instead of $600 for M$. Why does M$ make Office for Mac? Because M$ owns a stake in Apple and they get their pound of flesh thusly.
But the M$ company as a whole and the dominance of Windows has been a boon in the sense that hardware standards, drivers, etc all have become so prevalent under the unifying platform. And whether we like it or not, M$ is a force for innovation akin to Bell Labs or IBM - the R&D has billions of dollars of investment and is a driving resource for the entire industry.
My proposed solution is an alternative to breakup. Office should be mandated to run on all OS's - Linux, BSD, even BeOS. Microsoft should be able to achieve this fairly easily - after all they have Mac versions and even *nix versions of IE (which is an "integral part" of the OS, right? *ahem*)
Opening up Office allows Linux and other alternative OS'es to enter the business MONOPOLY. But it preserves M$ identity and right to it's OS, which according to *their* logic will win in the marketplace on its merits against Linux et. al (*ahem*). Let's see!
Forcing M$ to "open" its source or APIs is dangerous precedent. While advocates of Open Source seem to believe that its the only model worth doing business under, the reality is Open Source is not and should not be universally mandated. In a free business environment you should have choice as to whether you CHOOSE Open Source or the proprietary route. Breaking up M$ might sound great to those of us breaking our eggs on the pointy end, but to the fox, it doesnt matter which end you break the egg and we all round-end folks look alike.
abde
P.S. let's suggest that they rename the company MordorSoft. I like that analogy better than the Borg :P
A neat form of mass protest would be to encourage everyone you know to report themselves on the WaveAmerica site.
Maybe being on Pinkerton's list could be a sort of status-symbol for the 21st century.